Episode: 3829
Title: HPR3829: The Edinburgh cohort of HPR hosts stops Mumbling!
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3829/hpr3829.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 06:14:41

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3829 for Thursday the 6th of April 2023.
Today's show is entitled, The Edinburgh Cohort of Hacker Public Radio hosts Stop Mumbling.
It is hosted by Dave Morris, and is about 55 minutes long.
It carries an explicit flag.
The summary is Dave Morris and Mr. X Talk about various technical topics.
Hello everybody, welcome to Hacker Public Radio.
And today we're recording in studio C, my citizen car.
And I'm here with Mr. X.
And we've just had a brunch in the pub that's just across from us.
I don't want to say it was marvelous.
Yeah, it was good, wasn't it?
Yeah, we just got this haggish roll.
And they only serve breakfast up until midday.
I think we've got that little early fun for anything else.
And then the table that was booked soon after we had that live.
So we couldn't have wait for the main meal to start.
But it turned out to be a nice bit.
I don't think I've ever had a haggish roll with so many slices of haggish roll.
Yep, yep, we've got your money's worth for you.
That's good.
Anyway, so what we're planning to do is suggest a little bit of a chat.
We've got a sort of agenda which we may or may not adhere to, I don't know.
And we'll just sort of play it by ear and see how we go on.
Do you have your notes?
I've only got the one copy.
Oh, one of the bankers, you do that.
And I can look at my tablet.
Oh, OK.
See what we've just organised here, you can tell.
We have to leave that in.
It shows that our studio management is not absolutely on point.
So the first thing we thought about was as email still relevant in 2022.
Did you suppose you leave it there?
Well, that's right.
Yeah, I changed that to 2023 last night but nevermind.
Oh, yeah, I missed that.
It's amazing how useful we tend to do this thing.
Just for the convenience of Google Docs.
That's a really handy way of sharing things.
Yeah, yeah.
It's a really good way of doing stuff.
Just as an aside, shall I say about that?
I was struggling to do a copy and paste in this document.
And I looked it up and it said, if you're using Firefox,
which I don't, I don't use Google Chrome.
If you're using Firefox, then it doesn't work.
And then I found somebody that said, oh, he's how you fix it.
You go to the AboutConfig.
What you got out here?
Yeah, in a new tab.
Right.
And that gives you access to all of the settings in the browser.
Yeah.
And I've changed, and I'll put it in the notes, dom.event.clickboard.events,
which I've spelled wrong.
Dot enabled, and you set that to true.
So that enabled you to use the machine's clickboard to cut stuff out
and then paste it back in again.
I mean, it's absolute decals, isn't it?
It's disgusting that they've turned that off.
Yeah, we don't want you to use it.
We wanted this bridge if I'm using Firefox or some other blows
other than that.
Yeah.
So therefore, we can't surveil you enough.
Yeah.
Anyway, so we'll put that in as a note.
I'm sure other people have already been down this path
if they care about it.
Yeah.
So there's probably a little...
I used to use Firefox all the time.
And I've just somehow started using...
And I wasn't for that reason, but for...
I was using Chrome, you know, so I think I used Chrome more often than not know.
Yeah.
And you see why are these things...
I stopped using it in the past sort of year, 18 months
because I just didn't like the whole Google approach.
I understand that.
Yeah.
So, yeah.
Anyway, but that's a little bit off track.
Yeah.
So, yeah.
Is email still relevant?
It was really the question we were kicking around, wasn't it?
Yeah.
I think, as I said, I do remember the big thing that Google made
about the emails now in our own longer development
and we should be using something different.
For example, Google Wave, I think it was.
Yeah.
And that was going to be the next big thing in the big...
Who had all of that?
And I think I vaguely opened the app and it's as far as I went.
But you do feel in some ways that...
There must be a better way of dealing with things in emails,
but...
Yeah.
Or maybe it's just a way that modern do things now.
Well, I do not like Google Mail.
I don't use it, except that I do use it.
It's just a convenience factor.
For example, you know, it's fine and all, but...
Well, see, what I discovered relatively early on,
because I was an earlier doctor of Gmail.
Before, it got called Google Mail in Britain, not elsewhere.
I don't know quite what was going on there.
Anyway, I discovered that...
I use Thunderbird.
I've been using Thunderbird for...
I don't know, 15 years or something.
And I use Thunderbird to read pop mail,
which I get from my ISP for some reason, and I'm app mail.
And I found that there was an IMAP route into your Gmail.
So I set that up.
I think there were warnings that they were going to take that away at some point.
But they never have.
Right.
In fact, they were sort of fairly supportive of people continuing with it.
I can imagine, because a lot of people are.
And if you use that, then your mail client will pull down your mail.
Right.
And you won't get all the damned ads.
But you get...
And you're not getting all that label nonsense, which I really don't want.
So I just put everything in my inbox on Gmail.
And then use Thunderbird to pull everything off.
And then I file it locally into folders and all that sort of stuff, you know.
I think I'm really quite disorganized.
I just...
I did it all...
I'll come into inbox and just keep it simple.
Because I know that...
I call it get work.
He used to have...
You know, I used to...
And I know I can appreciate it, because it works a bit when I'm in now.
And I get so many emails.
But at the time, I couldn't see the point of having different folders.
And he was forever saying,
Oh, I'm looking for the email, is it?
And that folder...
It's just sticking the damn inbox.
You know, it's there.
You can find it.
But I...
With the amount of emails I'm getting there, I'm getting to the stage where I'm thinking,
maybe I need to do something like that.
But funny enough, funny you should talk about that.
I'm going to go off and complete the tangible to-do with the email.
And it was a video I was watching.
Was it Tom Scott?
Is that a chap?
Yeah.
And he was saying that he had a situation, probably won't do this just because it's all from memory.
But he had a situation where he said, you know, people of a certain age
they're used to putting emails into folders.
And that's how he deals with things.
And he was saying that obviously now the current generation think of things
from a label point of view.
I can deal with that.
And so I think he'd gone from one system to Gmail.
I can't remember something like that anyway.
And he said, well, if I just think about a folder that is being a label,
then that solves it.
But what he discovered was that there was...
And there's a way of...
I'm not doing this just this,
but it was something to do with the transfer that over obviously had millions of emails or whatever.
And what he found was the emails that were nested within it didn't go,
but he only found it out much later on.
So you had years of emails missing.
You didn't realize it.
You didn't realize we were going to solve this.
I think I've seen this, evidently.
Yeah.
And I think he was talking about threads.
That threads...
I think you labeled it.
That was the start of a thread.
But all of the messages in the thread weren't labeled.
And the software that was doing it didn't understand the label
for the thread was to apply it all the messages in the thread.
That's right.
So yeah, I know I did watch that relative you recently.
Yeah.
And it was amazed, A, that there would only be anything that's stupid.
Yes.
And yeah.
So I can see the label thing is quite useful
because a label is a thing that you apply to an email,
regardless of where it is or where it's come from.
And you can play multiple labels.
Yeah.
And that's a problem that my colleague had heard about you.
Well, is it...
And this folder...
It can't be in two folders at once.
It can be in two labels.
So that has to advance again.
No, it does have strong advantages there.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I...
See, I have a...
I started writing loads of stuff here when I was thinking about this yesterday.
And partly to say, I actually came to email in the very early days
where we had unique stuff in early 90s.
Something like that.
We started moving towards Unix and we had the SMTP mail at that point.
And we...
The mail...
Mail clients available on Unix were pretty scarce.
There were two, maybe, maybe three.
There was the bin mail, which was...
It came...
It came...
A standard with...
With your Unix system.
Open.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Which then...
It used...
I think it used mailbox format.
I can't remember what format it was.
There was something I did.
My system was sending me emails to the bin things.
The system...
We can do that with Unix.
I can't remember what it was.
So I'm scripted and I was getting...
What did we do?
Telling me this was a case.
I'm always low on this space.
I was telling me something anyway.
I can't remember.
Well, that's interesting.
Of course.
I like Plattu who has talked about this one.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The messages under that system come...
They are delivered to your local message transfer agent, you know,
because it comes through a chain of wherever the message is coming from.
And the MTA will then put it...
Says it's for that guy.
So it puts it in a spool area.
Which is usually via spool mail.
Something or other.
Well, that means that yes.
And then when you run mail, it will pull the bin mail.
Then it would pull it out of there and stick it into your mail.
Whatever.
So we had that and there were various clients that let you other than bin mail.
Something called Elm, I think, in those days.
But we were using altrix at that point.
And on altrix, they were quite keen that you used thing called MH, message handler.
Right.
An MH was a thing where you...
It did the same thing.
It would go and grab stuff out of your spool area and it would put it places.
But it was not a single tool.
It was a whole suite of things.
Right.
So there was one command called ink, which meant pull down the messages and stick them wherever.
I think you would stick them in the inbox.
Oh yeah.
But you could also say, oh, as you're doing that, run it through this filter.
And the filter, you could then write filters in all sorts of fancy ways.
Which said, so this is a mail from Charlie.
So put it in the Charlie folder and so on and so forth.
And you know, this is something I've touched them before.
I think some of the earlier systems were more sophisticated.
Yes.
You could even cleverer and have been dumbed down for the masses.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Exactly.
I spent many, many years at work using MH.
And then there was a tool called XMH, which was an X Windows,
more UI type thing, which let you manipulate your MH mail.
And then I moved on to what's it called, EXMH, which was a TCL TK client,
which was, which was, you could modify to the umpteenth degree,
which did, did pretty much the same, but had lots more facilities in it.
And as the filter, everybody in those days used the thing called prop mail.
And prop mail would take a message and would parse it.
Can I all the headers do all sorts of stuff to it?
And it could, you could make it, it was run by a configuration file, driven by it.
And you could do things like, if I get a message from this person,
then turn the message into reply send it back saying,
got your message, thanks a lot.
Or within a recipe for prop mail.
I did that.
I had my own help system.
I got from going to something like that, so configurable, so it was sophisticated.
Something like that, so dumb.
Yes, must be so frustrating.
Well, the dumbest I reckon is blooming out.
Oh, I don't know if that is such.
I wouldn't say that bad word, but I was going to say, but it is appalling.
I'm forced to use it.
Yeah, it's awful.
So it was either some extent, but I managed not to use it very much,
except for because we've got meeting invitations to it.
Yeah, even though, but Thunderbird could handle them and reply to them.
Right.
So I think, I think, you know, my point of view,
I think I started with, and I was trying, I think,
a bit of a minute before I could know what it's called,
first mail point I ever dealt with was Yidora,
Windows client.
Yep.
And, and Mark, of course, my brother at the time, he had,
you have mail, he had taught me all this stuff.
Yeah.
So that was a starting point.
But then obviously with Linux all that, I discovered,
when you use it's now in Thunderbird.
Thunderbird.
Yeah.
And, fortunately, Thunderbird can import Yidora,
mail boxes and stuff, which supplies, and so on.
Yeah.
Very pleased at that.
And so I did use it a lot of quite a while, but I ended up
actually using just Gmail for the convenience of it all year.
So I have, yeah, I've got to.
Yeah.
Well, the thing about the earlier mail stuff,
which I still look back on with regret that it's not generally,
like, I mean, I could set it up and use it,
because it'd be a bit of a pain.
But one of the things about it was you could rewrite the headers.
So, I mean, the headers, it's just a chunk of text at the beginning
of an email, which says things like from and to and subject and stuff
like that.
And there's a lot of other gobbins in there that says where it came
from and all that sort of stuff.
I got quite good at parsing that because the proc mail tools,
there's a thing called form mail, which let you parse it and do stuff
with it.
But it was possible to add your own arbitrary headers.
So you put X, X label, if you wanted.
Yeah.
And that would contain a label.
And then you would have facilities within the suite of XMH,
XMH, XMH, whatever.
It was saying, find me all the messages with this label.
All these labels.
And so you could do all sorts of complicated Boolean analysis.
I love it.
Yeah, yeah.
I love you, can't.
And then you can't.
Come back once, yeah.
I know.
And it's an easy email still relevant.
Yeah.
Well, I'm tempted to say bad words like this.
Yeah.
It used to be, but I've ruined it.
Yeah.
It's exactly because it's been destroyed by my reckoning in many,
many regard.
It isn't as desirable a thing as it was because, you know,
for me, it was a filing system.
Yeah.
You know, a lot of information.
Yeah.
You know, things about keeping discussions with people,
especially when somebody says, could you do this and buy
such a, such a time?
And you'd say, yes, sure.
And then you'd go, you'd be working on it and they'd say,
you haven't finished it.
Yeah, but you said you wanted to buy something.
Oh, no, no, I didn't.
Yes.
You do.
Here's the email that says it.
So don't I?
And I've used that so many times.
Yeah.
I get so many emails now coming in.
It's just a nightmare.
And nightmare.
And what I fight with is you'll get messages with different
topics and stuff.
And they might be slightly unrelated.
They might be mixed and whatnot.
So try to get them to the separate categories.
If you could do that automated thing, that would help.
And I started using, I think I mentioned it.
One note was that just working on to solve that.
I would cut and paste bits of emails into a one note thread.
And then I might, but I might have like one dog with a
dog or whatever.
I'd maybe be hitting this.
There was an email from such and such about this.
Here's the take blow.
It's all manual, but it's all searchable and you can find things
and you can sort it where you like.
But of course, the damn thing bloody well.
It's corrupted itself.
So I've got a hard work cut.
Tabs were in one note.
It's most still okay.
But when I looked up about it, there's quite a few folk complaining
about, oh, my one note got corrupted.
Yeah, that's great.
That's brilliant.
You're supposed to put it on a tool that's supposed to be
sort of like a weird click because of a cat.
My screwdriver melted and I was using it.
Yeah.
But I think it puts on one huge big data file.
That's probably part of the problem.
Yeah.
Well, people hated the MH philosophy.
People were saying, look at that.
It's junk.
Because what it did was it made a file from every message.
And it put them in.
It had a folder concept built in.
But it gave the messages numbers.
So we just stuck it at the end of the folder as, you know,
there's 41 there.
So this is 42.
And you could do things like shuffle around the numbers
or reorder them and date wise.
Mostly it would do that automatically.
But the advantage to that was all the file stuff.
You could write, you know, orcscripts and said scripts
and purl script to deal with all these stuff
in a very elegant way.
It maybe wasn't as efficient in terms of, you know,
story space and stuff.
But these are fine.
So if you wanted to add a header,
you just went to the file with your said script
and said this header to go on all these messages.
I remember there was a article in one of the Linux
like just looking at open office.
And they were competing to see it,
competing it to see some of that.
Some like a particular version like Word, for example,
because what you can do because, you know,
it's just a zip file with text within it.
So again, you can do, orcs, said scripts.
You could, for example, if you're an organization
and your name had a name changed.
Like my company has very many times,
and we won't go into that.
But, you know, you could, you could have,
you could just run a script and it all gets fixed.
You could not, you cannot do that.
We're Word documents.
Cannot do that.
Because you can't get into this, into the binary data
and two-kit sort of.
It's, no, it's a weird thing.
And, in fact, just the other day,
I had an old access database
and my boss is, he comes from a software background.
Everything should be, I've got to watch my city one.
Software background.
And he's always, he wants everything to be sort of logged
and put, could figure it online and a lot of stuff.
And we've got a lot of paperwork stuff.
And I said, you know, sometimes paperwork is better.
He won't accept that.
Well, just the other day, I found this old access database.
I was open it.
But, I said, but I've got that,
an A4 ring binder that's got that information in it.
So, there's proofs that, you know, you can't open it anymore.
There's a company servant back to me.
You can't open the bloody thing.
You know, you won't go through that.
You know, it's useless.
Yeah, yeah.
If it had an on-the-party system,
they could have opened always, you know?
Yes.
Yes.
That's a nice flying aircraft, doesn't it?
Yeah.
So, yeah.
The, the, the mail thing,
it's, the listeners might realise that it's a subject
that I rent on a bit.
Yeah.
So.
Now, the next thing we were going to talk about is calendars.
And it's probably kind of similar as well,
because I, I was frustrated with it.
I use, I've got more used to it now that I use,
because I use Google Gmail.
I also use the calendar.
I don't put huge amounts of stuff in it.
Mm-hmm.
But first of all, it frustrating.
But the cyan agenda was so much better.
And I so much miss it, you know?
It's, it's, it's, it's.
Yeah.
So, it's more sophisticated than just nicer on general, you know?
So, yeah.
I had certainly hoped for better calendars as time went on.
Yeah.
We used to use a thing called iCal,
which is the name that, that predated the format iCal
that people use for the calendar, the underlying ISO format.
And it, it was quite nice.
It was a sort of X windows display thingy,
which merely display, I think it just displayed stuff.
Maybe you could click on bits or something.
But it was, I think it was driven by a config file
behind the scenes.
So, you would edit that more than anything else.
But it was just a nice thing to have in the corner of your window.
Yeah.
And it would alert you.
You should be in a meeting or that sort of thing.
So, we, we, we, we, uh, we use, uh, uh, Skype, um, and, and, uh, in the office.
I, but the recent introduced teams.
And so, whereas I forgot the site.
So, Skype, it does integrate into outlook.
So, you can, you can set up a meeting or a quest or whatever it is.
But in teams, uh, it doesn't.
So, we need to wait a second.
So, I'm having an earthquake.
You know, the modern, yeah, you see this.
It's got its own separate calendar.
Oh, great.
Probably.
Yeah.
So, you can't import it.
Yeah.
Oh, there's no that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, yeah.
I actually use Thunderbirds calendar, which originally we call lightning, I think.
I don't know whether it has a separate name now, but it's, it's an integrated thing.
But that's just a calendar.
You can go to it.
Click on, on a, um, a day sale and add an event in there.
Yeah.
So, your visit to the dentist can be there and you can put, uh, put alarms on it.
I think one of the things that nice touch the light about the sign was it.
So, if you've, you've got a heading for, if you're a calendar event, add a good to the dentist.
And then you could, you could add a note.
So, if you add a note, what happens is it adds three dots to the end of the title.
So, what a glance.
Oh, I've got other information you need to look at in there.
I now do that manually myself.
I'll do that.
So, I'll do that.
I will look up three dots later.
I know.
Yeah, that's a nice feature.
Yeah.
But, I mean, I do do that.
I mean, I've got, I had an event come up recently, or I could see it in the future, which was
to get the bus to Glasgow for a pod crawl.
Which is, I still in my calendar.
And it's June about July.
But I'd written the instructions for where to go to catch the bus.
What frequency they arrived at and all that sort of stuff.
And that'd been there for years.
Very handy.
And I was going to Glasgow for another reason.
And it was really easy to do.
So, you know, so my calendar was also an event-related note thing, which, you know, seems to
me to be highly desirable to have.
Yes, absolutely.
So, yeah.
But I must admit, I did quite enjoy the fact that Phosden was on early February in Brussels.
And there's a client that you can run on your phone.
I've got the Android version of it.
So, you can see all the events.
And you can say, oh, I'm interested in that one.
I will attend this.
And it goes, and you can set it up anyway, to write to your Google calendar to say, oh, you're
going to be at this event.
So, you get alerts from the Google calendar thing to say, you're supposed to be at this meeting.
Because I've used that in real life, because to get to meetings at Phosden requires a bit
of legwork to get from across the, you know, a sea campus, how to find a place.
But, you know, just sitting at home and watching the thing in real time on there, the video
feed was really useful.
So, you know, it's like an open source project that wrote that.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
And presumably the API to add stuff like that to the Google calendar is generally available,
you know.
Yeah.
So, there will be permissions issues for your calendar, no doubt.
But still, you know, those sorts of things I find immensely useful.
I was fine.
Yeah.
It would be the sort of thing I would want to be using all the time.
Yeah.
Well, I effectively do.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think, I think the Kinn not mentioning about the last, what was the thing?
The first thing he was at, did he see what it seems?
I was just listening about that.
I think it's one of my, because it seems a bit more quieter than previously on Gaze.
Yeah.
I was surprised he said that.
I thought he was going to be.
Yeah.
Because the estimate from the first day organizers was there were going to be 8,000 people there.
Yeah.
I don't know how they worked that out.
Yeah.
There was just a line on a graph that was going up a 45 degree.
Yeah.
But, yeah, I don't know.
But, yeah, it didn't seem to be quite as many.
Yeah.
It used to be about four or five thousand when I first started going to them.
And that was full.
And 8,000 would be nightmare.
You wouldn't be able to, you know, be shoulder to shoulder as you walk from one place to another.
Yeah.
So, so with the next topic, you think?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think I can go on.
Yeah.
I should shut up a bit.
No, no, no.
Thank you.
In fact, I should do some shows on my email as crap.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That was better in a whole day.
Make it out.
Yeah, nobody would agree with you.
We could learn a lot from that.
I think that's it.
Yeah.
So, yes.
We were going to talk about having discs that can't count on what, why they do.
So, I think, I think I'm starting to suffer a little bit of bit rot.
And so, if I understand this, I remember we were reading about this.
There's something that I can't, you may be able to know more about it than me.
But it's the way that in flash devices need to be refreshed.
So, they get heated up.
The cells or the individual bits make up the individual sectors or whatever they are.
They heated up and they're not going to be flattened out over time.
So, the rot sits in and if you don't refresh.
So, mainly, to refresh all you would need to do, I guess, is just to copy the whole SD card
to some other media and then write it back and that would just refresh.
I think that's all you need to do.
Okay.
If you don't do that, over time, something that gets cut between the ones and the zeros
because it flattens out.
I think that's what's going on.
And what I was going to say is, I know that my, I noticed several months ago,
maybe in a year ago or so, my Raspberry Pi under my television.
I've got open a lick on it.
And it's starting to, sometimes it doesn't boot up properly.
I won't boot up.
It's occasional.
And I'll do other wee glitches happening.
I'm getting a bit rot there and it's slowly breaking down the thing.
And I think I had a issue with bits of audio messing from stuff on my upstairs Pi.
So, yeah, I think maybe I'm starting to see a bit rot.
But I still have to have had any feeling in me like, you know,
so they're not being able to robust to be fair.
I haven't had too many problems with SD cards that I'm aware of anyway.
And maybe I did have one in the early days of my earliest Pi.
What was that?
The A, what, the Model A or something?
Model A.
Way, way back in the, in time.
That, what, that sort of stock working.
And I thought I could say about, you seem to be of the SD card.
But that was an early, early SD card, right?
I didn't, I wasn't so knowledgeable about what type to buy.
It was probably some old rubbish thing.
I know that of a camera or something.
I know, I know, well, funny, you should say it.
I may have missed this before, but my wife's friend,
G, G, goes on a lot of holidays.
And she just takes her SD card and flash card and just fills it up.
And then she's, well, that's this holiday.
She's got all these cards, she's filled up.
And never ever backs on my friends.
Oh, it's going to go bad.
Yeah, yeah, it does sound like it.
Bit of the, I've got CDs that are all filled with pictures and stuff.
And I wonder how many of those are readable.
Well, indeed, indeed, whatever you choose,
it's going to add some point of exclusion.
Well, the, the, the, the reckon for audio,
I'm sure it's somewhere that the, the best archiving,
the, the media they reckon for backing up audio,
the reckon was, it was, it was a, it was a, it was a VHS,
you know, it's like a, it had high quality.
It's almost close to my cam stereo or something.
It was a, so, yeah, it's the audio quality
of these super VHS recorders, which are actually very high.
And that you could store the tape at that for many, many, many,
many years.
It's very, very strange.
Much better than a CD.
And the other thing that I think hard drives are pretty robust.
And well, let's say some mix more than others.
And I do remember that, I don't know if you remember the story
that back in the early days, Google decided they were going to use
a hard disk array to, to, to, to, to and they're just going to use
can banks of a standard hard disks.
And they did data analysis on failure rates and stuff.
And it did they wouldn't, they thought this would run,
I mean, I've shared mentions before they were unfair to say
which makes field which didn't, because they thought it would uncompetit
to. All that.
But they said that the certainly there were certain things that they
noted for it's the last for over a year than they go and forever
Basically, I'm a judge that run the hottest and more likely to be the ones that fail, things that I've got, so he's got a thing on it.
So I've got a Western Digital, my passport, 250 gigabyte hard disk, and I use it all the time regularly, and it has never failed.
In fact, at one point, I thought it had failed, and I was batting up down the floor trying to get us to work again.
And it's in the back, being on the back of a bike from Edinburgh to Darky's, a couple of times, a push bike, and it still works.
And I have all these, all my drives I've bought have been Western Digital passport drives, and my father-in-law has bought some, and none of her drives have failed so far.
But yes, I think it depends on which of the models you've chosen.
Of course, I've certainly had experiences with the Black range, Western Digital Black that are designed for, they're more expensive, and they're designed for long use.
I think I've got one of those still running in my main machine.
They have a color, there's a blue, there's a green, there's the green ones are for...
Oh, I don't know what the green ones are, I think they're for...
Are these things that go into computers? They're not like USB, anything.
No, no, no, there's been...
It's all of their range of spinning disks, and also their SSDs that come under these categories, and I think you get different...
So for example, if you've got a restaurant on my passport sort of thing, what green drive you've been in that, I don't know...
I don't know, I don't know, I think that it is possible to answer that, but...
Right, I'm not quite sure.
Well, I think it's on a field, so I think it's not about...
Yeah, I've heard of people buying the things sold as passport, and then taking the disk out and saying,
Look, I've got a black or something like that, and yeah, I couldn't give you a chapter in verse a bit, but I've certainly seen that.
In fact, it was recommended you got a better deal if you bought them through that route.
Right, they're actually...
They've been buying them on time.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Interesting.
I've got my notes here, all paper, and I think I've just shuffled them.
Yeah, I could just warn that I wrote about that, and I'm just looking and I can't see you.
Yeah, I'm sure I did.
You can probably hear the paper being turned...
Yeah, I'm sure.
I'm stuck, but it's in the bottom, maybe.
It's in the audio you can hear it.
And also, we're in the car park by the way, everybody.
Yeah, and if you hear the...
I've got the windows of the car, slightly open, because it's a bit getting a bit stuffy.
And there's a lot of people in the car park, so...
Your noises are...
You'll know what it is.
It's not so strange.
Yeah.
Hidden away in the back.
Well, we are, actually.
It's strange to be hidden away in the back of a car park.
We really ought to do a bit of job with these notes, because what we've ended up doing is accumulating odds and ends over the period of months.
Yeah.
Things that want to be talked about.
Well, that was it.
It was in the future upgrades I talked about.
Oh, okay.
Yeah.
That was it.
So it was a...
Well, Westerners of Passport Drive was bought in 2009.
They had 14 years old.
The drive was 250 gigs.
They were still there during the year.
So that was it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So we're going to talk about future upgrades.
I'll...
I'm just going to say, my father-in-law was going to buy some four-terabyte Westerners.
Another one.
He just recently bought another one, because he was concerned about chip shortches and whatnot.
Okay.
Yeah.
I mean, it's even...
Even within my sphere of work, the alternative industry is in complete turmoil.
And day-to-day, our things can change.
It's a nightmare trying to get the components.
And, you know, when you think about the complexity of the modern life,
and even something simple as a pump,
might have an alternate module or something,
and it's if you can't get that specific specialized part.
Because in the past, the components were like a TTL logic or whatever.
And they were standard bits.
And from those TTL logic, you clicked on a certain way and it made a particular circuit.
But now you get the whole thing built on a chip.
And that chip only does that one job.
So if you can't get that specialist chip for that specialist job, you're stuffed.
So you could get a situation where you could imagine where a pumping station or something like that opens a valve or something like that.
Has this module on it?
It goes down.
So you can't get that chip from China.
You can all on a pump.
Water into the doors.
And sometimes I'm in that.
That's insane.
So you can see that all these complexes people don't think about.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So there's not these.
It's just fun.
The novel.
That's right.
It's complexity and also single points of thinking.
It's always that straight.
There's been constructed.
Because it's great.
It's cheap.
It's the cheapest route.
Let's find the cheapest route.
Is it resilient though?
Oh, we don't care about it.
We don't care about it.
We don't care about it.
We don't care about it.
But that's something that the project that I work on is really quite old.
And it uses TTL.
And you can still get a lot of the chips today.
But the modern stuff that they're bringing out.
The other projects.
They can't get the parts anymore.
It's much faster now.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It can almost be a week before that you get the product out of the doors.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I keep hearing people saying stuff like.
We've got so much reliance on X.
I mean, GPS, for example.
It's in everything.
Yeah.
It's a vital part of so much.
You know, I was even hearing.
Was it something to do with hospital doors?
Or something to do with GPS?
Is it your own head?
How the heck would you expect it?
Oh, in it to do with GPS.
So everything just falls.
The best of GPS goes down.
Ah.
I know.
I know.
It's like having, you know, your nest thermostat or all these other IOT nicknacks in your house.
Your house is running on these things.
Yeah.
And it's dependent on some cloud, which one day will fail.
Well, either will fail.
There is no economically viable animal.
And you end up with the house for the junk.
And then another doors will open.
But the lights won't go off.
Well, that's a wee bit of an inconvenience.
Imagine you've got a warehouse.
It's unimaginably big.
Unimaginably.
No one person could navigate it.
You've got so much stuff on it that nobody apart from my computer assistant could
receive this stuff.
And you've got up and down in the country.
If that fails, how are you going to get stuff to the shops?
How are you going to get shops to the people?
That's all going to go to hell.
So it's scary, you know.
Well, I think you've got all of that, you know.
It's mental.
Mental.
I worked in the factory for a year to get enough money to carry on with my studies.
And I ended up being a warehouse man for a while.
And I got the job off.
I was given a dimo labelling.
Oh, crunchy ones.
Yeah, I had wax.
It builds the muscles in.
And here are.
And labelling all the bins and doing industries and that sort of stuff.
And that was all entirely manual.
People came to the front.
It was a section of the factory.
People came to the front desk and said, have you got a left handed widget in the guy.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
We got three of those.
And he'd know.
You know.
So yeah.
I mean, I even heard that something's big.
Shopping centres.
You go for a food.
They're constantly having a check of steam off.
And the sound of the floor is coming in.
So if the shelves went empty, they couldn't refill them less than they closed the stores.
I don't know how long it took me to fill out.
She didn't enter the store.
How long did it take to build it back up to stock again?
Maybe two weeks.
I don't know idea.
People started.
I don't know.
Because often these places run with a night shift that comes in to do the restocking.
Because that's when the through, even though they might be open at night,
they're still on the throughput is low.
I touched on it before.
I should have mentioned it last time was that my father-in-law worked for Scottish gas.
And he said that if the gas system's got to always stop,
then you've got to go to every house and turn every single path involved off.
Okay, okay.
And open it up.
Yeah.
Can you imagine that?
Yeah.
Can you imagine that it's not designed to ever stop?
No, no.
So if it stops, it stops.
Oh, wow.
So.
The thing that bothers me actually,
I just because I'm, I just have thoughts that go around my head and go away,
is about the day that the sun says,
right, time for your coronal mass ejection, but he's one of those hitters,
like the one did in Canada,
or the one that was the,
the one that blew up all the telegraph system back in there.
I thought I had to do that.
Because we're seeing that.
If it hit something like America,
or Britain for that matter,
that maybe we'd never survive it,
because you've got these,
you've got like substation transformers.
And so they take the grid voltage down to 240 volts for an origin.
I don't know how many they've got a reason to do it.
Maybe they've got 10 for the whole country or something like that and stock.
And it takes a year to restock that,
maybe two years to restock that.
I've suddenly the whole country's transformers fail all up down the country.
You couldn't replace them.
People would starve, people would die.
It would just be...
Am I gay, basically?
It's another case of, you know,
not exactly single point of failure,
but not enough.
Failure-approved thing.
And I think as I believe it,
I could be wrong,
but I think if I read into this,
and I didn't want to be this as well,
I should have thought about this.
I think things can be hardened against that.
And I think, for example,
Germany's done that.
Of course,
the cheap Britain hasn't done it.
Because we do everything in the cheap,
so we've done that, you know.
So yeah, so yeah.
It's all about making a profit from doing that.
No, that's all about profit, as you see.
Yeah, yeah.
It's exactly what we were.
That's a fascinating subject.
It's gone away from our agenda a tiny bit.
So, have we said enough about
this failure-y things and stuff?
Probably.
Probably.
My record is reading
44.
Oh, you've got it on it all over the classroom.
That's good you can see that.
That's good.
We're just trying to keep this.
Yeah.
It'll truncate a bit.
Yeah.
But I think we can go on for another,
another, another chunk of time.
If you chuck gates in, maybe,
is that, we've got time to cover about that in the movie.
So it's basically,
all my pies are running,
old versions of us being on a day,
you know, some of that.
And I had to go to Christmas team to,
I think, you know, before I did,
and I may have done, I've, I've shown it.
I did the same thing.
This Christmas had a go top grade my pie.
And I planned to do two pies.
And it failed.
You know, whatever.
I can't move far.
I got so far.
And it just didn't work.
And I just, I gave up in disgust.
So I just went.
But because I had,
but was I thinking an image of the whole AST card?
I could just read it back onto the AST.
And it was back where it was.
I've just said it well.
I'll, I'll just love the way it is.
I can't contemplate rebuilding it.
It's just too much hassle.
Yeah, yeah.
I've done a similar thing.
Yeah.
I've got pies which have failed,
because they can't upgrade anymore,
because the jump from Raspbian to Raspbian.
Yeah.
Is not, I don't think it's a thing you can automate.
Right.
So it just needs the whole thing being.
I have actually done two of them.
And they're up and running.
But I've not yet read it.
It's a case of, you know, it's a new can-pay thing.
Yeah.
You're blitzing the whole lot,
and then having to rebuild it.
But the tub was the two pies that I went top grade.
So one's got a, what's it called now?
It's a command and display CD,
command and display add-on board,
which basically has an LCD display.
Yeah.
And then buttons.
Now, it's really useful,
because I can start and stop podcasts.
I can check the Q status.
It's just usually handy.
And it controls my pie-up stairs.
And the pie-up stairs has got another add-on board
that's just got a, it's a simpler board.
And it's got buttons,
so I can again start and stop in the play.
I could do other various things,
without actually having any display on the unit.
So it's headless, basically.
And I think that the upstairs one,
I could get by,
we just nuke it and forget in a bit of the button.
It's not that big a deal.
But I wouldn't want to lose my command and display one,
because I wrote the Python script for it.
Yeah.
It's nice.
And is it not compatible with?
I don't think it is with those.
With the reader's pie-up.
I don't think it is the way it's from.
Oh, no.
Yeah.
So is the thing discontinued?
Is it, is it not a product anymore?
Yeah.
I think they have a newer one now.
Oh.
Yeah.
So, yeah.
It should need you to write something
to interface it.
Re-write it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Which is going to be quite a thing.
I'm just, I'm just using, I like,
for a long time, I've just used,
as almost like a piece of,
I don't even see it almost as a,
as a project anymore.
It just works.
It's put on.
And it's split comes out.
So yeah.
That's great.
But it's also one of the most dangerous things
that it can do.
It becomes part of your everyday life.
And then all of a sudden,
it goes away because somebody says,
right, upgrade, upgrade, upgrade,
or we're not making this anymore on your stuff.
Exactly.
That's irritating, isn't it?
Yes.
This is it.
So, the, um, the,
one of the projects I would like to do
and I've started, but I've moved on with it.
Got a few of these Raspberry Pi Pico chips,
which are quite powerful for,
for single sort of microcontroller thingies.
And I've got one which,
which came in,
or you had to fit it into a,
a little keyboard with a,
with a bunch of,
maybe, yeah,
I can't remember,
keys 12, something like that.
Just ordinary keyboard keys,
but in a little,
yeah, a little board.
And then it's got a USB output.
So things like,
I mean, you couldn't write a fair bit of software
on that,
Pico,
because it, you can run Python versions.
Yeah.
Or you can write stuff in C,
C++, I think as well.
But,
if you've got projects like
needing to control stuff through
extra buttons,
or something like that,
maybe something like that,
they're not massively expensive.
No.
No.
Something sorry.
That might be a better project.
Yeah, it might be a better project.
Maybe a better project.
Maybe a better project.
Yeah.
And I mentioned my Opelike thing,
and again,
that's getting really long,
and the tooth,
and there was a bit,
because the,
the bit rot is going to be a bit,
and I get,
because I,
I don't have the time to,
to spend on things.
And I think that's a trouble
with a lot of Linux projects,
you spend so much time on them.
I loved it,
and enjoyed it back in the day when I had the time.
And I was even contemplating,
you know,
I'm not sure,
I think it's a 3B,
I have my big go under the television,
I'm not sure.
But I had contemplated,
if I can Android box,
or something like that.
But I think I'll just keep this,
this thing as long as I can,
and see where I go from there.
I'm really,
just upgrade the,
the distribution on it.
Because I think the problem is,
the version I've got,
it doesn't do to the acceleration,
as well, so I see a bit of that.
Oh, okay, okay.
But yeah,
it's good off.
Yeah.
It's all too easy to get into those things.
I,
I was running a,
um,
one of those model,
what was it?
The A plus,
the one that came out a couple years ago,
which is just a,
a minimal board,
with no ethernet on,
just got one by,
maybe Bluetooth,
and,
no ethernet,
and,
but it's quite powerful.
So, there's so many models,
that's a lot of things.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I had that on the back of an old monitor,
and I was running Magic Mirror.
Oh, yeah,
so I've been seeing that.
And that was great.
It was really nice to have that,
because it,
it would tell,
I could even get the bus time table off it,
and it would tell me all about the weather
and,
and the time,
and all that sort of stuff.
You still have that?
No,
because the Pi needed that upgrade,
which I haven't done yet.
And then,
it looked as if that project,
that I was basing it on,
had gone into some sort of decline.
So,
unless you'd be prepared to go in
and dig around with the code,
and,
and get it all up and running again,
I think,
maybe this,
there are people who've said,
oh, look at this,
it's going,
it's going down the tubes.
Let's bring it back to life again.
There might still be projects like that around,
which would be great.
But,
my son's learning JavaScript,
and Node.js,
which is what it's written in,
so I could,
I could maybe ask him
for a bit of advice.
Yeah.
Because you never know,
it might not be that daunting too.
No, no, no.
But it's a project that,
oh,
it doesn't do what I used to do,
because I've got to go and mend it.
Yeah.
And I've also got to mend that,
and that,
and that,
so I'll get to it.
Yeah,
I'm like that myself,
because this is,
yeah, yeah.
It's prioritising these things can be a thing.
Oh,
one,
one,
one,
one,
one,
one,
but when I came back anyway,
I turned it,
the, the,
and I found there was no network connection.
I thought it was going on here.
I turned it,
my,
I did the,
the Volvo home,
plunky home,
and it failed,
one and failed,
because one was okay,
so one of its own useless,
because,
obviously, to get a network connection,
you'd run it,
one in the,
one in the,
one in the,
one in the,
one in the,
one in the,
one in the,
one in the,
one in the,
one in the,
yeah,
it goes through this.
And I thought,
well,
well,
well, I was getting a network connection.
I thought,
how was that?
And then I thought,
oh, it must be through WiFi.
And I thought,
oh, that's a newer version of the Pi.
It's got WiFi in it.
And I must have said,
I have a lot of time ago,
forgotten then back to the network plug against it.
That was a nice surprise.
So yeah, that was,
that was very easy fixer.
WiFi's,
I mean, that,
that magic mirror thing
was a WiFi-based thing,
for obvious reasons.
And I had been running,
er,
er,
around your Pi camera
in the window.
I bought a little board
from Pi Hut.
You could stick on the window.
I mean, it took a,
a Pi Zero W on the back of it,
and a camera on the front of it.
So you could use it
as a means of taking pictures of it.
I think I've seen those.
Yeah.
It was in the garden or,
you know,
whether the postman actually
gold or, I mean,
whatever he wanted,
you know,
it's good to do that.
Right, right, right.
Well, yeah,
you're like,
saying,
they can be tillers.
Of course, yeah.
Of course, you wouldn't do that.
No, no, no, no.
You could have done that.
You could have stood then.
Yeah, we'd go on there
and take a picture of it outside.
It's a bit useful, eh?
A camera.
A camera.
I screwed the camera.
On that particular one,
but still.
Yeah, but that was running on Wi-Fi
and it was taking pictures
on a heavy 15 minutes
and I was,
I was copying them to a machine
and stashing away,
making little movies out of them.
I think it was a very good day.
So, yeah.
Yeah.
Anyway, that's digression.
Yeah.
Yeah.
What else have I got?
Yeah, my, my, my, my,
my, my, my, my,
next time I've got my,
my, my, my, my,
old desktop PC's getting very,
very old and it's getting,
again,
no, then it's,
I mean, myself,
really, I've been very old.
So.
Yeah, yeah.
I know.
It's actually running
on Ubuntu 1804,
LTS,
but they've got security updates
to 2028.
It's amazing,
that's okay.
So we've got that.
It's going to,
it's going to seven in which I,
I, I make sure,
if I ever,
I've got to get the last time,
but when I do,
I may absolutely show the network
connections unplugged,
you know.
But I use that to,
to occasionally
to program a,
I'm to do a bit of gear, I've got a bit of other than that, you know, so they'll
they'll opt to click 780 with four gigabits of RAM to believe. So yeah, it's
it's pretty low-speak. I think I'm going to have to think a bit. Yeah, yeah. Upgrading,
you know, it's, it was one of these many desktop things that businesses use and
it runs really quiet, really cool. It's been rock stable, you know, but yeah,
it's getting different. I think people are pushing those, suggesting those as
being good, a good place to run if you want to get into these IoT systems. What's
the one open? But there's one that you run as a server that knows about all your
IoT kit. Right. And people have been saying that these are actually quite good.
Sure, if it's that exact model, but in the same, same area, that they're not
very heavy on power usage. Right. And so you could run them 24-7 without too
much difficulty and they've got enough power to run quite a lot of the code that's
needed to. Well, I mean, I've actually been able to do, I think I did an episode on
video editing. So I can do, yes, I can do video editing on it as well.
That's quite a fun machine in many ways. Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, I use it less and
less because I tend to just, of course, we have cold in Scotland and we've got
the electric heating as well. So you think I was too cold to go up that's cold
room. So you sit downstairs and all these are tabbed or something, you know,
a laptop or something. Yes. My, my, my main computer is in the downstairs and I've
got an extension to my house, which is where it is, sort of dining and kitchen
extension. And it just so happens, it's a, it's south pointing and it's got a
flat roofing felt roof. So on a day like today, which is very nice and sunny
for others. That space warms up any heating until it's actually really
on a bitterly cold windy day. It's not all that nice. Just sit there under a blanket
and I don't think about it. But yeah, yeah. Yeah. These issues that we have these days.
Yeah. I think we've maybe covered the next section we're going to talk about
YouTube, but that's probably going to haul, haul, haul. I don't know what I
work, what I'm doing. That coming up to 56 minutes on my recording.
Yes, maybe we did have it running. Yeah, that's been a good, a good place to stop.
Maybe less than anything else we were thinking of. We did make a list of
YouTube channels that we were sort of recommending. How do we got to that?
I don't know. What do we've talked about it over much? Because mostly,
most people tend to do their YouTube lists on HBR with just saying,
you know, this is good. This is good. You should watch this is like that type of
thing. Maybe we could turn what we've we've assembled into, you know,
notes with a little bit more texture. Maybe, yeah. Yeah. Because I think some of these
might be of interest. Okay. I mean, unless you want to take yours away and you
make a show up. No, no, no. Obviously, it came with love with that, but, um,
yeah, yeah. I know, I know. It's not always easy to find the time.
I'm on that actually. It's funny enough. I've got a show that I'm
trying to pull together just now. And I've actually all recorded. It's all done. Yeah.
But it's a show notes. That's slow me down. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
So it's not some self-tanked things. Yes. Yes. So, uh, I always remember,
I remember, like, Claire, Claire two, he says, uh, what's the point? Back in the day,
you know, you say, what's a pretty show note? Well, yeah. But that is, of course,
that's nice to have. I have found. Yeah. I'm because I come from, uh, sort of,
academic related background. It was really important to have textual material to go
with stuff. Yeah. So we were, it was drummed into it. So I tend to write the notes first
and then talk around the subject with the notes in the sort of center.
It's a good idea to do it. And I found that. It's come, come back. People have said,
you know, the notes are so helpful. Yeah. And I'm trying to make a, a book out of the,
one series I did. I think I mentioned in the previous tell me now. That is
sculpting what I said. This one is said. The said editor. I've got a book together.
But it's a PDF. I wanted an index in it because, because things as complex as that.
Oh, yes. So I can make an index with PDF. It's actually quite good. But who wants PDF? Well,
you know, you could live with it. But I really wanted to be able to make an e-pub with index
within the moment. And at the moment, I haven't found a foolproof, Dave proof method.
I will get that. I will get that. I think, I think I've got a said book on,
a right or a really good said book, I think, actually. Actually, I find the time these days to,
to I've got the say they've got, I've got the best one I want to like to be. So there was one
on a pocketbook in Linux, I think it was. And if you're really, if you're, I recommend,
if you're starting off on Linux, you think, well, what are all these commands that are available
to us? You've got this, the we pocket Linux book. And I think it's based on on red habit.
You know, the command line tools that are really the same across all distributions,
you know, the query to tell us or whatever. And so, you know, I'll say for text, and here's a group
of things, you do for text, and the group of things for searching, or whatever it is. And if you,
it doesn't take that long, I, maybe, good toilet book, you know, so you could use it a few pages
out every time, you know, and yeah, I haven't read it cover to cover a number of times. And it means,
you can see, oh, right, I could use art for lag, you said for that cut, whatever it is. And
you get to know the commands, because if you don't know what you can do, you don't know,
then you can't find something useful to use it for. It's not always easy to ask the question,
how, what's the best way of turning this text into a multiple column, or what those sorts of
things? I mean, it's possible, it's more possible to do it now, because you can do a Google search
and often get there. But you have to fight your way through the answers, some of which will be relevant
and some not. But yeah, but it's good, it's good to have that, have that knowledge of, you know,
here's all the tools in the toolbox. So if you need to knock a nail and do it, use a screwdriver,
you know, that type of thing. All right. So shall we call it quits at that point? I think it's just
turned one hour and one minute according to this thing. So yeah, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll call it
quits and it will do this again at some point. Yeah, just time it better if you want something else.
Yeah, yeah. Okay, I'll, I'll see. I'll switch this off. So goodbye everybody from Edinburgh,
and a nice sunny day, not particularly warm, but surprisingly so. But the sun is strong,
so it's quite, quite cozy. Good, good. Okay, bye for now then. Bye.
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