Episode: 4631
Title: HPR Community News for April 2026
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4631/hpr4631.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:15:32 (official HPR transcript)

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4631, for 2026-05-04
Today's show is entitled, "HPR Community News for April 2026"
The host is HPR Volunteers and the duration is 01:31:47
The flag is Explicit, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "HPR Volunteers Clinton, Ken and Kevie talk about shows released and comments posted in April 2026"
Hi, everybody. My name is Tim Fallon. You're listening to another episode of Hacker Public Radio today. It's HPR Community News for April 2026. Joining me from the islands of Scotland, it is?
Kevin, I have returned. Yes, glad to be back because last month I was available Monday through Thursday. You were available Friday through the weekend, so it just didn't work out. So yes, glad to be back.
Well, we have a backup out there in the outback. It is all the way from?
Hello, it's Clinton from Melbourne, Australia.
Hardly the outback, but okay.
I have never ever lived in the outback. I've only ever visited.
Excellent. And thanks for joining, guys. We're doing the scheduling of the Hacker Community News a little differently.
First of all, I'll tell you what the Hacker Community News is. But before I do that, if you're a first time listener, this is Hacker Public Radio, one of the longest running podcasts in the world.
And definitely one of the longest running podcasts in the world that doesn't have a Wikipedia article because it keeps stealing it from us.
Not that I'm bitter. Not that I'm bitter. It is annoying, actually, because when you try to talk to the press or somebody and then all of a sudden your Wikipedia article disappears, it's not nice.
Anyway, HPR is a community podcast. So it is a podcast where every day other techies send in a show about a topic that is of interest to hackers, hobbyists, makers, people in general.
Think of it as your virtual hackerspace. And this is the Community News, which releases a show once every month on the first Monday of the month.
And we talk about anything that has happened in the Hacker Space for the last month.
Some people, you can subscribe to the feed for this podcast. If you go to the RSS feed subscription on the main page or press the R of Hacker Public Radio.
And some people use that as a way to filter the shows because there's quite a lot of shows that come through.
Currently, we're pushing. In fact, last month we pushed 5000 shows and no celebration.
No, we didn't. We still have 100 shows to go, 70 shows to go before we hit our 5000 shows.
So that's quite a lot of shows. Anyway, I completely lost the plot.
Yes. And we're doing this slightly differently because it's better to have several volunteers from the community coming in and talking about these episodes for you.
And to make scheduling just a little bit easier, what we're doing is going away from a fixed time and date.
It will usually be on the Friday before the Monday in order to give people time to process the episode and post it everywhere that it needs to be.
So you will see the mail list going out. If you've listened to the shows for a particular month, you can feel free to join us and we will adjust our schedule according to the people who joined.
Which is why we're recording this on a Saturday morning. Does that all make sense, guys?
Yep. Loud and clear.
Except for time zones, but that's not your fault.
Yes.
That's not my fault. So the time is currently 177-77-10341.
We're going to switch over to 177-77-7777 today at some point.
I think you need to elaborate there. That totally lost me.
That's the Unix Epoch timestamp.
So, you're listening to this on the 4th of May. May the 4th be with you.
Oh, of course, yes. Happy Star Wars Day.
Kevin, I'm not your father.
And so, you can be a Trekkie or a Star Wars person and or both.
That's your call.
But we'll see if there are any references we can get in here.
Anyway, without further ado, what we tend to do is give the honour of reading out the new hosts to the newest janitor.
So, Clinton, if you could be so good as to go to the page and read out the new hosts for this month.
Unfortunately, there were no new hosts this month.
How could that be? How could that be, lads?
Lassies and everybody in between.
Listen, reminder, this is a community podcast, meaning the listeners, as in the person who's listening to these airwaves coming into your head.
This is not about having a few rock stars who produce all the shows.
It may seem like that, but that's not the whole point of it.
The whole point of this, ideally, HBR will be in a healthy situation, is if every single day we had a different host for the whole year through.
Yeah?
So, get off your whatevers and start sending in shows.
Even if it's, hi, this is my first time.
I have no idea what to say.
This is how I got into tech.
This is how I ended up listening to this HBR episode.
So, send in shows.
If we don't get new hosts, we don't take into account the fact that people move away from the project, either voluntarily or involuntarily.
So, yep, do your bit.
Thank you.
Free, this is hardcore internet here.
This is, we're doing, we're walking the walk, we're talking the talk.
Send in the show.
And if that doesn't get people moving, then really, I don't know what will.
So, yeah, guys, get onto the recording devices.
And next week, I've had to post three shows from the reserve queue.
And in addition to that, there were five shows that I've had to remove from the reserve queue due to the fact that there was copyrighted music or there were duplicate episodes or something else.
So, it may all look very healthy and may all look super fine and everything's fine there over in HBR.
But the fact of the matter is, this project, within a month, can end.
Yeah?
So, we need to constantly keep feeding the queue, keep feeding the main queue, keep feeding the reserve queue.
Okay.
Anyway, that is the bollocking section over.
And we will move on to talking about the shows that were released last month.
The first one, which was an episode, Simple Podcasting, Preparational Recording by Whiskey Jack.
And Whiskey Jack, as you will know, did our series on nuclear reactors.
Of course, What Hacker Space doesn't have their own nuclear reactor program.
And there was quite a lot of comments about this.
So, what he did was give us some tips on how he went about recording his episode and the tools that he used to create it.
Basically, FFmpeg and stocks.
And this had a lot of comments.
Archer72 says,
Listening ahead.
Hi, Whiskey Jack.
This has been a great series and I've been listening ahead with anticipation.
Might I suggest having tags added to each show to reflect using socks and FFmpeg?
Yeah, when you're talking about...
Sorry, this is Ken.
Cheers, Archer72.
Ken here, as janitor, I would say,
don't put in tags onto shows where you're using socks and FFmpeg.
Only put tags on shows where you're talking about socks and FFmpeg.
Right.
And Whiskey Jack responded to that straight away saying,
Thank you for your kind comments on this series.
I am pleased to hear that at least one person liked it.
As for adding tags for socks and FFmpeg to the show notes after the episode has been uploaded,
I'm not sure what the proper method to go about this is.
Perhaps someone could make a suggestion.
And the third comment by Rito.
It reminds me about SolarCast.
Hi, Whiskey Jack.
I really liked your podcast and the topic.
I cannot remember about your last, but the sound quality of this one was good on my mobile speakers.
The concept reminded me about the program from Norris, another host on HBR.
While similar, it does have some differences.
HBR 3496.
As I'm not on the future feed, I look forward to your next episode.
Cheers, Rita.
And to answer Whiskey Jack's question, you send an email to the janitor so we can add it without problem.
And I've just done that now.
So in the next three or four hours, it will regenerate.
Actually, it'll be sooner than that, but that's fine.
And Whiskey Jack says, response to Rito's comment in, I wasn't aware of SolarCast.
I just downloaded the episode and will listen to it to see if the concept of how to use it is the same.
If it is the same method, the author of that may have a better overall solution in terms of using it
as he has put everything together into a single Python program.
Given that my series is four episodes rather than one, though, it is possible that I have more explanation of what is happening to the audio.
I have had some fun with gratuitous hackery when analyzing audio in GNU Octave and LibreOffice Calc.
And it is more important to have fun than to be useful.
I have looked at the source code and see that it is using a technique with socks, which sounds similar to what I drew the interest of one of the show hosts in the February Community News,
4586 for those interested, published at the beginning in March.
And when talking about another piece of podcasting software, I will have a play with the audio techniques.
I may get enough material from that audio processing technique to make another podcast episode.
Anyway, thanks again for the tip on SolarCast.
I will try it to see if it suits how I want to make a podcast.
And he went away, listened to that episode and returned with another comment saying,
I have just listened to the HPR episode on SolarCast and it appears to me that the method he uses is indeed the same concept.
That of recording a series of very short segments and stitching them together later,
as opposed to trying to edit a single big audio file with an audio editor.
SolarCast approaches it from a different way and offers a more automated process.
My series requires a number of manual steps, but I focus more on what is going on under the lid.
I also use a different filtering method.
This sounds like it's worth another podcast episode for me in which I will mention SolarCast plus also talk more about filtering.
Thanks again for telling me about SolarCast.
End of final comment.
Excellent. Excellent. Excellent. Excellent. Excellent.
More episodes coming. That's what we like to hear.
Absolutely. Actually, I really enjoyed this one.
Yeah, it's always good to hear how different people do that may create the podcast,
because obviously there's a thousand and one different ways you can do it.
And one of the things that I certainly learned from Whiskey Jack and his nuclear series is that when he seems to record a series,
he's thorough. So this is going to be a very interesting full series.
I don't know how many episodes he's planning, but yeah, I'm looking forward to these.
Absolutely. Couldn't agree more.
The following day was one from the Reserve Queue.
I'm looking at you all. I'm looking at those of you that don't have 2026 in your last uploaded episode.
You know who you are.
Yeah, that might be me.
Well, at least you're here.
This doesn't count, by the way. You've got to do your own one.
That was my whole plan ruined.
Yeah, there you go. And the New Year's show doesn't count either.
So the next episode was, but this was a good episode, one which I bring to the point of religion,
sorry to say it is the proper date format, and it is about using ISO 8601 or its derivatives,
which is year, month, day, hours, minutes, seconds.
My only exception is those of you who wish to use Epoch, which is the number of seconds since 1st of January 1970.
Yeah, I mean, I totally get this one because I would, well, personally, from writing it on a date and looking at it,
I prefer the kind of the standard European method, the kind of day, month, year,
just because that's what I'm comfortable with reading.
But since I've actually more gotten into sorting out and fixing up files, I mean, as Huka mentioned in this episode,
it makes life so much flippin' easier. It's so much nicer.
It also, if you're doing anything that's comparing log files as well, it's just so much easier.
For some reason, about 5 to 10 years ago, a memo went around to every developer in the world that says,
completely ignore allowing people to set date formats manually or customizing date formats,
that everybody who happens to be in a country, the only format that they're allowed to use is the format in this country.
So, as an example, in the Netherlands, I can only set, just as an example, right now, on your Linux machine,
it is not possible for you to set an ISO date format on your Linux machine.
Let that sink in. The silence will be truncated on that, but I really want to let that sink in.
We think about here, sorry, this is me going off on a rant, but we think about Linux being open,
but there's a bug open for years on KDE about where the ability to put in custom date formats has been removed.
Gradually, a lot of the applications are putting them back in,
and Mac and Windows have added back the option,
but Linux continues, continues to this day, to force locale as the basis for date formats.
Okay. Was that too religious, guys?
Not at all. For you, I thought that was actually fairly mail-owned, as far as a Ken rant goes, so well done.
Oh, I could go on all day about this. I really, really could.
Anything to lower one's blood pressure is good.
Anyway, Jim Gavore said,
This is the only proper date format. Welcome, Jim. Thanks for spreading the word.
I've been using this for over 20 years. Sorts well on any file systems. Sorts well in note-taking app titles.
I have a keyboard macro on my Home Linux machine and on my Windows work machine that bangs out today's days in that format.
It is the only proper date format. Correct.
And Candy Cane Art, R07, added sensical date format.
It's definitely handy to use with alphabetical sorting, especially if dealing with cross-file system archive,
since access and modify times are rarely consistent long-term.
And the following day, we had another episode from Kevin Ahooka.
And it was Playing Civilizations 5, Part 10.
And the reason we have two shows back-to-back is that the rule about 10-day separation between hosts
doesn't apply when we're taking shows from the reserve queue.
If you're so worried about it, you know the answer?
Yes, so I'm assuming you hand this one over to me.
Because I know you're a big gamer, but can I just say, do you mind if I actually take the lead on this one?
Absolutely, go for it. I'll grab a coffee in the meantime.
Right then, so yeah, another great show by Ahooka on Civilization 5.
So this time, this is Part 10 in this particular game series.
Not in the whole series overall, because he did ones before that, but for the ones on Civilization 5.
And this is Gaining Great People.
And he goes talking about the different things that, obviously with culture victories and, you know,
yearn points, et cetera, for everything on Civilization 5.
And indeed, every Civilization game.
And he talks about the types of great people.
So he goes on to say about the great artists, which can start a golden age or create great works,
great musicians and what they do.
Great writer, great engineer, great general.
The Khan, which is unique to Mongolia.
The great merchant.
Merchant of Venice, which, no surprise, is unique to Venice.
Great scientists, great admiral, great project.
These aren't obviously things you can get just as a couple of turns.
These are big parts and they will actually help you.
So, and then he also talks about trade, the different types and also the effects of trade.
So it's, yeah, it was really good.
Like I said, I'm really enjoying this series.
They're very in-depth.
I have to confess, I've only ever played Free Civ.
I've never actually gone down the route of the Civilization game.
So I almost get the feeling that with listening to these, I'm kind of learning how to play them.
So, yeah, thoroughly enjoyed this.
Yeah, I'm not a gamer at all.
Like I've never played this game and I almost certainly never will.
But I do really enjoy this series.
It's really nicely laid out.
And it gives me some insight into how some of these games are designed.
Absolutely.
It's kind of weird.
I have the feeling that, you know, I followed a tutorial on how to use Inkscape.
And since then, it's kind of weird.
I know a lot of stuff about Inkscape, yet at the same time, can't use it.
I have the feeling with Civilization that you know all the strategies for winning, yet we'll be completely confused by the UI for the first time we play it.
Yeah, it's definitely one of these games where, like most of the style of game, the first time is literally your tutorial.
You're going, what are you going to do?
And guaranteed your first time, you're going to lose terribly.
It's the same with all of these games.
Don't invest too much into your first Let's Play.
I can still remember the first time I played this style of game.
Yeah.
And I didn't realize I didn't just have to deal with external forces.
I had to deal with rebels.
And I had this brilliantly defended city.
I had great trade.
But inside, I'd worked my Civilization that hard that inside, I didn't realize civil unrest was a thing.
And I was overrun by rebels.
And I'm going, oh, for the sake of sake.
So the game ended that way.
The following day, we had the community news for March, 2026.
And that also had no new hosts.
So we've had two straight months without new hosts.
Hmm.
Hmm.
Anyway, there were two comments on the episode.
The first one was from Candy Caneator.
Misattributed comment.
And Holy, I just realized I accidentally put Windigo's name in when typing.
Oh, yeah.
This is one where somebody else should read the first one because I'm commenting.
Clinton, can you read the first comment, please?
Sure.
By Candy Caneator or Arthur, I'm not quite sure.
Misattributed comment.
Holy, I just realized I accidentally put Windigo's name in when typing revive the MPV util scripts and didn't notice until just now.
I'm so sorry.
And I replied, fixed.
No problem.
I renamed it.
Contact the janitor for these type of issues.
And you can get the janitor at admin at hapricarpublicradio.org.
Moving forward to the following day, which we move back to the New Year's episode 2006, episode 4.
For those of you who don't know, every year, the HPR and the Linux Ludcastle community put on a 24-hour, sorry, 26-hour session
where they talk about everything and anything, and then a team of crack commenters come along and go through the show notes.
I put in absolutely brilliant links to everything that is even remotely, remotely discussed links to the IT crowd, Christmas story, diehard movies, obviously talking about Christmas stuff there.
Yes, I liked how in this episode they kept it without controversy at all.
By, of course, having that great controversial debate, is diehard a Christmas movie?
Exactly.
I have never actually joined one of the New Year's shows.
I'm not sure if that's something I'm proud of or something that I should be chastised for.
No, it's weird.
I personally don't consider it a HPR thing.
It's something done definitely by the community and that HPR contribute to.
But I don't see it as a HPR show, and for years I felt that people on it use it as an excuse, oh, I've done my show then for the year if I'm on that.
But then I hear from Kevin O'Brien that that was how he got into HPR, and without Kevin, we would have a lot less shows, that's for sure.
I should admit that I have not attended one of those New Year's shows, and it's not because I've had awesome New Year's plans.
I must admit, yeah, I think it actually does slightly disadvantage us here north of the border in Britain in that I think I've been on two or three over the years, but it's only been short times.
And it's just New Year's up in Scotland is such a big thing, and it's such a big family event, just with a social, that I just can't get to them most of the time.
What I recommend you do is just call in.
Even if there's nobody on the channel, you just call in and say, Happy New Year from Melbourne, and then that's that.
And just drop out again.
Just say hi.
You don't need to be on for 14 hours, and you definitely, definitely do not need to be keeping the talking going when there's no talking.
And that means that I'll have done my yearly show then, right?
Yeah, yeah, for sure not, for last year.
Yes, and speaking of somebody who I hopefully will be running into next week in person is Jeroen Batten, who did a show on adding functionality to Audito installation.
And this is another one of those civilization things where it's a tool that I have never used, but now I feel like I'm almost an expert at it.
So this is about business applications and adding additional add-ons that are available.
Yes, and it's good to see that we're continuing with the likes of, you know, we've already mentioned Whiskey Jack and the hookah.
Jeroen's another one that, yeah, he's very thorough in what he does.
You know, if you're just looking for just a kind of light, a bit of light-filling space for the background, then these guys probably aren't your best ones because it's thorough.
It's absolutely thorough, and they're excellent shows.
Brilliant.
Thoroughly enjoying the series.
The way they do it, cutting them up into pieces, it's, you know, everything's digestible.
So, you know, this was completely a digestible show.
You didn't need to be an expert on anything.
You were just going, yeah, this is available.
And, you know, maybe at some Christmas party or New Year's party up there in the Highlands, Lowlands, Highlands, whatever.
You'll get there one day.
I will.
Hopefully I'll go up there one day.
Actually, it'd be nice to do a HBR live episode out in the Hebrides.
I think that would be a good idea now, yes.
I'll have to bring some Dutch beer or, better yet, Belgian beer with me as I go.
And from a software engineering point of view, I really like the way that Odoo is sort of laid out and designed.
It seems really sensible and no more complicated than it needs to be.
Yeah, and I have the feeling with this sort of thing that, you know, I come across somebody who's got their small business and are about to get screwed by, you know, all you have to have like this big application when you can kind of point them in to the right direction.
Okay, something went wrong.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, did I break?
I broke an episode the following day.
We had Doug 18.
Just give me one second while I make a note of something I have to fix.
Were there any comments?
Can you guys handle the comments while I'm doing this?
So, yeah, the first comment on this one is by Jim DeVore, and this is, is this the best approach for privacy?
I suspect this was about computer design and a fascinating presentation of that subject.
For privacy, wouldn't it make more sense to use old hardware?
Things were so much more transparent in the DOS days.
And the second comment was by Candy Caneater, interesting.
I find obscure hardware design cool, and this is no exception.
Deviating from the common 8-bit design is something I've rarely seen, and though I didn't understand a lot of the deeper mechanics, the way you explained it was captivating.
Yeah, absolutely.
I agree there with Candy Caneater.
In fact, both of them, it was definitely an interesting show, and it was one where it could have gone so much deeper.
But if he'd have continued on, but it's like he didn't lose, well, I found it, he went a good amount of depth, personally.
And what I'm fixing is I accidentally overwrote the show notes of that episode with the show notes for this episode, which is why I'm totally confused.
Ah!
Yeah, well, it did confuse me as well when I clicked onto it there.
I was like, what?
And the reason I was on this episode is because there's a pipe delimiter in the text.
And when we export, when we're generating the show notes, it uses...
Oh, go on.
Yeah, exactly.
It uses pipe delimiters, and I first thought it might be the single code, so now I was able
to find a different pipe delimiter that would not...
A different delimiter that the script can use and that SQ-Lite 3 can use.
So there we are.
We have a very own zero-day announcement.
Yeah, do you want to do that at the end, or do you want to do it now?
Okay.
The next one, I think, was also from the reserve queue that we just checked.
No, it wasn't.
It was Lee complying with the company's odds by clicking next a lot.
What did you think of this, guys?
Yeah, sounded actually vaguely familiar, horribly familiar at times, necessarily.
I don't tell you I do audits of the company, but yeah, this did sound rather too familiar.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, so I have worked for my fair share of government organizations, and I do work for
one at the moment.
And this is probably like a six-monthly cycle where we have to go through this process, yes.
And don't get me wrong, I think it's good to have it nice and simple, but you also need
to, when I'm doing them, I'm always in my mind, you know, that press release where a rogue
employee violated company policies and did something that they shouldn't have done.
So this is very much a, security is very much a insurance thing.
What are the risks and what can the business afford to lose?
And this is one of those tick boxes that needs to be done.
But for those of you interested in the career in IT, this is your future, ticking that sort
of boxes.
Well, yes, but it's like in the areas I've worked in, we've had a lot of safety stuff.
So I've worked in a lot of physics groups.
So we've had physics experiments.
So we've had a lot of different safety things to go through.
So I've worked for companies that have a lot to do with gas.
So we had a lot of gas safety things through.
So I suspect that it's really not IT specific.
I would say that it's any organization that is large enough that needs control of dangerous
things that are controlled by a couple of months.
And actually, I'll come back.
I'll disagree with myself there because I recently did the safety marshal training and work again.
And the guy was going, look, it's like this.
You take three steps forward and then you'll have forgotten two of the steps next year.
And then we redo the training and you'll take three steps forwards and then you'll have forgotten
two, but you're still two steps ahead.
So and when doing the training, it was a blank and then it all started coming back to me again.
And so that is the thing.
Keep hammering it into the squishy human brains and maybe it'll stick.
Yep.
It's another implementation of flashcards.
Just done really cool.
Yep.
It was good, though.
It's good that Lee is giving this, I mean, a lot of the stuff and that and, you know,
the fireside or where we sit down next to him as he does a programming task.
There's been a few of those this month as well or coming up next month.
I can't remember which.
But it does really give you a sense of what it is like to work in IT most of the time.
So we have a HBR exclusive, an interview that will save civilization or at least your kitchen drawer.
This one was hilarious.
Yeah.
Big Deborah interviews Troner Coaster, who is an avid fan, avid fan of implementing age control.
Yes, absolutely.
Antoine says, just do the age verification.
Just do the age verification.
We can write the law for the protection of people of what ages shall and shall not have access to.
Yes, online.
Offline.
We have no thoughts about that.
We have a proposal about it in the near future.
Thank you, Troner Coaster.
That's true.
And Candy Cane Art, our 07, says, good strategy.
I like how you use exaggeration and parody to make your points.
It makes your points both memorable and hit hard.
And Troner Coaster responds, hello, Antoine.
Please don't define me in what state you were going to submit that proposal.
I'll move to that state and run around with the banner, Antoine for president.
Hey, Kenny Caneater.
I don't get it.
Do you hate hackers?
Antoine says, our state, the invitation.
Hey, Troner Coaster.
I'm a member of the legislature in Atlantis, the underwater one.
Nevertheless, we will emerge soon.
The making of e-banners can begin.
Our language is alterian, and we don't understand, if not, the translation.
If you can read it, it is in real time by scanning of the legitimate eyes that should see the email messages.
Parliament members can't roll for the executive, though.
You, if you can read, may come to the palace.
If so, please just let us know so that I can wake both eyes of the editorial whales for making of the presidential propaganda.
And, Avanti, end of italic, Atlantian, Intimus, Translation, XXX, star, star, star, star.
Well, the lads are having some fun there.
However, it is a thing that's coming, whether we like it or not, unfortunately.
Well, it's been pushed a lot, whether we like it or not.
I'm not sure about licensing for age, but I'm beginning to think after that episode that a license for sarcasm would be a good idea.
Absolutely.
You introduced age verification down there in Oz, didn't you?
Yes.
So it sort of started with, I'm probably going to get a lot of the details wrong.
It sort of started with social media stuff, and now it's sort of moved to any adult content, I think.
And, like, I don't have kids, and because I'm well past the age where I'd have to verify most of these things, it hasn't really impacted me at all.
So, yeah, it's one of those things where, like, in one of my previous roles, I was at a company that was responsible for filtering social media for students and stuff.
And I can see that there are advantages to limiting the amount of abuse that students can get to this stuff.
But I also think that there are a lot of people that will find their communities in social media as a young kid.
And that is, they're stopped from doing that now, I believe, or severely limited.
So, you know, I can definitely see, I can definitely understand the push from both sides.
Yeah, yeah, I think, yeah, I think it's some of the analysis that I've seen on the, that it is basically failing to do what it was supposed to do.
And people are still getting to, it's stopping people with legitimate reasons for being online, being online, and people, the kids are still getting to the adult sites, despite all their efforts.
Yeah, it's, especially for a tech savvy kid, it's not exactly difficult.
But the one thing that I would actually like, from a geek's point of view, is that if this would, if you could get something that would actually stop them just kind of with a whole doom scrolling on social media,
even the kind of ones you would consider the techie, geeky kids, who in before times would have, you know, kind of been really whizzes on the computer.
Oh my word, they're, they're watching techie videos, geeky videos, but flippin' Ada, it's like, look, just open up your file, your file browser.
What's a file browser? And this is just across the board.
They know how to open up a flicking social media app and scroll through it.
But it's like, look, open up your file manager there.
What's that? Open up your browser.
What's that? We'll see that flicking logo that you go on the internet with.
One of the best suggestions that I've seen is the abolishment of the doom scrolling, that you need to actively click, you know, next page.
That it doesn't, that you go down the page and you have to actively press next.
But they, social media companies don't want to implement that.
But there's a, I think there's a EU regulation where they're going to force that on people.
That you have to have the option to, you know, click next.
That is not continuous.
And I think this is one of the really interesting things in the US law cases at the moment,
where for a long time, all of the social media providers have been able to just say,
we are just a publisher of somebody else's content.
It's not our content. It's not our fault.
But the law courts and what's happening now is some of the law cases, they're actually going after the algorithms.
So they're actually going directly after the publishers.
And it appears that some of those are going to be successful.
So I think we'll actually see some changes to the algorithms and put in some frictions where the frictions would be useful.
Yeah, it might have some impact on HPR in the full loss of time.
But we'll have to see.
Anyway, this part of political broadcast was brought to you on behalf of Trader Coaster Inc.
For all your Atlantis needs.
The following day, we had Unix Curio Part 4, archiving utilities and file formats, especially PAX.
And I would like to thank Vance for these episodes.
They are awesome.
So much detail.
They are really lovely to listen to.
And myself, I'm very much an old style Unix person.
So I still remember days of getting Solaris and having to compile GNU tar on it to be able to unpack some of the GNU tools
because the Solaris tools were problematic and stuff like that.
So I vaguely remember bits and pieces about this, but it's really nice to hear and understand these things.
Yeah, and it's good to actually get a refresher as well because a lot of these things that they're in there,
they're in the brain from the distant past, but you kind of have completely forgotten about them.
It was when you mentioned about PAX, actually.
I was like, whoa, that is going back.
I'd completely forgotten about that.
I nearly missed a flight because of this, just by the way.
HPR takes no responsibility if you miss your flight.
There's a joke about unpacking faster somewhere in there.
Oh, yeah, I see that.
The following day, we had Whiskeyjack Simple Podcasting Episode 2 Basic Filtering, which had six comments.
Antoine says Applying Filters, EXP with Declicking Compression.
Worthy content for the use of, for the fun of it.
Actually, as an audacity user, may not use the command line editing, but the underlying concepts are the same.
About de-essing, maybe it's better to apply it to the excerpts one needs or wants to improve.
With the first uses of click removal, I like it so much that I applied it to the entire recording.
The result was almost not audible clicking, but a lot of missing T's in some of the phonoms.
Best is that you don't click the tongue, but if not, then it's de-clickable.
For specific regions.
I don't remember using de-essing you're presenting, but the idea may be the same.
To check the results when applied.
And I shall await the entire series.
But one tool that I would like to listen to is compression.
Let's see whether it's going to be addressed in the shows or not.
Anyway, thanks for sharing.
And Whiskeyjack responded with,
I know absolutely nothing about audio before making my first two HPR episodes.
I learned a little about filtering in order to try to fix audio noise problems.
I noticed in these ones before making the eight-part series which followed.
Most of what I know now has come about from having to address the subject more systematically
while making this four-part series.
There is still a lot I don't know, including how to use audio compression properly.
I have never heard about de-essing until I started making this series.
I found out about it while researching filters.
I am currently making a follow-up episode which concentrates on filtering methods
and what sorts of noise situations each method may be useful in when making a podcast.
So far, it looks like there are pros and cons to different methods depending on situation
rather than there being a panacea which fixes all audio problems.
So far as clicks go, the recording method that I use of making small segments
and then stitching them together rather than speaking fluidly and continuously
seems to inherently need de-essing more because the clicks seem to be most common
when you start speaking from a resting state.
Given the situation, I have some ideas that I may try which address this specifically
rather than using de-essing.
I will add compression to the lists of experiments that I will do.
We'll have to see if I'll come up with any useful results.
I am currently about to go buy a new microphone to create a new category of recording set up
to collect test samples.
Thank you for your feedback.
I got the idea from this project from a comment by an HPR listener on a previous episode.
The third comment is by Vance.
Click removal.
Antoine, thanks for mentioning the click removal capability in Audacity.
While I already knew about its noise removal filter, I wasn't aware it also had click removal.
It might have helped me for HPR 4637, where some of the electromagnetic signal was picked
up by my microphone or recorder, Zoom H2.
The tapping sound was not present in the room where I record it.
While clip removal does seem to distort speech when applied to it,
though to my ears, it doesn't sound as weird as when noise removal is done with speech,
I could have applied the filter only to the pauses, where the tapping is most noticeable.
I will consider doing this in the event that I'm not able to eliminate the source of interference
in the future, which should be the best way to go.
And Whiskeyjack replied to that saying,
I had a look at HPR 4637 episode to see what the clicks were like.
I did experiments to find a technique that would remove these clicks.
The click removal effect in Audacity does nothing useful to deal with this.
The same is true of most number of other common filters that I tried.
The ones which did have an effect on the clicks introduced noticeable distortion in the voices,
which was more of a problem than the clicks.
What does work is the noise gate effect, which is a gate in FFmpeg.
You set a threshold in decibels, and any part of the signal which falls below that level is suppressed to zero.
In other words, quiet parts of the audio are made quieter.
I set the threshold to minus 20 dB, and all the clicks were completely removed without introducing distortion into the voice signal.
In a few spots, short interval initial syllables on a few sentences were also cut out,
but I didn't spend much time adjusting the parameters to get perfect.
I suspect that another solution would be to not apply the effect on those few parts of the audio where it happens.
Would it be all right with you if I used a short five-second clip of your podcast as a noise sample in my own upcoming audio filtering podcast?
This is not a noise problem that I can easily recreate,
and it would make an interesting problem to find a solution to address.
The more I look at things, the more I'm convinced that there is no one-size-fits-all solution for audio problems,
only collections of tools that we can keep in our toolboxes.
And Vance responds,
Thanks for your ideas.
Looking at the old Opus MP3 files on HVR, I see that they have some additional noise during pauses that makes the click removal filter in Audacity less effective.
On the original WAV file, I was able to remove most of the tapping noise by applying that filter to pauses with a threshold value of 50 and a max spike width of 30.
Trying the same values on pauses in the MP3 file was less effective, but did improve things a little bit.
I agree that applying the click filter to the sections where I'm speaking produces undesirable distortion.
It would be possible to manually highlight just the pauses and remove clicks from each one, but that would be tedious.
I considered blanking out those areas, but it would be just as tedious, and I thought it might sound weird for there to be total silence.
However, your suggestion of using FFmpeg's agate filter would eliminate the problem of having to manually highlight the pauses.
I see that it doesn't totally zero out the waveform, just reduces it, so it shouldn't sound weird.
I would be happy to send you WAV or FLAC files to play around with, and you are welcome to use as much of this episode as you like in your own work.
Email me at the address on my host page.
Initial testing seems to indicate that it was likely my mobile phone that caused the problem to begin with.
If that is the case, it's easy enough to get rid of the problem at its source by moving it away from the microphone.
It was in my shirt pocket, or just turning it off.
And Whiskeyjack responds with,
I already have the five-second audio sample that I need from your HPR4637 episode from the MP3 release,
but I thought it would be polite to ask you first before using it as we were already corresponding in these comments.
I have most of the script written for a new HPR episode and will begin recording the dialogue and making the audio samples used to illustrate each point.
I will describe in detail what I did to the sample from your podcast in that episode and show up before and after example.
This new episode is entirely inspired by comments from listeners and your comment describing a click problem provides a very interesting subject for discussion in it.
Thank you for your feedback on this.
Yeah, just adding a wee bit here, the Audacity, that's what I generally use, it doesn't have it by default,
but there are quite a few plugins you can get for DS and D-clickers.
And actually, I discovered that, I can't remember who was it who said it,
was it Whiskeyjack or was it Antorine, saying about a lot of these take out too much.
It's like some of the words, you know, like even words, it'll take this to DS it,
or, you know, something that has a click, especially like a P, a B or a T, will tend to be distorted out.
And it's like, oh, that doesn't sound good at all.
So, unfortunately, although it does tend to be a bit slower, I do just tend to go through podcasts
that I tend to edit and just take out the clicks myself manually.
It is laborious, but I've not actually found a solution that I've been happy with yet to automate it.
But I may try this one that they're talking about.
And if you, dear listener, would like to have friendly, helpful chats with other people in the community,
simply submit a show with some weird audio problem.
Exactly. I was going to say these comments, though, are getting to be a, like we're doing an episode here.
It would be great if Whiskeyjack and Vance could get together on this and talk about it.
And on janitor's note, if you're looking for the source of any of these files,
so it's always nice to ask permission, but Vance has already given permission
that the shows be released under Creative Commons CC by SA license.
So, therefore, you can use any audio on HPR under those terms of that license.
That's number one.
And if you want to get the source files of any of the episodes,
since we started posting source files for episodes, which is the last thousand or so episodes,
you will find them on the Internet Archive.
And right here on my desk, I have six hard drives currently processing
to try and get a lot of this stuff up onto the HPR content distribution network,
community content distribution network as well.
Okay, so the next day we had, oh, HPR Beardgarden 12, Baltic Porter.
Not these guys again. Come on now. We're not having a break from them.
Hananam says, uh, Stodebaker. Again, Stodebaker. Same owl as a sound in Kevi's O.
I remember that episode. It was actually O.
Okay, you read the comment then.
No, I'm standing back from this comment.
No, it's, uh, it was just because it was funny because I remember that
when I was actually prepping the episode.
It's, how do you say this beer?
I said, and then I found out. I was like, really?
Well, I've got a beer called O.
So, Stodebaker.
The same O as Kevi's O.
Right. Once had a Nordic Porter at 9.5% ABV,
which was an Eisbock, Eisbock,
made from the Stark beer, which is strong beer,
at 7.5% ABV, which is at Doppelbock,
or Double Bock,
a strong, often dark German lager,
which might be mentioned in the upcoming episodes about strong lager.
Spoilers here. It wasn't.
Okay.
The multi-Nordic Porter came in 0.5 litre bottles
and had a heavy coffee and espresso notes
and was really the perfect drink for a long, cold winter evening.
However, it's not available anymore,
but they now offer Grand Mariner and whisky cask-matured versions
in 0.33 litre bottles,
which I did not taste yet.
Well, Kananamdar is definitely somebody
who should be joining you guys on the beer garden.
Hey, more the merrier. We're more than happy.
The following day, we had the second Doctor part one.
We start looking at the second Doctor who,
which is Patrick Troughton, is that correct?
Troughton.
Troughton.
Fair enough.
Oh, yes.
This is on my list to watch all these episodes.
I may have to contact you, Kevi,
to see where you got some of the original episodes.
Yeah, no problem.
I'll help you with that.
Yeah, so I actually really enjoyed it.
I have to confess, going back, starting watching it,
all the way from the very start,
I really got to like William Hartnell.
And Ahuka kind of points out the best thing they did
was they didn't try and replace William Hartnell.
Yeah, yeah.
He didn't copy him.
Patrick Troughton made his own Doctor.
And I totally agree.
And that's probably the reason why we're still watching this today.
I did actually like the kind of things he points out.
when it started, who was a combination of historical and futuristic stories.
And sadly, the Highlanders, which appears in this first segment of the Patrick Troughton's era,
was kind of the last, pretty much, of the historical ones.
And this is where we're introduced to Jamie.
Yeah, so, and actually I quite liked what he said about the Underwater Menace.
It's one of those, it's actually that bad, it's good, the story.
I totally agree.
I have, I, I'm watching Deep Space Nine, which is the Star Trek thing at the minute.
And I must say, I liked it a lot more when it was live than I do now.
But the, the idea of, there's one character in there with the trill who keeps coming,
you know, dies and the symbiont gets moved from host to host.
It's a bit like, you know, this Doctor Who thing.
I wonder, did they steal that gratuitously?
I'm not sure about that, but I will say that I'm someone who's grown up on Doctor Who
from a very young age.
So I'm very thankful for these, for this series in particular.
And the following day, we had Android Volume Help,
where operator rants about certification on Android on the internet.
Anyone remember what this one was about?
I think this is the show that talks about Android,
the Android phone deciding that your volume is too loud for the safety of your ears
and automatically turning the volume down.
This was a good episode.
I have some show notes for this, but I haven't added them yet.
I'll add that to my to-do.
Kevin, can you read the comment?
Yes, so this was a comment from Candy Cane Arter 07.
Intended double entendre.
I like the double meaning in the title volume control
in both the literal use and control of the volume of your device.
Like how drives are called device volumes.
I also agree that the progressive looking down is annoying
and it intentionally creates a feedback loop of,
well, people don't understand the systems because it's locked down,
so we need to lock it down more so people don't break anything.
Valid point.
Actually, as a listener of audiobooks, this drives me up the wall.
I, because quite often I'll nip out and do a loop.
I've got my own kind of wee circuit I follow.
So, and I always listen to audiobooks during it, and very often,
I'm about a quarter of the way through,
and my volume just drops way down.
And it's like, why?
I can hardly hear anything.
Turn this back up.
And it says, of course, then you get the,
we feel that you've listened to this long enough,
and it may damage you to hear, so we're reducing the volume.
Ah!
Oh, dear, oh, dear, oh, dear.
I vaguely remember this being a thing a few years ago,
but I think I must have found the magic setting,
and even when I get the new Android phone,
I must copy that setting across,
because I do not recall having suffered from this for many years now.
If you ever dig that up, please.
In fact, no, no, record an episode about it,
because that would help so many people.
The following day,
we had another in the HBR New Year show,
and we have,
they must be going somewhere in Ohio,
because there's lots of talking about that.
Manhattan Project,
Black Sheep Squadron TV shows,
and then lots of stuff about
Windows, et cetera, et cetera,
PDP 11.
So, a brief info dump
on broadcast address routing
and IPv4 in general.
This is by John the Nice.
Yeah.
It was from the Reserve Q as well,
unfortunately,
but I would have popped this into the main show,
and it was a very, very good breakdown
of basically basic internet routing.
This one you should have in your back pocket
if you are doing any networking whatsoever.
Meanwhile,
what's that I hear up on the mountains in Switzerland?
Somebody complaining about IPv6?
Sorry,
haven't heard any shows lately about IPv6,
so we're going to stick with IPv4 forever.
I liked how we actually linked a bit
with the source of this show.
So, it was from Community News from January 25,
and that was the inspiration.
So, yes, good.
So, we've talked about plenty on this episode,
so please, you know,
you're getting plenty of source material here.
I mean, all this is gold, is it not?
Nerd sniping is what we do best here.
So, there was no comments on that,
largely probably because it's,
as you get to the end of the month,
there are less comments,
but you feel free to leave comments on episodes,
and I do appreciate the people
who do take the time to do that.
It's great.
It is the currency by which we pay our hosts,
and feel free to do that,
and listen.
At the end of every single RSS feed,
there's a button.
All you need to do is press it.
You're brought straight to the comments section.
The only word you need to type in is
P-U-V-L-I-C at the end of your comment,
and press submit.
It's much appreciated.
It makes our job a lot easier here
when talking about shows as well.
And if anyone understands
what the IPv8 draft that got put out
a few days after April the 1st,
that'd be a good show,
because I still can't tell
if it's a April Fool's Day joke
that was late by a few days,
or if it's a real thing.
And more episodes on IPv6
will be much appreciated as well,
just like the way Whiskeyjack does it.
Or Yeru.
Take individual things,
explain.
There have been a few episodes
explaining in general,
but now it's kind of go detail about,
I don't know,
something like address naming
as one episode.
Something like subnetting.
Is that a thing anymore?
Why not?
Watts replaces it.
THCP, is that a thing anymore?
Why not?
Watts replacing it.
Lots of little episodes.
Keep it small.
People target it on a particular thing.
Thank you.
Go do that, minions.
Meanwhile.
Absolutely.
Meanwhile,
the cheap yellow display part seven.
GUI trying a simple hello world.
This was Trey,
and the cheap yellow display is,
I've got loads of them.
And I liked,
did you hear,
there were no comments,
or there's one comment on this,
which somebody can read.
Who's going to read that?
Me.
Yes,
it was myself.
Great to hear your success.
I need my own,
I need to work on my own cheap yellow display.
So these cheap yellow displays are basically a small little screen with a,
with an ESP32 or,
you know,
a,
ESP32 behind,
which is like an Arduino,
but with Wi-Fi.
So you can code these things up and you went kind of back.
He has done a whole series on these and the UI one,
I felt was a bit hard to follow,
but now it makes sense what he did because he went back to basics and
started understanding each of the blocks of code and what they do.
And even if you're not interested in the cheap yellow display as such,
I think his way of debugging and reverse engineering stuff was a valuable
lesson to anybody,
to everybody basically.
Oh,
totally.
I thoroughly enjoyed it.
And the fact of the way he went right back.
And it was a good,
actually it's good for the young ones,
especially that,
especially when we've got an age of kind of copy paste,
you know,
it's like he admitted himself that he did,
he had done stuff in the first segment where it was practically him just
following it,
not actually understanding.
So he thought,
right,
let's go right the way back.
Let's see why things didn't work.
Let's more understand rather than just do.
And this is one of the big things I want to encourage anybody,
especially,
I don't mean to pick on the young here,
but just,
I think we're just in an age now where copy paste is just so common that
people do things and,
oh,
that worked for me.
Oh,
well,
I understand it.
Well,
actually,
no,
learn how,
why it worked and how,
what's the things are doing rather than just saying,
do this.
And it's getting more difficult now with chat GPT and the like,
where you just go,
it's so much easier.
Well,
actually what's happened is I think the whole search has gotten so bad.
And I think deliberately.
And the evidence from the Google trials shows that it's intentionally.
So the same thing that brought down Yahoo has brought down Google as like forcing people to be on the site longer because make the search results worse and people are staying on your site longer.
And now it's gotten so bad because they want to encourage people to go to chat GPT and whatever.
And I found myself that using these tools,
you get code that you don't understand.
And then you have instantaneously,
the moment you've written your code,
you have a code debt.
What's that word,
Clinton?
Technical debt.
It's not what they call it.
That's the one.
So all your code is technical debt.
Even,
you know,
when I look at the bash scripts that I've written for HPR in the years,
I can tell what phase I was in my,
in my coding journey because I didn't use functions.
And I,
I used uppercase things and my style changed and you have that technical debt,
like straight off the mark.
It's just,
and I've had to encourage myself to know,
use the man page first.
But on the other hand,
I do use touch GPT a little bit to,
why are you suggesting this?
Why is this?
What are the,
you know,
instead,
for example,
using a printf instead of echo,
why are you using that?
So it is good in a way,
but at the same time,
you shouldn't rely on it,
but it's very tempting.
It's hard to do that,
you know,
when it's late and you're focused on something else and you can just get
chat GPT to,
or somebody else called or whatever,
just to give you the code,
but you're paying for it later,
I guess.
This is a great episode.
I just want to highlight the notes are really good.
And I include the images of the graphical thing that he's working on.
It's a,
it's a really nice,
uh,
fully rounded product.
Yep.
Again,
thoroughly good,
uh,
thoroughly good episode.
And,
uh,
yeah.
Can't overstate how important it is to do good show notes.
Oh,
totally.
Now,
we also had another good episode the next day from another fine episode from Lee for site-specific browsers.
And actually I was quite,
uh,
interested to hear that he had actually learned from the same source I did,
which was the peppermint OS.
Um,
Oh my word.
My mind's just gone blank.
It's the,
the,
the application peppermint OS,
which was the first one,
but I've seen it really well implemented.
And first one I used extensively.
Uh,
yeah.
So we've got,
uh,
one comment there from candy cane.
Ardor.
Electron charged.
On one hand,
I don't really like web apps in general.
They always feel incredibly sluggish and give me a headache.
On the other hand,
it does increase Linux support.
I got used to them first.
I have to confess,
wasn't on the computer.
It was more,
well,
actively using them was when I,
I ran,
uh,
this just shows you how much of,
uh,
uh,
how much I dearly liked a challenge.
Clearly I was desperate to get away from Android.
I ran Firefox OS on the mobile,
uh,
for a year.
And of course it didn't have any apps.
The whole point was no,
no,
everything's just through a browser.
So you got to make your own kind of,
uh,
you stored them,
you gave them your own icon.
And they,
they looked,
they looked unran to be honest,
like,
uh,
right.
Like,
uh,
uh,
individual phone apps,
but they were just site specific browsers.
And I still use them to this day after good face.
Not Firefox or ways.
I just use,
use SS pieces.
Uh,
I think a lot of people are using them on,
um,
Android for,
or on,
uh,
you know,
other ROM version of Android for banking apps.
And that sort of thing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I was going to say a lot of the banking apps refuse to load up when unknown Googled versions of Android.
The following day we had cable management and PC speakers operator talking about cable management speakers and green screens.
And I have to say the show notes in this are absolutely excellent links images,
the full Monty.
And,
uh,
I really do appreciate the efforts that,
um,
operator took putting the show notes together for this episode.
Really,
really impressive.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Just looking at my table.
Sorry.
Just looking at my table.
I think I could,
probably make use of this episode a lot.
I don't think there's a geek in the world who couldn't just say exactly the same.
I mean,
is there anything nicer than looking at somebody's desk and going,
you know,
all the cables rooted properly,
or even the patch panel,
you know,
everything just cut to length.
And it is a thing of beauty.
I have to,
I have to say good tips here,
by the way,
for,
um,
for,
for keeping the mess together or minimize.
The mess at least.
Yep.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
So the next day we had,
uh,
Unix Curio number five,
faster pussy cat,
kill,
kill.
So I had no idea what he was talking about there.
So I had to look up the movie.
It looks like,
I wouldn't say it's a B movie.
It's probably closer to like D E F movie.
Well,
I'm glad somebody did.
Cause I kind of just thought,
I don't get the reference,
but I'm not a movie buff.
So I just thought it was just due to my lack of my knowledge,
but it's not even like a mainstream movie.
No,
it could be a cult movie at this stage.
Yeah.
Fair enough.
Fair enough.
So going on about the kill command,
uh,
and we had quite a few,
uh,
comments on this one.
So the first one was by,
uh,
Antoine and kill and kill all nothing to aggregate only to say loving learning about kill.
In my first times of Linux,
maybe a problem of mine.
I had to use it almost daily in the main purpose,
not knowing until now that the command can pause or only return the running status.
I found it magical because the control alterate of,
Windows was not always responsive in times of trouble,
but in Linux,
accessing a terminal to USS kill X or whatever program was always possible.
Thank you Vance for the show.
Comment number two by Candy Carnita.
Killer episode.
I didn't know about kill minus zero.
That's a cool posits way to check if a process is existing or not.
In most of my scripts,
I use the P commands instead of P grip,
P kill,
P wait.
Since usually getting a specific process by PID didn't matter.
And they all supported passing a PID file directly with minus F.
And Vance replies,
uh,
glad you enjoy it.
Hi Antoine.
I'm not sure if this still supported,
but under some window managers,
you can use and press control alt escape and the cursor,
and it'll turn into a large X with skull and crossbones.
You could then click on the window to kill the program that owned it.
Similarly control alt backspace would end the entire X session.
This is no longer common though.
And it might not even be possible under Wayland.
Uh,
I remember there was a time during installation whether,
when you were asked whether you wanted to enable that or not,
but I haven't seen it in a while.
Very useful though.
Uh,
candy can eater says very cool.
Thanks.
Sorry.
No,
Vance says back to candy can eater.
Uh,
very cool.
Thanks.
I used a bunch of kill all.
Uh,
I used kill all a bunch.
I was not aware of P grep,
P kill and P ID weight.
They look to have some neat capabilities.
Maybe you should consider doing an episode on there.
Oh,
you see what you're doing there,
Vance?
Oh,
very good.
Of course,
none of these are POSIX.
So you wouldn't want to use them in the scripts unless you knew the system.
It would be used on how those utilities point.
And candy cane R2R07 responds,
Vance,
the control alt escape key bind is actually calling a binary X kill.
And it's pretty easy to just set a key bind in your desktop environment to call it.
On my system,
it's bound to shift alt X since it is really easy to hit with only the left hand.
Also,
I figured those weren't POSIX,
but they were still useful for day to day.
Terminalizing and little personal scripts.
So on the 29th,
we had nuclear power technology follow-up.
And this was where Whiskeyjack basically answers quite a lot of the episodes that were,
or a lot of the questions that were asked.
One thing I was wanting to point out here,
some people,
you didn't want to go into the second question,
which was nuclear power plant safety compared to conventional plants,
because it's politically controversial and not a good topic for HBR.
Yes,
it is.
It's a good topic for HBR.
But he has said throughout the series,
to be fair to him,
he's going to keep politics completely out of the series.
Yeah.
So that's probably why.
Maybe not so much the fact that it's not good for HBR.
I think he just said from the start,
he was wanting to stay politically neutral.
Yeah.
But,
okay.
Even if it's something that I don't agree with,
I don't see why it can't be discussed.
Do you know what I mean?
Oh,
no,
I would agree.
We should be discussing things.
But I think he just said from the start,
because of the very polarizing nature of nuclear power,
he was going to keep out of politics.
So that's,
it's up to him at the end of the day.
I'm not going to say it in full.
It's up to him.
I get it.
But I don't want people having the feeling that you cannot discuss political
topics here on HBR.
Be aware.
Do it in a respectful manner,
supported by evidence,
independent,
blah,
blah,
scientific method,
et cetera,
et cetera.
But,
and be aware,
yes,
that,
you know,
there are pros and cons of everything and that you,
you can,
you can address politically sensitive topics here on HBR.
So long as you're sensitive to the other people's point of view and
ideally have the,
somebody with another point of view come on and help you out.
Like,
I don't want people thinking that you can't do that in HBR.
In fact,
the whole,
the whole point when HBR as a project was announced,
was first put out on Radio Freak America to have it,
it was entirely based on political.
It was supposed to be nothing but political discussions.
So there you go.
And I would just like to thank Whiskey Jack for this series and also for
answering my questions in this final,
final Q and A show.
Yeah,
it was a thoroughly good series.
Now,
guys,
we're,
sorry,
I have to say,
absolutely brilliant.
Thank you very much.
I was just wanting to say guys,
it's disappointing guys and gals out there.
We end the month with another one from the reserve queue.
Not that the show was disappointing,
just the fact that you're hearing that message when it starts.
But so Lee went on to do a very thorough,
what I did at work today.
I love these.
Part two.
I love these.
I love these.
I love these.
Cause you just sitting there and he's working his way through it.
And it's basically,
I love these,
except that in work,
if somebody was doing this,
I would be hitting them with a rubber chicken.
Just shut up.
Lee,
shut up.
But then I'm trying to concentrate on my own stuff.
I'm not in this,
but it is,
it's like that buddy programming concept,
except you're doing it with a hundred and 50,000 people who,
who subscribe to HBR.
Yeah,
no,
it was really good.
Like I said,
very thorough.
And yeah.
So if you want to go and hear what,
if you haven't listened to it,
I highly recommend going to hear and listen to this.
Leave yourself 45 odd minutes.
Cause it was quite a long show.
But yeah,
brilliant.
And he has such a nice,
calm internal monologue.
And it's like when I'm programming,
my internal monologue is no,
nothing like this at all.
You need to maybe do a show.
How you,
how you.
It'll just be beep,
beep,
beep,
beep.
And that was the last of the episodes for this month.
So what we do now at this point is we go back to the show notes for today's episode.
We haven't had a lot of star Wars references in the hero,
but there you go.
We did our best.
It's hard enough to do the show without adding comments to it.
So,
um,
HPR 4424,
how I use new,
um,
newsboard podcast and Reddit by Archer 72.
Um,
I posted the summary of findings and now I'll be very careful here because this is the first month that I'm using the,
uh,
comment checker.
And yes,
the summary of the findings is on HPR generator issues.
This is on the Git T repo,
uh,
three,
two,
one.
And,
um,
um,
um,
there is an issue with relation to,
uh,
how HPR shows in general are saved.
And this,
this program was about newsboard and it was saving HPR episodes with the PHP,
uh,
script name rather than the file name of the thing.
And it's a kind of difficult one to fix.
So,
but it was an interesting one.
And,
uh,
I even had some of the more technical guys and work,
uh,
talking to me about that.
And the link to my findings is in the show notes,
uh,
which is,
uh,
I think you just had a small drop out there.
Yeah.
So,
uh,
the solution is the content disposition header,
uh,
in use on the CCDN.
PHP did that work because time still supported.
It's just been added to curl.
I think we discussed this last month and I put in this comment,
uh,
just as a reminder.
Um,
and that essentially the reasons why we do it the way we do.
The only,
the only way we can do it,
um,
we can fix this properly is by having more,
uh,
taking the archive.org out of the community content distribution
that are continue to use this,
continue to support it,
but that we ourselves would host our own stuff.
Um,
unfortunately I have lost one of the,
um,
I,
I thought I had another hosting platform,
but,
uh,
turns out I don't,
um,
another one I need to bring up.
Uh,
so,
uh,
I will only have two currently that can support the volume of files that we have,
which is about four terabytes of files.
Um,
so if you've got a fiber network or if you've got a high speed network,
just coming into your house or data center or somewhere that you can have a four terabyte
or more disk drive attached to it and can serve out files,
that would be absolutely excellent.
The actual amount of file traffic isn't that high and it's nicely spread out over the day.
There's no major peaks.
So,
um,
it works out kind of cool.
So a bit of a rant there.
Don't know if that's helped.
Was it a rant or it was just a waffle?
No,
I wouldn't say it was a rant.
No,
not by your standards,
certainly.
Thanks.
So there was a one other comment on that episode,
which I'll read up by Ahmed L.
Mahmoudou.
And if I'm not pronouncing that right,
the only possible way that you can get me to pronounce it any better is if you come on and do an episode.
Now you commented so much on this that I think it's about time.
I think we're taking an executive decision.
Hands up everybody who thinks Ahmed should do a show.
Me,
me,
me.
Yeah.
So do a show please.
Thank you.
Anyway,
they're right.
The issue with news boat is not forgotten.
I'm working on a macro to inqueue download and rename them to the corrected file name.
For example,
hbr4580 colon thefirstdoctorpart4.org.
P.S.
How did you find hbr or get into tech as a subject that would definitely like to hear about it?
So this is a comment from Archer72 to Ahmed.
And we also had a comment on episode 4569 kiosk with guest mode on Linux by Klatu.
And the comment is by 0xf10e.
And the comment is by 0xf10e.
Great episode.
Great episode.
A nice example of using and adjusting free software in a public setting like, well, a library.
By the way, an example for public money, public code I tend to use is creating a platform for libraries to catalog and manage their books.
So what about copying a pre-configured browser profile into a library guest for some adjustments?
And clearly not overthinking.
What about having swap encrypted with a new throwaway key every time?
I'm sure there is an option for this.
At comment number one, temp is the only other place I could think of, too, where a user's files could end up and maybe run find slash temp slash user library guest exec rmrf.
Oh, I'm not going into this symbol.
So have a look at the comment before logging and at logout.
And cleanup of library guest even on a RAM disk setup just in case.
Reply to comment number three, SMB most probably can be mounted at login via PAM like an encrypted home directory in a bigger setup with a bunch of underpowered thin clients.
You could even mount RAM disks from the one box without soldered on RAM.
And replying to comment number four, ORC clone view looks great.
Any special permissions group memberships a user would need.
All right.
Oops, sorry.
Go ahead.
Go ahead.
We've got one new comment on episode 4585 responding to MPV fan club by Candy Cane Eater.
If you do want to hook into MPV with external bash scripts, you can set up a socket with dash dash input IPC server and pipe command line input or output through that.
Unfortunately, it doesn't really work as well with multiple MPV windows, but it is great if you only plan to have one window open at once.
Okay.
Something went wrong there with a link to that because the comments that he posted was, I've just sent myself a note, which is what I was doing there.
He said, perpetually update the script.
I set up a small GitHub repository so I don't have to keep writing comments here when it's changed.
And he has a link to git.sr.ht under his home directory link in the comment for this.
And I'll put that into the actual show notes for that episode.
And just a reminder, if you want your show notes edited like that, just email the admins and we'll add a link.
It's not that big a deal to do.
And we're structurally thinking about a way to allow people to do pull requests and that sort of thing.
If that is something people are interested in, get in touch.
Now, going back to the comment, we had a comment by adding voice over audio track text to speech on subtitle movies, which was by Windigo.
Great usability win.
He says, after my wife and I started enabling subtitles a couple of years back, I found it hard to watch media without them.
I love the concept you outlined here.
I know some people have difficulty reading subtitles, so being able to add audio option is a great tool in the toolbox.
Smiley face.
Thank you, Windigo.
You have no idea how much that cheered you up to here.
And we also had a comment on HPR 4600 with the First Doctor Part 5, Vahooka, where, oh, he actually comments himself.
And this is, maybe I will.
My intention was only to cover the classic series, stories of Doctor Who, but I suppose there's no reason I couldn't cover the renewed series as well.
I've certainly seen them all.
And this was in relation to a comment by Archer72 requesting that he do the later ones as well.
And you, I think.
Yes.
I just said, keep them coming, keep them coming.
Absolutely.
Now I realize I have a bug in the script, so I'm kind of a bit distracted.
On eroding freedom in open source software, which was an episode from March by Hopper MCS, Troller Coaster says Hopper did some time travel.
And, oh, my, OMFG.
Oh, yeah, the F, normally it's OMG.
Anyway, Hopper went time traveling to steal my idea and actually says the opposite to what he suggested when interviewing me on this topic.
I'm confident that he vibe coded a time traveling machine after interviewing just to steal my thunder.
Go have a look at episode 4616, where we sing the love song of the merits of age verification and how to further extend it and make the world a better place.
And here he's all against it.
Oh, my God, again, Troller Coaster, to avoid misunderstanding, OMFG means offer my finest greetings.
Oh, well, that's good to know.
That sounds a bit like a kind of kid's response to a teacher.
No, no, I mean something totally different.
Let's see.
Okay, then we have, sorry, I'm doing these because I just want to 100% confirm that what's going on.
We have Lee says quotation.
This is in relation to Lee Lux down as Waikuku.
Quotation here, Paul.
So Paul had asked to share the poem that Elizabeth read out.
And the link to the Internet Archive, do not confuse duty with what other people expect of.
And Paul J said, thanks, many thanks for the link to the passage.
So that's nice.
And the final one is Troller Coaster, my nerdy childhood from floppy disk to dial up dreams by Troller Coaster.
Troller Coaster said, damn you, my nerdy nostalgia.
Now you made me listen to a decade-old episode of HBR, what nostalgia over nostalgia.
So nostalgia squared.
For sure you can't be negative unless it's complex nostalgia.
And this was because Claudio M. had done his episode in 1541.
There you go.
So that's that for the comments.
So let's mosey on to the mail list, shall we?
Yep.
And you're not getting a break because you're kicking off the mailing list.
That's for sure.
And hi, all.
Oh, no, we covered this last month, which was basically changes to the way it's been recorded.
And we also covered it at the beginning of this episode.
Changing your approach to, let's see, did we cover everything?
So we're doing this as a one-to-one.
How you expect it to behave is on here.
That's more or less our not code of conduct thing.
HBR has gone from Wikipedia and recent policy changes.
Yeah, yeah, we covered all of those.
Right.
So do we want to start from the one Monday, April 27th show?
Yep, please.
Okay.
So this is by Vance Cochin-Derfer.
Oh, I've butchered that.
Vance.
Yeah, just Vance.
We'll hear it, Vance.
According to the calendar, there is not yet an episode scheduled for tomorrow,
and there are fewer than 12 hours until tomorrow arrives.
That was back when it was written, obviously.
I emailed the janitors 24 hours ago to check in, but I've not heard anything back.
Does anyone know if there is a problem?
I'm relatively new, but in the past three months or so,
it seems like open slots will be filled from the reserve queue at least a few days in advance.
So this situation appears unusual.
To which I replied, all is good.
And yes, I'm looking for somebody to put in the reference to the movie for that.
And I would be very impressed if you get it.
All is good.
All is good.
And he responded with, great to hear.
Sorry if I was overreacting.
To which I replied, no, definitely no need to worry.
Any rumours that I was out in the garden and completely forgotten was just fake news.
And I want to thank Vance for doing that reminder because I had a week's vacation
and I completely forgot to post the shows.
So I ran in and did them.
And of course, there was a whole mix-up and cutting post shows.
The thing about posting now from the archive, because we're doing it quite a bit,
is that you need to be very careful if you're putting in a reserve show,
for people putting in reserve shows.
Because a year can have passed between you putting them in and them coming out.
So I need to contact you, for example, if there's had a situation where there's an episode
with some copyrighted music in there.
And in this instance, the copyrighted music was, yeah, it was an honest, well,
it was an honest mistake in that it was classical music.
But you can't, even though the classical music that the orchestra is playing
is out of copyright, there is still copyright on the performance of them playing.
So it's still a copyrighted infringement.
So in that case, the host has to re-edit the show.
And I can't be waiting around for that because, obviously, we have to post the show.
So that chill comes out of the queue and has to be reposted back into the reserve queue.
So you're waiting another year.
So be very careful about your show notes.
Also, I see Lee has put in some part one, part two, has a series in the reserve queue.
So that's kind of dangerous because if anything happens to those episodes that they're wrong,
they're going to get put out of order.
So don't put in series into the shows that depend on each other into the reserve queue.
Do you know what I mean?
You can put in a series, but don't have them dependent on each other,
on the order of which they come in.
Clear or not?
Yep, totally clear.
Okay.
Did we have anything else?
No.
Community news?
Oh, yeah.
There was any topics that you want to talk about.
So then I have the time and days.
How did you like the new requesting for volunteers, Clinton?
Did that – what about that spurred you into action?
I think it was actually the request on the chat channel more than the email, I think.
Okay.
God, hey, I'll just join.
Why not?
And I think I had put my hand up before, but the time zone thing just didn't work out for the previous time zones as well, I think.
Okay.
So that works good.
How does Saturday morning suit you, Kevin, just in general?
Well, to be honest, although I complained about how early it was, I think in an ideal world, I would like maybe to shift it back an hour if possible.
Earlier, yeah.
Just because Saturday late morning does tend to be a bit of a busier day for me.
It wasn't today because I had Friday off, so I did everything due for Saturday morning on Friday morning.
Yeah, we'll see how it goes.
It's nice to have different people in there, and, you know, there might come a happy day where I don't need to be honest.
So that would be – as in next month.
Yes, but like you say, I'm more than happy to have extra people on here, especially for times like last month where neither of us could arrange a time where we're both free.
Exactly.
And next month I have on the normal recording day, so that entire weekend I'm away and won't be able to participate.
So either we do it earlier or somebody else does it instead.
So when you say next month, you mean the next episode?
Yep.
All right.
Well, that's actually maybe working quite well because I'm available definitely for the May one, but I am definitely not going to be available for the end of June, beginning of July one.
I am abroad at that time.
Super duper.
Oh, yeah.
And there were suggestions.
So there was a suggestion.
So as part of this community news thing, if you do have announcements or anything that you want to bring to the community's attention, this is, you know, not a bad place to do it, I reckon.
And we had a request from Trey that B-Sides Knoxville, USA, Tennessee is going to be on on the 22nd of May, 2026.
So on the 22nd of May, 2026, B-Sides Knoxville, Tennessee.
So great opportunity if there are HBR folks in the area.
Also, no harm to go there.
If you're going there in general, go there.
But also if you wanted to record some hallway tracks, that is what we do.
So that came in from Trey.
There was a request from Archer72 about something, which I cannot find now.
Oh, yeah.
Favorite Rust application would be a good topic since it has been accepted into the kernel as far as I know.
So there you go.
Those are your any other businesses.
Can I add one that I forgot to email?
Sure.
We've got a virtual podcrawl coming up on the 13th of June.
13th of June, folks.
13th of June, yep.
So that will be from 6 p.m. UK time, British summer time, until whenever.
And it'll be on the Telegram channel.
But, however, we can actually move to Jitsi if there's a lot of people kind of saying that they'd like to come but don't want to install Telegram.
That's totally fine.
We can use a Jitsi server as well.
Super duper.
Clinton, did you have anything for us?
No.
I feel that if I had anything interesting to do, I would not be at home on a Saturday evening.
Very good.
Very good.
Well, folks, that's it.
Tune in tomorrow for another exciting episode of Hacker Public Radio.
Yo.
Thank you.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye.
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