Episode: 1319
Title: HPR1319: Frank Bell Presents HPR to His LUG
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1319/hpr1319.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-17 23:29:59

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Hello, this is Frank Bell.
This is a recording of a presentation I gave to my love on our super duper summer extravaganza
about hacker public radio.
With my usual flair for preparation, I made some notes incorporating some of the input
that I received on the HPR mailing list, printed out the notes, and left them on my printer.
Interestingly, I had to wing it.
I left out some other things I wanted to be sure I said, but I hope you all find it interesting.
Any mistakes are mine alone.
This is not intended to be authoritative.
It's just hacker public radio from my perspective as a listener and sometime contributor.
One mistake I know I made was I attributed Poki's podcast about the care and feeding
of campfires to Ahuka.
I apologize to Poki, and if necessary, I will happily apologize to Ahuka.
And with that said, here it is.
I am an avid listener to podcast.
Is that waveform look good?
I can level and compress them out.
I started some years ago, I got a little cheap MP3 player, and started, I think the first
one I subscribed to regularly was the one by this fellow Ty Cochran, which is called
Geat News Central, twice a week, almost every week for 870 some shows.
He does an hour to an hour and 15 minute wrap up, tech news, he's a genuinely nice guy,
fun to listen to, you get the feeling he's someone you'd like to meet in person, and
that led me to look for more podcast.
I eventually stumbled on one called the Bad Apples, which was done by a fellow named Klaatu.
You see it's not Klaatu, depending on whether or not Klaatu has already been taken in that
particular forum, who had grown up an Apple user and had discovered Linux, hence the name
of his podcast, Bad Apples.
It is now renamed to the GNU World Order, GNU World Order, the website GNUWorldOrder.info
And from a mention in one of his podcast of Hacker Public Radio, I discovered HPR and started
listening because Klaatu, who I had learned pretty much knew what he was doing, had recommended it,
and I have reached the point now that I'm actually contributing.
Hacker Public Radio is a community pie-casting site.
Anyone can contribute.
They make it as easy as it could possibly be if you want to do a pie-cast.
The only criterion is that the subject you choose must be one that's of interest to hackers,
and they define the term hacker very broadly.
One of the senior members of HPR, a fellow who calls himself a hooker, I believe it was,
did one on how to build and maintain a campfire.
Of course, one reason he did it is because in summertime there's kind of a drug of shows,
so he was trying to fill a gap, but it was a fascinating listen, especially if in your time
you've ever been camping, my ex-wife had a Girl Scout troop, so I used to go camping with them,
and listening to him brought back lots of memories because I became the default campfire
person when I was there.
Could you go to Contributors, please, on the menu bar, Contrib- a host, host.
There, click on that, scroll down to get to Frank Bell.
I've done several myself over the past two years, it took me a while to work up to it,
click on the host ID.
A very popular topic for the first podcast is how did I get involved in Linux, because
most of these folks are open source folks.
The one subject I have not heard on an HPR podcast is anything to do with Windows.
How to use Windows, how to install Windows, you don't get that.
I've done them on WordPress, I did a four-part series on setting up and using WordPress,
two parts on Enlightenment, if you caught my presentation on Enlightenment, that presentation
I did here on the Enlightenment desktop came from preparation for that podcast.
Hacker Public Radio has a long history.
Anybody remember 2600?
There was a fellow who called himself Stank Dog, and his cohorts were called the Digital
Dog House, and they were involved in 2600 back in the 90s.
And that eventually led to a podcast called Twatek, today with a techie, and Twatek started
about 1999 or 2000.
And there was another sister, the Twatek website you can still find is linked in the Hacker
Public to about page.
And there was another digital site that has disappeared, I could not find them on the
net, but they merged forces about eight or nine years ago and became Hacker Public Radio.
It's very much a community oriented site.
There is an admin mailing list, but anyone can join.
There is a regular user mailing list, HPR, I think is HPR at hackerpublicradio.org.
All this is on the website that anyone can join.
Sometimes they're like the twig mailing list, they may be quiet for a couple of weeks,
and then something comes up, and they're really, really busy for about three days.
Recently, the rules for posting shows and what sequence they should be posted changed,
and there was two weeks of very intense discussion before consensus was reached.
Right now, they're on a first come for a serve basis.
Everyone seemed to agree that that was fairer than trying to have, okay, if you're new,
you get bumped in right in place, and if you have it done one longer than anybody else,
then you get second priority, and then so, and it got really complicated and hard to manage.
About the time I first started listening to Hacker Public Radio, it had fallen on to
lean times.
Maybe sometimes there were only three shows a week, the goal is five.
Along came a fellow named Ken Fallon, an Irishman who lives in Belgium, and put a tremendous
amount of effort into bringing it to life again.
He came up with some strategies to fill empty slots by getting permission to syndicate
other podcasts.
So if any of you have ever listened to the Sunday Morning Linux review, SMLR, the first
time I heard of them was when Ken posted one of their podcasts as the syndicated show.
And as of the end of last year, we were healthy enough with enough submissions, and I say
we, because I feel like I'm a part of it, even though I only done seven or eight podcasts
over about two years, that we stop syndicating shows, though we kind of reserve the right
to do that if we get desperate again.
Ben Robb, yeah, binary revolution, that's the one I couldn't start, could not remember
the name of, thanks Mark.
So it's also on the HPR about page.
Many of the people who submit these use audacity, the open source recording and editing program,
but you don't have to.
I know that a lot of times you'll hear interviews that are done at various Linux fest and conventions,
and they are commonly recorded on somebody's telephone or MP3 player, and then submitted.
Some submissions are heavily edited, some like the second one I did are too heavily
edited, as people get their feet wet on how to do a little editing.
Some aren't edited at all, they're just posted up there.
The shows are not moderated.
The site runs on the goodwill of the people who make submissions.
There's even a telephone number that you can call from the United States or from Great
Britain and press the right key, and you can record directly to the HPR voicemail and the
HPR admins will add the intro, add the outro, and post it for you.
Generally, and even though the preference right now is that you submit in FLAQ format,
because it is lossless, and Ken's written some scripts that take the FLAQ and converted
to Og, MP3, and Speaks, SPX, the Speaks codec is an 8-bit codec specifically designed
to be lightweight for use with the spoken word.
You sure wouldn't want to hear music on it, but for someone with the spoken word who's
downloading to a digital device and worrying about data caps and things like that, it can
be very useful.
Sometimes when people want to do interviews over a great distance, they'll use mumble.
There's a podcast called, it used to be called Linux Basics.
It's kind of in hiatus.
The fellow who's starting to has gone on to do other podcasting things recently purchased
a podcast network called PodNuts, because the guy who founded it got tired of dealing
with it.
The Linux Basics mumble server makes their server available to HPR users.
You can connect up there and then record the conversation over mumble and have it all
in one space.
I really enjoy listening to the podcast.
There are very few hacker public radio podcasts that I don't not listen to.
The ones generally I don't get all the way through are something like Matt might do.
If he did a podcast on coding, I'm not a coder.
And when you start getting into talking about how you write this and how you write that
in this language versus the other language, I just sort of, okay, yeah, I know that's
important.
But nobody can know everything and that's one of those things.
I just don't know and I can't follow the conversation.
The variety is wonderful.
I mentioned one on campfires.
I've listened to podcast on how to do, how to stream your radio station over the internet
and what open source software is available for that.
And one of them in particular, the guy actually set up his radio software, the way radio stations
are set up, they automatically came in every 15 minutes and played the theme song.
You don't think there are engineers there, those radio stations anymore, do you?
No, it's a box.
Some of them don't even have people.
You may remember several years ago, there was a disaster in some time in the Dakotas and
the police chief tried to call the local radio station to get the word out.
And there was nobody there.
It was being run off a server in Chicago.
Not even the phone call didn't even get forwarded anywhere.
I picked this topic when Mark was saying, please help.
We need a presentation and I just finished recording a podcast and said, okay, maybe I'll
talk about HPR.
And he said, go for it, I'm desperate.
So I put a message out on the HPR mailing list and said, you all have anything I should
mention.
Somebody suggested doing audacity demo and the consensus response was, no, that's
a whole nother topic.
If you want, by the way, if you want to learn how to record with audacity, go to YouTube,
type in audacity, there are dozens of tutorials.
Some of them very good, many of them, not so much, many of them smell like surgeons,
old dead surgeons.
That's when I have it heard.
When Mark, I did an interview with some of you may recall, we tried to get you to listen
to it with Mark and we did what's called a double-ender.
We saw opposite each other at the table.
Each one of us recorded our own end of the conversation, then I edited them together.
That's where I ended up going out and getting this microphone because this is directional
and the one I had wasn't.
And you'd be surprised at all the ambient noise there is in Mark's backyard that we didn't
even notice when we were sitting there, but boy, the microphone picked it up.
You got audacity open or just looking at a picture.
Okay, well, yeah, that's how you learn.
HPR is very much community oriented and this shows I can tell you are not filtered.
They do go on iTunes and they are tagged by default as explicit.
Even though they usually aren't, the idea is better safe than sorry, especially with
those prudes that run Apple.
There's ample guidance on the website.
The shows are all released under the Creative Commons license, share and share alike.
You can look that up.
There's a link here if you want to read it, but what I want to do is get down to this
part.
There's a telephone number if you want to call in.
There's a fellow from Kansas City, a hardware hacker who calls himself Mr. Gadgets.
His first shows were all telephone in.
How he could be on the telephone on his commute and be as coherent and consistent as he
was with minimal arms, eyes and butts, screeches, crashes of twisting steel and other stuff
that he'd expect on the highway, extremely well organized.
I could not extend the talk the way he could.
Any of you hardware hackers here look for Mr. Gadgets.
You might enjoy listening to some of his shows.
You can search the, as you saw when I asked Mark to click on hosts, all the contributors
are listed.
You can click on the contributors numerical ID and see their list of shows.
So if you want to, you hardware hackers, you want to see what Mr. Gadgets's podcast
about, that's how you would get there.
I'll show you in a sudden.
Then there's instructions on how to record with your portable media.
It's not detailed instructions, but enough to get you going.
How to use audacity and some criterion about, and as you read the page in detail, you
know, once you record, once it's recorded, what do you do with it, you send an email to
adman at hackerpublicradio.org, say I've got a show I want to contribute, what's the
password for the FTP site, and Ken sends you this password, which is about, because we
had some security problems, the password is now about this long, and stretches down
the hall.
I think it was 32 bits when I piped it and put it in key pass x.
Most of the, the podcaster invariably, in English, podcasters from all over the world,
if any of you have noticed my truck, you might have seen the HPR sticker I've got on the
rear window.
Now I avoided IRC, I'm not an IRC person, so I don't have, you know, a cute name like
code cruncher or a stank dog or something like that.
But these are just some of the various people, yeah, you'll find some Slackware users there.
Some of these guys are pretty hardcore.
So I've got really two goals to hopefully get some of you interested in maybe listing
to HPR and listening to a few podcasts, and if any of you have some knowledge or information
you want to share, maybe even make a podcast, we contributors are welcome, nobody ever gets
criticized for poor audio quality or anything like that, you know, it's an open door.
And it's one of the nicest communities I've found on the internet, you know, one really
does feel like a member of the community, even when somebody, and Peter 64 lives in Australia,
as you can see, and works on a golf course to listen.
I actually listen on an iRiver E150 MP3 player, which I, I didn't realize it, but they're
considered high end, they support AUG as well as all the other more common ones, and I do
that because of battery life.
If I listen to a podcast on my telephone, it sucks the life out of my phone.
And the MP3 player, it's about the thickness of four credit cards and about the size of
a credit card, goes right in my pocket, and the battery's good for 12 to 14 hours, plus
being specifically designed, plus if my phone rings, it doesn't override my podcast.
Sometimes it's inconvenient if the phone rings, because I have to take the thing I didn't
hit the pause button, but I'd much rather do that than listen to it on the phone.
If I'm listening to one on the computer, I pretty much reach the point that I use VLC
as my default choice for a media player, because if it doesn't play on VLC, it's not going
to play on Linux.
Any other questions?
Hi.
Anybody ready to take a nap?
I don't do Apple.
You're writing the community now that if you do iPhone, I junk, you can use get VLC again.
OK, I've shot my bolt then.
If you want to email me, you can email me at Frank at pinesuform.net.
Pinesu Farm is all one word.
No spaces, no punctuation.
And my website is www.pinesuform.net.
Thank you very much.
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