Episode: 3196
Title: HPR3196: HPR Community News for October 2020
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3196/hpr3196.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 18:40:54

---

This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3196 for Monday 2 November 2020. Today's show is entitled
HPR Community News for October 2020
and is part of the series HPR Community News. It is the 170th show of HPR volunteers
and is about 90 minutes long
and carries an explicit flag. The summary is
Dave and Ken review the month's happenings
and try various pronunciations of Cedric De Bruy's name.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by archive.org.
Support universal access to all knowledge
by heading over to archive.org forward slash donate.
Support universal access to all knowledge
by heading over to archive.org
Support universal access to all knowledge
by heading over to archive.org
Support universal access to all knowledge
by heading over to archive.org
Support universal access to all knowledge
by heading over to archive.org
Support universal access to all knowledge
by heading over to archive.org
Support universal access to all knowledge
by heading over to archive.org
Support universal access to all knowledge
by heading over to archive.org
Support universal access to all knowledge
Hi everybody, my name is Ken Fallon
and you're listening to another episode of hacker public radio.
This time it is the community news for October 2020.
Joining me this evening is...
Hi everybody!
And at least I actually did that in a comedic voice.
Maybe I did it anyway and didn't know.
This is Dave Marais.
So for those who don't know,
HPR is a
longest running community podcast network
where the shows
to the podcast are contributed by listeners
of the podcast.
And that's becoming very important point, Dave,
because we're short of shows again.
And
the people who have stepped up to the place
are the regular old
regulars that
are there from time to time
and will step into the breach
and fix this issue.
However, that kind of
is not the point of HPR.
The point of HPR is if everybody contributes
to one show a year, we wouldn't have a problem.
It's a very difficult thing to do.
We're not the only people who suffer from this.
Anybody who
anytime you've ever heard a podcaster
or YouTuber going,
if only everybody donated one dollar
then I'd be a millionaire.
Well that's kind of the issue we have.
But what we do need
is people to contribute to the network.
The podcast that you download
and you just consume
and
somebody else is paying for it
and this corporate sponsorship
or people are collecting money
on Patreon or whatever.
That is not how you can contribute
to this show, how you can contribute
is by pressing record
and sending in a show.
All the rest of that is taking care
of for you by other people.
So if you have not contributed to the show
your name is
and search your name
I am living in
where you live
how you tell us a little bit
how you got into tech
and Dave and I the following month
will go and give you a list of shows
that you can record
for your next episode.
That's how it works to have pretty much
true enough true enough.
So you can introduce the new host
for this month which were
already stepped up.
Okay, your homework for next month
if you have not contributed to HPR
I want to see your name there.
I'm looking at you back in the class
pretending
that I don't see it.
Yes, homework next month.
Yes, so much a show.
Thank you. Have a nice day.
Okay, what we do here
in the community news is
this is an open show
to anybody who has listened
to it.
Yeah, it just gives
an opportunity to
make sure that everybody gets some
feedback on the shows
that they've submitted
and also extending the analogy
of the the teacher marking your homework
that doesn't apply here.
This is just fellow
contributors to the network
shooting the breeze and having the chat
about what we found interesting
in your shows.
You're not going to be marking anything
down.
That's reserved only for me, David.
Could do better.
Anyway, the first show
was season one, episode 14
the big programming language panel
which was from the Linux
Alcatross guys.
This was a panel focusing
mainly on rust
and now it's going to take over the world
I thought.
That was Linux in laws, by the way.
You do fell into
the trap.
Yeah.
Thank you.
This was interesting, I thought.
I did quite enjoy the chat
about the different languages
and there were a few.
Plus and Python and stuff
were being talked about mainly.
But rust was certainly pretty high
on the on the list.
Yeah, I'm almost tempted to
if I can find the time
to the list.
Yeah, yeah.
It's funny how you get less time
the more time you have.
Nothing to do with me.
I can assure you.
Who Dave?
There's a lot of project that
requires to do this.
I seem to be also
creating myself projects
right left and centre.
Every project sort of
works.
That's life, isn't it?
Yes.
I enjoyed the good idea to do this
and they had some interesting guests
on there to talk about stuff.
Cool.
The audio was much improved, I felt.
Yes, I could actually hear
Martin this time.
Chris was on his best behaviour
in the sense of
not being quite so
punctious as he can be.
So the following day we had
Ahuka who's learning Spanish
and give us a little tip
on how to use alternative
keyboard maps.
Which is
quite interesting and something
that I do.
Well, I use the external
additional
umlouts and
accents and stuff like that.
Yeah, I um
I found this really, really useful.
But I didn't want to go the route
that ahuka went
particularly.
I quite like the
the way that was mentioned in the
in the comment.
Shall I read the comment?
Yeah, please do.
Um, Gumnos says
using the x-compose key.
When typing in Spanish or French
or often I've long used the
script and this is
dot x init or dot
x session.
For me as a Fluxbox user
is an equipment. Fluxbox
slash startup.
I have the following line and he
shows the line
set xkb map option,
compose caps, colon caps.
Which turns my caps key,
which I never otherwise use,
into a compose key.
There are other ways to use
this type.
And he's represented that you
press, um, compose
followed by an e,
followed by a, um,
an apostrophe to get an e
with a accent.
Is that a grove accent?
Anyway, with an accent.
I can't remember grove in the
queue. Um, and there's a few
others. He lists here, which,
which are really cool.
And um, there are hundreds of
things that I can guess
them if I don't know them cold.
Should work out of the box on
Linux and BSD running x and
work with pretty much every
x application.
And um, to my comment on, on the
comment was that I had been doing
this for years and years and years
using old tricks and
HP UX and stuff.
And then I seemed to completely
forgotten that and not used it
again on Linux.
And so, uh, I'd put a thing on top
of that thing and, uh, oh look,
I've just taken it off and I can see it again.
So I've been having great time
relearning all these things.
So thank you very much for that.
Okay, and I'll read the, uh,
other comment for that show.
Which was just sent in by me,
which is the link to the cheat sheet,
which I gave you, which I intended to add
to the comment.
Oh, right, right.
Goodness me, how come it's not
showing on the site here?
Can I understand it?
Yes, I'll deal with that later.
And yeah, I did,
but you told me the cheat sheet,
yeah, it was, wasn't it?
Yes, you just said that.
Um, yeah, that's really quite useful.
But they are really cleverly constructed.
So if you want, um,
a degree sign, which is something
I so often do,
um, then it's composed,
oh, oh,
am I right? Yeah, it is.
And, um, you know, there's,
there's a lot of really obvious ones.
I remember from the old days that
I didn't have a keyboard with a,
with a British pound sign on it.
So you had to do compose
L hyphen, which you can imagine,
a pound sign being an L with a line
through it.
And, uh, you've got, uh, got the thing.
I don't know if that's in your cheat sheet,
whether that's old, old school stuff.
Uh, one I use the last is the Euro symbol,
um, composed E equal marks.
Makes sense, isn't it?
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
They're really cleverly set out, I think.
And then, uh, I do, for the kids' names,
like Shenade has got any father in it.
So I do, uh, compose E and, uh,
single, single quote.
And if you wanted to do a double quote,
you do a, uh, compose a column.
And that works with all the, uh,
column letters.
Yeah. Oh, and it gives micro,
a lot for all the microservices and work,
which is compose backslash U.
And they use the single arrow sign quite a lot
as a delimiter,
which is compose dash greater than.
Nice. I've never used that one.
That's, that's great.
Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
I, um, I find myself.
You take some ASCII text,
and you want to use the limiter,
and then you use a,
a unique character like this,
and you know, it's not going to be in the file.
So that's really useful. Yep.
No, that, that is really good.
And things like, um,
I find myself writing messages on telegram,
where I want to put, like,
a half or a three-quarter symbol,
and, uh, compose three,
four gets you three quarters,
which is, again,
very, very obvious rather nice.
And Tm,
mm-hmm.
Not never done that.
Copyrights as there as well.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
So the next day,
back to the plan,
HPR Community News 2020,
we had one comment,
and that was by Mike Ray
about YAML spacing and Ansible Lint.
Interesting, although I can't see,
I didn't find the indentation in YAML
as annoying or as difficult as Python.
And,
pip3 install Ansible Lint
will give you a good
Linter for Ansible YAML.
I have a
repository on GitHub,
which is github.com-chromarty
for such Ansible Dash,
Raspberry Dash Pi,
with loads of rules,
playbooks, most of it,
with the ALY-Bent norm.
I think I might do a show about that.
I love writing Ansible,
and I'm good at it,
although I see some myself,
ever the modest.
I might, I'm here.
He speaks rules, okay.
Yes. Yes. Yes.
Yes, good to hear you.
Oddly enough, I actually have downloaded that,
Raspberry Pi repository,
not knowing that it was from our good friend, Mike Ray.
That's cool.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
It's something I really want to get into
it. Yeah.
It's, it's, yeah.
The Lint,
there wasn't a Lint when I first started using
a YAML, and I ended up writing one in Perl.
I think I might have said this before.
Surprise. So, yeah.
It's, it's pretty easy
because the parser will tell you
what's wrong with it, so you can give a report.
But, like I said last time,
the, with VIM
and the
various syntax checkers
which have developed enormously
in the past few years.
There's an asynchronous thing
running behind VIM
which is watching everything you type
if you, if you enable it
and it's saying, no, no, no, no.
You, you forgot to put an indent there
or you, that's the start of a YAML array
and did you really mean that
and so on and so forth.
It's, it's excellent. That's very good.
Find YAML a problem.
Oh, it used to be, it used to be an issue.
Although, while some people
might find that helpful, other people might find that annoying.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
It's, it's like having a
I don't know, a parrot on your shoulder.
Who's a good boy then?
Okay, okay.
OpenVPN following day.
Norrists.
Free tier of VPS for securing phone traffic.
This was an interesting little one I thought
for those of you on the road.
Those of you who remember what it was like
to be on the road.
How you can use a low cost VPS
as an open VPN
to run them on free tier cloud providers
or you know, cheap cloud providers
in order to get access
externally to your internal network.
Couldn't recommend this highly enough.
Very, very good show
if you're into it.
Yeah, it's, although I was impressed.
Sorry, Carol.
No, I just, all I said was
I was impressed with this one.
Yeah, I liked them.
I liked this quite a lot actually.
They, they, although I remember somebody
was promised me a show
about a VPN.
Can you remember the person
at Boston?
Somebody who had
worked in a mine.
Yeah, yeah.
Who could that have been?
Can't imagine.
No, I can't imagine.
Yeah.
Yeah, somebody who had a
pine 64 phone.
Exactly.
Almost all about wire guard.
Anybody?
Spring to mind it all.
The haze is clearing.
So, the haze is clearing.
So, Rob.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Cornwalls, Jones to mind.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Just that part of the world.
You know, crunching up granite.
That would be a tip.
Better get that show in as quickly as possible.
Before Brexit or we may have to
import, put a tariff on it.
So sooner or later.
Anyway.
Where are we? Yes.
Where are we?
Back off there.
Finishing the recombinant bicycle.
Channeling Stephen Hawking's.
Brian and I are just going to finish him
riding the bicycle.
I had no idea what he was on about
until I did this spam check through.
And this was the culmination of the
episode which no doubt some people
except for my gray will find annoying.
Because it's e-speak.
But I personally don't find e-speak annoying.
Because I use it every day.
And it was fine actually.
I quite.
It's it's a good way of dealing
with the situation we don't have the chance to
to read your own your own notes.
It's it's good.
Yeah, I've seen perfectly acceptable to me.
Yeah.
And the personnel of the pictures.
Yeah.
It's it's a it's a wonderful project.
It's not a thing I would ever want to do
myself, I feel.
But it's extremely impressive
what can be done.
And it's not so if you have a lot of the way of tools
like a black and decker workmate
and a few pipe vendors
and stuff that you can borrow.
You can even rent them out.
So quite impressive.
I must say not something that I would build myself
but there you go.
Yeah, yeah. This is very very cool.
It brazed a lot of the pipes
himself, which is a skill
as well with developing
if you're if you're into doing
that type of thing.
Yeah. Yeah. Excellent.
Well done. Well done.
Cool. And the following day
make MKV to back up media
and an open question.
Two ways to install and make MKV DVD
and blew rear backup programs
on Fedora 32.
And to answer
72th question, basically
he takes DVDs and CDs
and extract them.
And the question at the end was
basically is he nuts for doing something like this?
I don't know.
So personally it seems like a
reasonable sense.
So personally is that I am now recording
a follow up show for this
hashtag for myself.
She'll
because I have
done this exact same thing
and will stand by my decision
to do this because
with streaming services you
you never know. It's there one day
and I'll scan the next
these are the views of myself
not necessarily those of my employer.
And so
you have something physical
that you physically own yourself.
And you don't have to
faff around with
that doesn't have the right sub titles
or the right whatever you can download it.
So it's there on your network
and you have access to it.
So it's an absolute
excellent thing.
So there's some tools
that would make his life
a lot easier than I've used for
doing the DVD portion
and the CD portion
I
dragged out my usual
K3B and then found
that it uses
free
CD free CD
db.org which is now
going to fund the project
and no longer looks
up
CDs for me.
So that's a ripping tool that
has ceased to be functional for me
at least. So yeah
that's one of these. That's why the show
would have been posted but
didn't get posted.
Turns into a saga.
I've used that a lot not for many, many years
mind you but yeah
that was such a convenient thing to be able to do.
There was a while
where didn't buy CDs anymore because
yeah yeah they're online but now
it's a case where I'm listening to a lot of
independent bands and it's
you know you would have said oh well
I'll go to a concert when they're
on but now in Covid times the only way
of showing the appreciation to these bands is
to buy the CD it's
you know treated as a
physical donation to them
and you know
that's that's kind of the way I'm
looking at it now.
Yeah no fair enough
do you want to read that comment there?
Yes I will do that Jane Dock
who we haven't heard from for a long time
remember the name as
a host who sent in some really interesting shows
in the past using make
mkv make mkv sorry
thanks for your show
I really enjoy make mkv
unfortunately I've had better luck
with it on my windows partition
there are more restrictions
ripping DVDs when I use my
Ubuntu laptop since my home has
limited broadband I like to buy
DVDs and rip them on my computer
to watch offline I use handbrake
to compress the video files
so you're not the only one who uses
make mkv.
And live on the show
two episodes have been submitted
by your own.
You have better access to the information
than I do I just saw them come in
not who had sent them
oh you have the e-mails don't you
and then you look at the e-mails
because there's no e-mail
that comes to be for the show
it's not
you're not on the admin
not his pure list
don't get no
they go to that
no never send them
okay
something strange
something's throwing them away
there's this
yeah there are mail issues all
over the place
and some of them might be
Thunderbird but I don't know
I have to do something in
I have to do something in
Gmail to get them to forward
or something
yeah strange because you're on there
you're definitely on that list
I can't loads of other messages
mainly in this but nothing about that
you don't get but it's
confirmation to request to reserve a show
and you don't get thank you for all
I get those yeah yeah
well that's the one I get
but I get the only get them for my shows
no I don't get them to
admin I get them to me
so yeah there's a host
no and when anyone submits a show
there's a there's an e-mail sent
to admin list
and you should get it
for whatever
do okay
north to south
dig take a note
do you need to fix this
yeah yeah see I never knew
it happened so I never
knew that was missing it
so that's quite interesting
it's possible that
the e-mail address I use
which is a free
service running on an Italian
hacker
is again so mark
down as being
a bit iffy from time to time
no idea why
but it does happen
so it's possible that
the sender is refusing to send it
to that but I get other
messages to it I don't know
I'm not speculating
okay well
the following day
part of the gimp series
miscellaneous tools
by ahuka
these few remaining tools
are important and they don't
fit neatly into any category
so the pat tool
zoom
measurement and stuff
like that
there are two comments
who did the last one?
me or you?
so I did
I did the last one
okay archer 72 says
some projects too but sometimes
it's a bit tricky to find a way
to regularly donate
for example I started using
Fedora so does my wife
but could not even find
a one time donate button
and Kevin replies
to nating to Fedora
the Fedora wiki page
and he says it
explains that they're not looking
for money which I suspect
is because they have strong corporate support
I would guess the bun tool is much the same
but there is more than one way
to support a project you like
how about doing some shows on Fedora?
why you like it?
how to configure it and so on
oh yes Kevin you're the man
yes if I had a hand free
I'd applaud there you go
yes
and the next day
straight from Germany
real currency cloud offering
JWP
and another
option to remotely access
home servers and stuff
without having to fiddle with holes
in your router which I consider
to be a very dangerous thing having
applications call out but any
you and this one was
the real currency cloud offering
so no comments on that show
that was good but my
note is said
it's really nice to hear JWP
and with his great audio as well
his audio sounded really good
so he's obviously not
on his phone or whatever he is
or he's got a new phone
yes yeah
why Dave
you do this deliberately
following show was from Scotland
and it's probably
it has the name
well it was
told like a pirate day so we had to make some
sounds to uh pirate so
so I came up with Yoho
and a bottle of Coley
calciferol which is another name for
vitamin D which we talked about
yes this is nice show
I uh
didn't realize the differences
in the naming
it was nice to have that cleared up
oh the Covid-19 and the
the name of the virus so
it's got two other stuff
yeah i know it's quite confusing
in fact the virologist say
why have we got a disease
and a virus with different names i mean
we don't do that also the polio
virus is called polio and stuff
like that you know so
it's somebody somebody slipped up
in the hierarchy but
you know it's not to
not the most difficult thing in the world
yeah probably that
they didn't think it was all the big deal
when it started off
yeah i think it's got something
to do with it
nothing controversial said in that
episode of afraid Dave
so we're just going to have to
we sent everybody to sleep
yeah actually i love this show
really those relaxing
yeah i
that's what i said to Andrew
the concept of people just
chattering about stuff
which is you know
vaguely relevant overly to the
to the audience can be
listening to somebody
talking to all the judges
yeah you're not necessarily
participating but you just let
it flow over you
it's interesting yeah
so yeah
okay next one was
don't trust the files
from saiderick
through you
said this time deliberately
to make sure he's on the
shoulder next time
he was going to join us
he did yeah i don't know
well you know how it is
sadly afternoon can be difficult
so yeah it'd be nice to have
long i'd really want to know
how he pronounces his name
i haven't managed to solve that
by listening to
I think through he is
probably the way
because that's the way i've heard it on
the sites where you look up how you
pronounce names
you go to sites
that's how you know how to pronounce people's names
you actually do research
i did i um yeah
well absolutely absolutely
i actually have
whenever a host submits their show
i take example of how to pronounce the name
and put it on the
on the upload form
or on the on the website
but it's on the list of things
to do that you can
click it and then be able to
introduce themselves
yeah yeah that's a great idea
it's it's something we should
ask on your post show just say
you say your name
do we say that?
yes it's on the list please introduce yourself
amazing how many people
forget to do that and
there are some people where i'm still
listening seven shows
in first sometime
to say that they will slip their name
in so i can have
all of them in the speak version of the name
yes yeah
okay good
but this show for those not listening was
a privacy and security
how he was able to use
similings in zip files and the zip files
then allowed him to access any file
on the on the host server's network
and the file he linked to was the
ETC hosts our password file
which
is now not actually used for
containing passwords that's an ETC
shadow but still at the same time
he could pull both of those files down
and gain access to stuff
not good
yeah it's
i wasn't aware of that i mean
it used to be a thing that you were warned about
allowing things to
to create
symbolic links
back in the day of
early days of security but i never
occurred to me that the zip
software would let you do that
so
following day was
in clinics in laws
this time they're in laws
and they were talking about it security
and stick in sex
so i won't read the summary
for people
but some good links there to
looks in grip.fs
and
the best
etc etc etc
no
it's a good subject to be
to be summarising like that
there's a lot of good information there
so
Clinton Roy says mix not quite right
it's almost like separate
streams were spliced
on top of each other
rather than interleaved
question mark
he's referring to the fact that
they were talking over one another
at the start quite
badly
so yeah
yeah
saidrick
saidrick
great show keep them coming
hey man i love this show
each and every time the mood is great
the content is very much
interesting.
i love listening to people talking about
interesting things in a relaxed context
pandemics in history
not so excellent
infectious disease is one of the most important factors
influencing human history
ahuka health and health care
and this one was
basically
an euro western centric
look at pandemics
that have occurred
did he also go into the
the effect that
western earquarts
had on the
um
and the americans with the
bringing all those interesting diseases over
he did european colonization
yeah yeah he did mention the word
population
i've actually had several people on the subject
lately and i've got them a bit
merged together in my brain
but yeah i'm pretty certain that
who can mention that
i mean it's a well known
nastiness
so brine in Ohio says
fear porn good show
but i'm a bit confused
people tell me there
are too many people on the planet
too much man-made global climate change
isn't disease a good thing
doesn't attend the herd a bit
what should i be afraid of today
too many people
too much CO2 capitalism
yes brine all of those things
and the hamsters
yes yes i think
maybe fear is not necessarily
the the right response
more to see if you can
make a change or
pressure others to make the changes that will
help some of these things
but the thing is yeah
if people were tackling the problems
you wouldn't need the fear
but people are tackling the problem
such as that is a bit of a problem
too much of an interest in
in the
some of the problems are
i'm not going to get solved because
people are making money from not solving them
so yeah but that's always been the case
to everything i imagine
that's when they iron maker
or the bronze makers
were around the fire going
oh new fangle iron coming in
yeah not like the bronze
my day i'm going to be
i'm going to be able to work
etc etc oh yeah
so yes
etc etc
do we
happen to go i'm sorry
okay great show
coincidentally i'd heard a show
on the same topic
on national radio here in Belgium
their angle was how the Spanish flu
had actually ended the first world war
and the most of the casualties
in that conflict
originated from that disease instead of the fighting
interesting
there was a lot after the
war i know that much and there were two
two waves and people didn't like wearing masks
and
got all of that stuff
that seems to be the norm
and the malnutrition
and yeah
okay
lighter things
see what they did there Dave
a light bulb moment
part two
history of lighting by mr ex
and this
is actually quite
very brief history of lighting
from fire to the week
tungsten filaments
halogen fluorescent
fluorescent light strips and sodium
what i find interesting about lighting Dave
is that roughly the same percentage
of people's income
is spent on lighting throughout the ages
it's not fascinating
i have of course no research
to back that thing up at all
but
i heard it somewhere
on some podcast so it must be true
yeah
i don't know i couldn't say but
it sounds likely
because it's been expensive in the past
i think
mr ex mentioned gas
man calls and stuff
did he
i was thinking about that as he was talking
thinking
going to stay in places
where they had them still
strange and mysterious process
setting light to one of those things
watching the little man call
go white hop
and the rest of yeah
i used to
we had
in our old house
my granny's granny
their house had
some ornamental ones
gas lights
occasionally they would turn on
but
occasionally you go into a house
you know
the
you probably don't know because you're
not a catholic enough from our land
there's this thing called the stations
which
occurs in our land where a mass
which is a catholic
celebration
occurs in springtime
and sometimes in autumn time
in people's houses
and it's usually once every seven years
so it goes
in a different
part of the parish
and then
so this year
it's going to be your house
and then it's your next door neighbor
and their next door neighbor
and the whole way
and it's essentially a way
of making sure that your house gets
teet-losters
because
everything's taken out
and there's one room
in between
that's all
that's all
there's a lot of
people
who live in the middle of the
bog somewhere and then
the ladies would descend upon the house
the week before
it
completely
overturning these poor
blocks lives
everything is
removed out of the house and all their
thought never electricity even, but there are a few in farab too. Good way to make a money as a child,
not so much about the religion, more about the cash that can be associated with those events.
How do you? Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's an interesting insight. Yeah, I have a friend whose
was brought up Catholic and he isn't anymore and he often talks about
and his wife and his mother is Irish, so I think it must have been the fairly Irish-oriented
Catholic upbringing. Yeah, I've heard a few tales. He claims that there's somewhere in
Ireland where you can find the skull of John the Baptist aged five, which is a wonderful
concept. This guy going around shedding skulls all through his life. Yeah, yeah, but
he struck me as just a rather silly joke. There was a classic, there was a classic
variation in the gospel's door that I believe later, at one time where the somebody was saying
that American tourists came to Shannon and the boss was called the same Patrick and then
25 years later we're back and the same dude was selling the same skulls.
And he goes, yeah, but you saw with this one 25 years ago, aha, but this is the skull of same
Patrick as a young man. Yeah, I think I think people to be honest think that Ireland is a very
Catholic country and they are to a point and there's a point where it's a very social thing to
go to mass because you meet everybody in the neighborhood at mass and it's for a lot of people,
it's about meeting outside of mass, you know, all the neighbors and whoever. Not so much nowadays with
all the what's happened stuff coming on, so but that was definitely a lot about it was that you turn
up there's a social responsibility to to go to mass, especially if there's, you know, if it's a
memory, it's a memorial mass for some neighbor that you knew blah, blah, blah, many years ago then
if you don't turn up, it's like we've got the balance to turn up at the mass. So yeah, yeah, yeah,
was it because a lot of the, uh, when I was, let's take a tangent on the tangent here,
when I was going to mass, a lot of the, uh, the old IRA lands, yeah, and those are the ones who
fought the British in their war of independence, they were excommunicated from the church at the time
and they wouldn't go into mass still and when they were allowed back in, they were still, they would
just go in for the, they, um, they, uh, they, given around the bread and stuff and then they'd leave
even, even at that age. So they were, they were, uh, uh, outside the church. So it was like, it's
really, really weird, weird thing. I don't know how it got to that. Oh yeah. No, it's interesting.
So yeah, there's a, there's a show in there somewhere. Yeah, we just bloody wasted it now, Dave.
Well, I went to, um, Portugal many years ago with my boss or we used to go to conferences,
he would choose somebody from the department and say, well, after this conference, I'm
sharing something or other, would you like to come with me and you'd say, okay, fine. And, uh,
we had quite a lot of spare time and we were in north of, uh, what's the main city in Portugal?
Anyway, um, it's a very Catholic country and there's so many churches and he was a
Catholic and he said, do you mind if we have a wee drive around and go and visit all the churches
and, uh, and he was fascinated with all the, obviously, the, the icons and everything, but, um,
the, the reliquaries. Yeah. The amount, the amount of bone in those reliquaries was astonishing.
I don't think, I don't know, if it's that common in, it's not in the UK, is it? I don't know,
I'm not really that knowledgeable about it, but, uh, the whole business of visiting Portuguese
church, uh, Catholic churches to, uh, to check them out. Um, he was taking me lessons in, well,
this is the reliquary, that's the stations of the, the cross and all that stuff. So, yeah, yeah.
Never, never let it into us, Dave, was in the further money.
Lisbon was the answer to your question, but he's talking to me. It was a good bit of anthropology,
very nice. But, uh, I do, um, I do find that the Catholic church in Ireland is fundamentally
different here on the continent. If you, uh, when I went into the, um, to mass and the Netherlands,
even, even going to an English mass here, it's a long, a good mass in Ireland is 25 minutes,
you know, 20 minutes is going to send you to Donegal and anything longer is like just too much.
So, 25 minutes is the perfect time for mass. Um, how it gives you plenty of time for chatting
outside and you're back in an hour that enough time for it to put on the roast on the Sunday.
You know what I mean? Priorities, Dave. Indeed, indeed, yeah. Practical Catholics, that's all right.
Anywho, uh, my author's subject, or we'll have to record a show on it.
Trying to find the town, let both moments, no comments, not really surprising as it was only
this week. Ansible for dynamic host control configuration protocol. Now, oddly enough, I was
thinking of doing this very same thing for the, uh, for all the pies here on the network, Dave,
including the wall of pies that I have over there. But I don't run for you previously, but
it shows you what is possible. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's, it's very intriguing. You need to have a,
you'd have a router that was capable of, uh, of being run in this sort of way, which
supplies using a server of some kind to, uh, to run your, your network, which I've tended to avoid,
because it's expensive. They tend to be expensive. Thanks to run. Uh, yeah, you can run,
often be a steal on the toaster, surely. A raspberry boy for sure. Yeah, well, one of these
SBCs that have two, yeah, ports would be an interesting thing to do. And I can't remember which one
does, but one of the, uh, one of them does, doesn't it? And not for his man of money.
Nope. I choose to run for me at all. But then I tend to run them on, uh, what do you call it?
Let me just log into my router and find out the answer to these two questions. I have ones from
GL.ness. GL.iness, which have the really tiny little size of a matchbox type of thing,
half, uh, half a playing carrot, that sort of size. And out of the box, you can have them run
open WRT. Okay. Okay. Yeah. That's quite neat. I did want to go down that route at some point,
but there's not many machines that will, not many proper routers that will run,
that type of stuff these days. And you, Cedric, says, also getting in Hanswell high-nourished,
I've just recently started using Hanswell and currently playing with a new toy, a
churring pi board equipped with seven raspberry pi compute modules. Basically, it's like a single
board cluster, so to speak, smiley face. Anywho, anyways, I found Hanswell extremely helpful in
setting these up. First, I make all the pies with a fresh install of the one-to-server with SSH
enabled and an account that has authorized my public key. Then I just create a simple inventory file
with IPs of each node. And that was good to go. Then I could do Hanswell-C cluster-a and then
with the command, which is sudo apt-optit and sudo apt-install dash-wide Kubernetes.
End of comment. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's really cool. The, if you looked at the churring pi thing
tour, I thought I'm not really into the compute module thing. It doesn't fill up my board,
puts it. No, no. The new compute module, the one that's just out is quite impressive, but
yeah, I was intrigued by the churring pi thing, but I'm not really sure what I'm
using it for. I've had to say, look, I've got a story here. Yeah, yeah, great, fine. Now, can we
get on and do something else, please? Yeah, it's, but I mean, it's just like an imagination on my
part. But yeah, that's quite impressive. Quite impressive. That would be an existential for
subject to, on why, why churring pi board tell us. It's good for running all sorts of
clusterable things, presumably, Kubernetes being one, I guess. So Archer 72 answered the call,
and got himself added to my, while he was already on there, on my old regulars list,
along with Mr X and yourself, among others. And this was a thrift store quick fix for a doggie
blanket hot glue to the rescue. Yeah, yeah. That's, I thought it's great. I like these sorts of
things. And the dog looks, I don't know, it's happy. Yeah, it looks well, well warmed up with
its lovely jacket. So yeah, yeah, I just, I just got through six sticks of glue yesterday sticking
the rope back onto the cat scratching post. We were with cat people here. So scratching post
with rope random, this cat can shred it in about a week. So I don't know, with a hot one or
key, but she's got claws like razors. He's incredible. Because you just need to pull, just
break one rope. And the whole thing falls off. Of course, it's a, it's one one continuous run.
Maybe a staple at the top, but maybe one or two in the middle, I don't know, I've not seen them.
But yeah, it's an interesting thing. But any hot glue is good stuff, I think. Let's see,
see with this last. But yeah, good show. The following day on our, our loss of walk,
my wife and I, having a romantic walk in the graveyard. Surprisingly, that is what we do.
Like your friend who goes to churches, I would go to the graveyard in particular cities and stuff.
Yeah, that's cool. There's a lot to be said for it. I used to take a lunchtime walk around the
grave fries, grave fries, bobby church yard, which just up the road from where the
university I worked for had some of its buildings. And wow, it's Edinburgh's full of bizarre
church. You'd love it. But yeah, with all these sort of louring angels, sort of things,
some, yeah, you'd really better headstones. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So yeah, I can, I can see this,
there's a certain appeal to that. Certainly intriguing that the soil is not really soiled.
There's a bit, I guess, there's some sort of, it's called San Roe. But it seems to be grow up,
I mean, you can't grow a tree on sand, so there must be a bit more to it than that.
No, the dragon, it's actually quite interesting in the whole, how they convert basically
deltas into, into arable land. So, but that's a topic for another day. Yeah, yeah. For those of
you wondering, this is about how you dig graves in the Netherlands, which is essentially a sand pit.
So do you want to do Cedric's one? Yeah, surely. No, no, I just takes me a while to scroll down
to the end. Cedric De Roe says, love graveyards. Hey, Ken, love the episode. I also like walking
around graveyards. They combine the best in three key factors, I think, silence. A lot of
loud praises these days, but graveyard is almost everywhere a place of serenity. Art, I don't know
how things are over there, but here a lot of graves are real works of art and history, even the graveyard
of a small town tells dozens of stories. Visiting tips in Europe from a fellow graveyard lover,
bearish laches, cemetery in Paris. Brilliant, love it. Been there a few times.
Oh, all right, I've been around graveyards doing family history research and stuff.
I don't know if you're going to scream, scream soul in Antwerp, in Belgium. Yep, anyway.
And there's a really nice one. Can't find the name in the Czech Republic. So, yes.
And Clinton says, interesting. I found this quite interesting. I never even thought about such
requirements. Thank you. Yep. Yep. Great point. And the next day, we had gimp brushes by Huka.
Pain tools, particularly gimp, particularly the paintbrush tool required to use different types of
brushes. And also go to his own website for complete journals.
Very good. Yeah. Yeah. It was interesting. I didn't never really thought much about brushes in
these things. So, yeah, good to know. Swedish corona experience, Daniel Persons, one of the people
I am waiting to have his name pronounced on the show. So, I can get a snippet. In fact,
a whole show with just your name repeating might be necessary, also for Cedric.
I do health and health care. This is about what the Swedish should do. If you're sick, stay at home,
symptoms take a test. Wash your hands 20 seconds. Don't touch your face. Keep a distance of two
meters. Don't gather in large crowds, avoid public transport and work them home if you can.
Pretty much the same as here. Mm-hmm. Sounds pretty sensible.
Sounds people hear to these things. The sort of lockdown thing is a bit over the top feel,
perhaps. I mean, that seems to be the Swedish view. And I've certainly heard that view.
Yes. But I mean, the lockdown was partly put in place because the epidemiologist said
if it is very, very, very ill in disease, then doing that is a great way to prevent it
getting around much. But then it turned out not to be anywhere near as transmissible as was
thought. It's still pretty damn transmissible. But the way in which it's transmitted wasn't clear.
It was all this stuff about sure washing your hands is a great idea because you will pick it up
if it's on a surface. But it's not aerosolized. It's just coming out of people's
mouths and noses mostly. So it's partly the view has changed as fact has been accumulating, I guess.
Yeah. The thing, I think Sweden was applauded for not having lockdown around, but one factor that
I think he touched upon was that quite a lot of people have summer homes and basically it's out
in the middle of the sticks. You're not going to be in contact with anyone. You're just in the
middle of the sticks literally. It's a lockdown without a lockdown. It's a pleasant lockdown
because you're stuck in the middle of the sticks in your own forest and you're away from everybody
and swimming and interacting with very few people and going to nice isolated beaches because
that's what you want to do because you're living in the middle of a city. But it'll be interesting.
It's also interesting here looking at the map to see that there has been increases
in cases in the last few weeks that it is rising in Sweden as well.
Cheerful stuff Dave. We should have a COVID-free community news at some point.
Yeah, in a few years, yeah, we should be fine. Do you want to do McNallyw's
one because I can be just because of his weird Scottish accent?
So McNallyw says, interesting info from Sweden. Thank you for this show. I found it very
interesting to hear how another country's county is dealing with this virus from an individual
perspective. You often hear that Sweden is dealing with COVID-19 by requiring much lighter restrictions
than where I am in Scotland slash UK. But your description doesn't sound very different from
the situation here. One notable difference is that you said older children are not back at school.
Here all children are back, but due to an outbreak at his school, my son is currently at home
self-isolating as our most of his year group, 15, 16-year-olds, or 100 or so people.
This should not come as a surprise as I understand the virus spreads amongst older children,
much like it does with adults, though the disease is much less severe in most cases.
Interesting, yeah. Don't do people looking back in 15 years at these shows,
you know, somebody catching up with all the HVR shows going, that's so ridiculous. If they had
only known about that, they'll know. There's so many facts coming to the fore all the time.
I was listening to this week in vorrology yesterday and they were talking about if you have
Neanderthal genes, then this seems to mean that you have a higher chance of getting bad effects
from this thing. So if you're, and it's not as bad in Africa where there's no Neanderthal
genes, the Neanderthals never made it to Africa. So, you know, I don't know how what research
is behind that, but I think they didn't talk about the stuff that's just speculative.
Yeah, so, you know, there's so many factors.
The number of stillbirths has, sorry for bringing that up to some people,
has decreased, and they don't know if that's from better washing of hands, but I would also say
it's probably less stress from travel. So, yeah, you don't know. There's a lot of stuff
coming out of this. It's like, okay, it's crap now, we're at home, but it's a really good
social experiment to two things. Yeah, yeah, yeah, learning a lot of stuff, not in the
post-delightful way, but we are certainly learning things. And Cidric says, crap, guess I missed
it. So, sorry, what a happy week it's been here in Belgium. We'll try next time. They're in lockdown
now, full, full Monty lockdown. Right, right, right, okay. And they're asking nurses with
Covid to come in and work if they can. That's, that's not good. No, no, no, no, no. Now this is
the trouble. It's not the health service. It's getting the burden of struggling stuff. Yeah,
yeah, it's really, really nasty. From that point of view. Okay, next one, Dave.
Lies your topics again, but I'm getting a bit old now. I like more moment part three,
the led revolution by Mr X. And this is about LEDs and their history, which is actually fascinating
and well-researched and lots and lots of interesting links in there. So yeah, thank you, Mr X,
for this. Yeah, yeah, it's a great subject. It's astonishing when you look at the history of this
stuff. What, what changes there have been in a relatively small period of time. No, it was
the thought that the early LEDs could be used to light your house, which was just ridiculous.
They were just sort of flickering things in a machine on the front. Yeah, yeah,
the front would be a high five if you had such a thing. Yeah, exactly. On your telly or something.
But yeah, it's really, really grown out of all proportion. It's amazing.
And then the blue one, because they're so expensive to make, it's a classic product if you have it.
Yeah, yeah, it's fascinating. It really is. I just go and do some more. So then we go and read
the Wikipedia page and that type of things. Really good. So, Antisus is probably pronounced wrong.
Paul Krick, also on the list of old regulars, PymBook Pro, and why he bought it,
then the unboxing, and then a few weeks later, how it's working out. Good episode of this. I like
it. Now, it's a good thing to do. A good way to organize a show. And it's most intriguing to hear
about such a thing. Yeah, it sounds really good. And last, I think, but not least is the last one.
Which would be, I guess, no, it's not. Monochromic and the Halloween one with their terrible,
terrible accents. What's funny nonetheless? Yes, yes, yes. I didn't quite make it to the end of
this one, because my time was a bit short, so I'll catch up later. But yes, they were, they were going
all out for the Halloween theme things. I was going to do it with Halloween, but they could
whatever. Scary Friday, yeah, horror, horror. For your consideration, the ideal ham radio setup,
and this was introducing a new podcast by Archer 72 podcast recommendation, done very, very
well. It's the Ask Noah Show. And yeah, this one floated my balls on many levels, because I like
hearing about new podcasts. And this one was focusing on ham radio, which is another,
another thing that I'm interested in. So, great show. Yeah, it was, it was, and I do enjoy hearing
these, these introductions to other podcasts. That's always a great thing. And this is a radio show,
as I understand it, which, which is then being put out as podcast, but a proper podcast, not one of
these World Garden podcasts, an RSSV type podcast. And yeah, and there's some really good,
good stuff on here in general. So, yeah, I'm sure you could learn a lot from this.
Yeah, and that was, that was pretty much that for the shows for this week.
Monteven. And also this week, because it is this week. So, we had a one comment about fixing ebooks
with Cleaver and PDF crop, which was my show. And the comment is from a guy called Ken Fallon saying,
thanks for this. I knew this had to be on the internet somewhere.
So, you were searching for it. He was searching for it, and there it was on HBO, done by this
Ken Fallon guy. Yeah, very impressive. Seek initial find, I guess. I know we have this
rule, like Hacker is one of the person who finds it interesting. Is that okay if it's yourself
six months after you've done the show? Yeah, I'm sure that means there's potentially other people
who will come along. I had a comment on Twitter a few weeks ago from my guy, he said,
thank you very much. I don't really read Twitter all of them, but I was on the alerts I used to have
seemed to fail. And he said, thank you very much for the show about Bash parameter thingies,
which was the first show I ever did on on Bash, the insides of Bash and stuff. Very, very helpful
and useful. So, you know, it's not me blow my own trumpet, but just to say that people do look
back through HBO stuff, and presumably their indexes, their searches that sometimes end up
pointing it to some of the shows, and people read the stuff or listen to the stuff and
can find the useful. So, you know, it's never, it should never downplay what you're contributing.
Yeah, and this is why I think Hitchfair is really a long tale type of podcast that you can
comment from a show that was five years six years ago now, more? Yeah, yeah.
So, the community news, the mail, the, the rebooting speech synthesis program. Anywho, now,
the mail list for those of you who don't know is where we on HPR is the democratic forum for HPR.
So, if you're not on the mailing list, you're not really having a say in the community.
So, that is where decisions are discussed and taken. And one of those things was
forwarding on, oh god, don't know where my brain is going to do.
Anyway, forwarding on from our friends at OLAF. The OLAF conference run by the Ohio Linux Fest
is a five or one C3 non-profit organization, is the largest gathering of open source
and Linux community in Ohio. This year, the conference will be virtual from the November
the 5th to the 7th 2020. I would highly appreciate it if you could answer a call for presentations
and registration links to your group. So, there you go. Consider it done. Yeah, good for them having
a virtual conference. People seem to have come up with all manner of effective ways of achieving
this now. So, yeah, hope it works out for them. Then we had a call for shores. A call for
shores is still open folks, still open. We are desperately in need of shores. I would like
normally we get some of the hosts, populace, quite a few of the slots, and then there's a few,
that is actually the way I prefer it. If you see the queue filled up that every week has got two or
three shores in it and then people, the drive-by contributors can post shores into the free
and available slots. So, see, signing that in a way that nobody can see. So, we do need people to
fill up those slots because they're not being filled and we're also not getting, we can't always
rely on somebody finishing 25 shores and uploading like a hooker or operator does. So, we can't be
depending. Can't be depending on the old regular as guys. We need, we need to have shores. I can't
stress that enough. It's a continual problem and I can't fix it. The only people who can fix that
are the people listening. Yeah, so yeah, everybody is in lockdown essentially. Lend you time to
record an old show. Don't be embarrassed about recorders in the toilet. It's a perfectly
valid thing to do and I'm sure there's been more of the one shores recorded in the toilet
here on HBR. So, yeah. Should there be a lovely host of my friends?
Then there was one about the HBR community news and Cedric was going to join. Then I had
a request for shores about 3D printers because it's something we discussed before Dave and the
reason I bring it up again is because every time I come up with a solution, every time I think I
need a 3D printer, I can come up with a mechanical way that I feel is better or I repurpose something.
But I keep hitting the one problem and that is buying enclosures for project boxes to put
components in to make it a thing. And those things are really expensive and if I was to buy
all of those that I need, I would end up being in the realms of a cheap 3D printer. So
maybe I have found my use case, Dave. Maybe I have.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I have not made such a thing but I can well see the effectiveness of doing
something like that. Yeah, that would be quite cool actually. I'm not using my 3D printer anywhere
near as much as some people. So it is an issue. But yeah, but I want to hear that sort of
shows. I got to the printer. I did all this research. I put it on my desk and now I never use it
and here's why I never use it because I want to hear that as well. Then would you
consider taking your printer and contributing it to the library and then you know, I did some
using it whenever you go down, you know, is there why 3D printers? Is it the future of the world?
Let me just read what I asked. Homework for this weekend, June Monday, can somebody send in
shows on 3D printers? I know there are people with them and yet we have no shows. Your first show,
what is a 3D printer, types etc. So drive by shows you might want to do in series. I have a
this type of 3D printer. It calls Blah and here are the specs. I would or would not recommend it.
Blah blah blah. So that sort of thing. Why? Yeah, it's strange because I know a lot of people have
3D printers and yet we've had no shows, Dave. So it seems odd. Yes, yes. Maybe yeah, that's a good
point. Feel that perhaps Grintery people tend not to want to talk about what they're doing for
some reason. No, that's ridiculous. It's just silly. Yeah, yeah, it's an odd thing. Do you
think that because I've been pressuring my son's girlfriend who has been doing some really
interesting stuff with this printer, she has been a model maker for a long time. She used to
buy these air drying clays and that sort of thing and make little models of animals and heads
and all manner of stuff, symbols and so on. And then having done that, she'd either give those away
paint them out and give them away to present for people and children and stuff or she then got into
making silicon molds from them and she bought some epoxy resin, you know, one of the big sort of
bulk size resins, the clear type that they use in medicine, that type of thing. And so she was
poor, she was pouring a whole stack of models from her master. But then with the 3D printer,
she was really really keen to start her sort of base model off with the printer.
So I said to her recently, yeah, we can do a show for us because that would be really interesting.
I'm sure people would like to see what first stage and the subsequent stages and the 3D printing
and the resigning and all that stuff. And she said, oh yeah, I might do, yeah, yeah. So
why? I don't understand why. Sorry, I'm just asking if I'm nagging or not. She's not even listening.
But, you know, I don't quite understand what, with me, I have a zeal to tell people about stuff,
even if they don't want to hear it. But I don't know, is it makers don't want to say?
That's just one of the centric, too. You got to say, yeah, I said, there's a people always
used to say, I want to be a teacher like him, tell people stuff they don't want to hear.
So I don't know, I don't know. It's an odd, odd, it's the 1% thing, 1% to 10% thing about
contributing that everybody has. You saw with archive.org as well. Like very, very few people
contribute back to all the projects. But then again, people contribute to stuff. And then
that's the country where I would contribute to a podcast, I might not necessarily contribute to
some other thing, you know, do a YouTube video and it might be my thing. So yeah, the podcast is
relatively lightweight stuff. And yeah, so to me, that's quite an appealing way of saying
there's this stuff and it might be interested in it. I mean, I think I had to
trust your arm to get the first shot. Oh, I know, I didn't want to be, I want my voice to be
quoted in perpetuity and want to sound stupid. Yeah, yeah.
I don't know if that's it.
Early who, as we speak, well, actually, as you speak, I've been on mute and I've been drilling holes
in an electrical box trying to hack it into a 3D print into a housing for a project that I'm
working on, which will be a HBR show, hashtag all myself a show. But it would be a mod,
this definitely will be a lot easier if I had a 3D print record, just lay out the parts and
print it. I mean, all nice boxes that I can hack that I can, and they're expensive as well.
Even the generic, generic employers that you get are tiny and expensive.
Yeah, yeah, I bought one recently in the, well, sometime this year and was really disappointed
at how expensive it was for. One of the main things you do get, though, is you get nice,
if you're putting bolts into it and you've got embedded nuts inside it, which make it a nice
thing to put lid on. The one I had just got a rubber seal to it, cat noises off, and so it's
really good for that. I don't know how you would 3D print something as such a good quality,
Nico. Yeah, but a lot of the YouTube channels I watch, they'll have, you know,
they'll do a little project and they'll also upload the files for the project that you can print
the case as well. So that's kind of cool. Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's tons of stuff.
Thing either, so blind dodgins and dragons by Mike Ray. I think he likes, he speak,
may have mentioned it in the past. Let me say six and 56 and I'm totally blind,
played D&D for over 40 years. Recently, we do download the research on the fifth edition and
burning desire to play again. And I got to that part that far into the email when I thought
I'll stay that tattoo will, will put up a new game for him. Part, I've been working with friends
who've been taking over a look at Village Pub, and I want to help them succeed in difficult times.
If I can get a D&D group together and might meet in the Pub and play a socially distant D&D
game with masks if desired, of course, this could either be in Zoom or Jitsi. Our mumble server
is available to you for this purpose. So how do I do, how do I DM when I can't see? I can't
draw or access virtual maps of the course. So this will have to be more a theater of the mind
stuff than usual, I guess. I've listened to some of tattoos shows on RPGs and they just make me
form with them out even more to get this moving. I'm also making a audible polydice roller out of
an Arduino and a speech-jash shield. Interesting. Hashtag looked up myself. By listening to the
Critical Role podcast, I've found out about d&dnbeyond.com, which makes it possible for me to access stats
and other material online, either for my laptop or my iPad when I DM, but there has to be some
crossover between me who can't see and the players who can. Anyone got any wisdom to impart?
Oh yes, they did, Dave. Oh yes, they did. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I thought it was enormously
heartening to see these responses. Yeah, I really make me feel a lot happier that day. I have to say
it was good. Do you want to do under one? Yeah, I won't do the accent. How come you don't have
the Scottish accent after all these years? It's the same way I don't have a Dutch accent after
all these years. It's very odd. Well, neither of my kids have Scottish accent, they were born
in Edinburgh. So I think they, I don't know, they both been quizzed about this. How come you're
11, Scotland? You don't know how far, and they say, well, my dad's English. Oh, right. I'll be
a man. You're poor wind. That's a, yeah. I don't know. I might go back to the show. I might
go back to the, yeah, I might, says McNullo, I played d&d with Class 2's HPR group and I've been
amazed at how effective RPGs can be audio only and online. In some ways, it's like the old saying
about radio, the pictures are better than TV. I don't see any impediment to you playing it at all.
I'm sure there are dice roller ups that can be, that can read out numbers or someone here can hack
one together easily enough, or there are tactile dice, etc. We're always looking out rules for
each other mid game because as a group, we seem to be cursed with poor memories, at least I am.
So doing that for you would be no problem, and if you're blessed with the better memory,
you'd be helping us. I'm looking at bringing in a friend who has motor neurone disease,
that's advanced to the point where he can no longer move, even his fingers, with a voice controlled
PC and some assistance from fellow players in recording hit points and inventories and such
like. We believe that'll work. Class 2 is far more experienced than I am in RPG matters,
I defer to his judgment, especially on how we organize into groups, as I think our only issue
is that we have too many players for one group, a nice problem to have. I look forward to meeting
your alter ego in forgotten realms or some way of fantastic Andrew. Cool, cool, cool.
And then, on the sun rolls over New Zealand, we got this answer. Mike, I played DLD 3-5
and Pathfinder with a blind player for years. I've admittedly never run a game once blind,
but I've run sessions with no materials. So it's definitely possible to DM without doing
looking at the books or die. I will record a HPR episode with more details and thoughts.
And here's a quick summary. D&D core rule books are available on audio books, D&D
Beyond is apparently accessible for blind users, untested. All thoughts about more traditional
Lee is about what traditionally is made possible by vision, no adventure modules is necessary,
make up and adventure in your head. On the fly, reacting to players is what makes you a player
yourself, otherwise you're just a referee and that's boring. You need to know or at least have a
feel for monster stats. You can have player read stats features for you assuming one of them
has a monster menu or you can memorize stats from the audio version or you can just
invent your own, although making stuff up that's fair takes some practice. People say players
shouldn't know the stats of monsters, but I've never played a D&D game of D&D without at least one
player knowing a monster stats from memory better than I do. Just doesn't matter. Tell your
players to buy some graph paper in a map their process through a town or dungeon. I don't know
about you, but I don't have a caretog for following me around in real life giving me directions.
So don't think a DM is obligated to map everything out for your player characters. Really?
You just don't have satnav in this car? Thank you for your thoughts of mind.
The other of the remind instead of battle maps, I don't want to bog down my analog game with technology,
so I don't tend to use mapping software in my online games. Combat can get fuzzy as a result,
but stay flexible. Don't be too strict about movement speed. Just write the combat layout frequently
to keep everyone on the same page and it works out fine. Have players manage initiative
order and damage? Have players roll your dice as DM? I never conceal rolls from pairs,
so it doesn't really matter whether I roll or not. Just tell a player to roll a D20 for you
or a D6 for damage or whatever. Frankly, there's a certain citizen to this two players after roll
to inflict pain upon each other or themselves. It can be a lot more fun than a DM rolling.
Alternatively, you can just pre-roll your dice, generate a list of random numbers and progress
through these rolls in whatever accessible way you prefer. That's it. It's not a major shift,
but a slight adjustment. If you ever want me to run through a one-shot game and talk through the
process, let me know. Here's pure episodes for it's coming. I'll start with your show.
So the next one is from Kirk Reiser, who says D&D or RPG is something that has also interested me
for a long time, but I've always been afraid to expose my ignorance of the form. I believe I
started to play one game back in the late 70s, but then life got in the way or something did anyway,
so I never got the chance to do it again. If you folks are looking for another
blinks to participate, I'd be willing to try it. And he signs as baffled.
Good. And Jason Todd says, if you keep this up, I'm going to buckle down and join a game. You've been
more... and the inevitable. You are more than welcome to join in. That was in reply to
I'm going to buckle down and join a game. You're more than welcome to join in as is anyone on
or adjacent to this mailing list. My public drop-in sessions are announced here. MixSignals.eml4saf Games
4sashrpg.xml. We play different systems on a rotating basis, but if it is some RPG you're looking for,
then this is the place to start. MixSignals.eml4sash Games 4sashrpg.xml. You heard it here folks.
On Haker Public Radio. My response. Shall I do Mix? You want me to do Mix?
So, Mix says, Clatu, this is all great stuff. I was not able to reply directly because I
currently have some kind of enigmail error on Thunderbird, which starts me replying to anybody
with a key. So this is a new message with the subject hopefully set right. I've created an account
on D&D Beyond. I've descending them in email and asking if their materials are accessible.
I have bought the Monster Manual and the Dungeon Master's Handbook and cannot only confirm,
I can, yeah, not only confirm that both are indeed accessible, but that both are beautifully
formatted for me to access with the screen reader. For example, the Monster Manual is well indexed
with all the monsters falling under alphabetical order and I can go to say goblins directly
and see their stats. So, if I was making a campaign, I can easily copy and paste monster stats into
a serial order text document for me to follow on a laptop or on my iPad. It's been great seeing
Monster Names I've not heard or seen for over 40 years, like Carrie and Crawlers and Jill
Hatteners Cubes. The fifth edition real book I found online and converted into text with the
help of the great Kurzweil 1000 OCR app on Windows. The real book was a PDF of scan
damage making up each page, but OCR was not a problem. It has not formatted tables correctly,
but I can extract what I need. I've also joined a very big community on Facebook dedicated to
5ED and the folks on there also seem to think being blind is no barrier. Certainly I
already kind of accepted the idea of players rowing my dice formula and don't think
there is any impediment there. I look forward to another episode on this subject from you.
Perhaps if this becomes something of a discussion, we can have a small game at on Zoom
or preferably Jitsi and making an episode from it. Anybody else who's up for that could also join in.
I've not generated any characters yet. I have to get on to that. Next problem is how to stop buying
dice on Amazon, but that's not the story. It's also very easy to write dice applications in Python
and JavaScript, of course, Mike. Having being a parent who bought his stuff off his daughter's
Christmas list several years, which was this dice, that dice bag to put dice in, etc.
Do you have a certain sympathy with this? I must admit we had a
Patrick. We had difficulty buying him stuff presents and then now he's starting to get into the
and the life has become so much easier. I'd like to, can you recommend something to buy?
Yeah, get this book, get this manual, get this dice, and I also lost and brought
that in. Yeah, okay, next one, to no surprise at all, we get this message from Platoon,
which was I'm up for a winch at the game for sure. I could make a two to four hour session
on UTC Saturday, somewhere from 1600 or later UTC. I've extracted the text and converted all the
tables into bullet lists from the system reference document from the player's handbook.
I discussed this with my fellow in episode three, one, two, zero. The drawback, if you call it that,
is that I've added some open game content to fill out missing character options, which
caused my SRD to diverge from the official players. Handbook, for instance, the player's handbook
offers path of the berserkers and path of the total warriors from barbarians,
but the only release path of the berserkers as part of the SRD. So my version offers path of the
berserkers and a third party path of the shaman instead. Not a very big deal unless you're playing
with some adamantly, some adamantly opposed to third party content. Here's the git repo to that
document, not about.org for session, not cut to for session five, the digit five SRDND, the digit
five SRDND. The document is five e underscore SRD.MD that may or may not be of use to you. I think
Dave, that if time travel is invented, it will be glad to try and fit in more D&D into his life.
More hours into his day, yeah, yeah. And Mike replies to this, yeah, following the right thread,
I think I need to read a bit more before I dive into a game, he says. So, but he's well in the
path, it seems. Speaking of D&D, I have an urgent request from my son. As we know, no, there
are D&D people there. And this is typical of a conversation that I would have every day.
And it is, which on dead would you rather be from the D&D version five book? Would you be a
Lynch or a vampire? And we need to know why. So, no idea what any of that means.
If you haven't said that, it's not which is the best, very important. It's which would you rather be
keeping in mind that you're going up levels, et cetera, et cetera. And this is a very,
very important question. You can reply either as common to this episode or better yet.
Better yet. Can you guess what Dave? Can you guess it? Record it. Oh, yeah, I nearly got it there.
Well, we have to have these shows later in the evening because then we have less time to be
waffling. Yes, yes. Okay. So, the, let me tell you any other, any other business stuff.
Any, any, any AOB. So, just the tags and summaries I sent in. Yeah, good. Updates. So, that's all
really to say. That's it. Super. Just drinking a coffee. And as far as upcoming events and stuff,
not really not a lot that you can go to, but the LWN.net community calendar is on there. So,
if you're looking for online stuff, there is actually probably more chance of you attending
these events because they're more than likely available online. And a lot of stuff is going on.
So, let's go to November OpenFest, RustFest, BattleMesh, two weeks days, MiniDebConf, Emacs,
AllF on the 5th. So, that's in, it's in four days from now. OpenFest 2020. That's it. Yeah.
Cool. Excellent. Tune in tomorrow, Dave, for another exciting episode of Hacker. Public.
Okay, now I'll start onできers now.
Goodbye. Okay. Bye, everybody.
We are a community podcast network that releases shows every weekday Monday through Friday.
Today's show, like all our shows, was contributed by an HBR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording a podcast, then click on our contributing to find out how
easy it really is.
HECCA Public Radio was founded by the digital dog pound and the infonomicom computer club
and is part of the binary revolution at binwreff.com.
If you have comments on today's show, please email the host directly, leave a comment on
the website or record a follow-up episode yourself.
Unless otherwise status, today's show is released on the creative comments, attribution,
share a like, three-to-toe license.
