Episode: 4111
Title: HPR4111: HPR Community News for April 2024
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4111/hpr4111.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 19:47:26

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4,111 from Monday the 6th of May 2024.
Today's show is entitled, HPR Community News for April 2024.
It is part of the series HPR Community News.
It is hosted by HPR volunteers and is about 70 minutes long.
It carries an explicit flag.
The summary is, HPR volunteers talk about shows released and comments posted in April 2024.
Hi everybody, my name is Ken Fallon and you're listening to another exciting episode of
Hacker Public Radio today.
It is the HPR Community News for April 2024.
And joining me this evening is, hello Dave Morris here.
Hi Dave, how are you?
I'm good.
Thank you very much.
And we're recording on a slightly unusual date and time, but that's all to the good pleasure.
So flexible we are.
Yeah.
Places too for a reason.
Yes, I have some family commitments that I need to take care of.
It's been a hectic month.
It doesn't look like it's going to stop in a hectic month any time soon.
So we will continue to persevere.
There's one thing that HPR does is continue to plot on.
HPR is a community podcast network and that means podcasts are crowdsourced from the community.
Who is community?
The people listening to this show.
You are the community.
And we are the janitors.
What are janitors Dave in the context of HPR?
You keep asking me this question.
Well, where the guy is at the moment we're guys.
Yes.
We haven't really recruited any non guy people.
And we look after the sort of infrastructure, the metadata, the background.
In fact, we have virtual mobs and buckets and a floor to mop I think.
And there are plenty of mobs available folks.
In all connoisseurs, shades, sizes of the rainbow.
And feel free to bring your own mop if there's stuff on HPR that you think you can contribute to the community.
It ain't an ivory tower.
You don't need to fill out an application form.
You just need to do equally submission shows.
After a quite good burst beginning of the year, we're reasonable amount in the reserve queue.
But we are seeing a slowdown again in the amount of contributions.
This is typical for this time of year.
But if you haven't contributed to this show, please do so.
There are free slots coming up.
We will be posting reserve shows.
So keep the community alive.
Keep the project alive by submission shows.
And this show is where we review the news and the stuff that's been happening.
And the most important thing is where we welcome new host Dave.
And that is traditionally something that you do.
It certainly is.
Not quite sure why, but there we go.
I'm very happy to do it.
And this month we have a new host.
New in one respect.
Dave Hingley.
And Dave is the brother of Mike Hingley, who's an existing host.
And I think if we've been to all camp, we will met both of these brothers at various points.
But Dave has joined us and is wonderful to see him.
I was absolutely chuffed to see that show coming in.
Absolutely.
Chuffed.
So the Hingley brothers are indeed very close to what I consider the HPR community.
So good grace to have them officially on board as these as hosts.
Nothing is.
Sorry.
Thingies.
What are things?
Okay, Annie, who during this show, the community news, what we do.
Dave and I put down our proverbial mobs and hypothetical mobs.
And we come out of the closet, so speak.
And we go through all the shows that have been aired in the last month and give you a little bit of a summary.
In case you haven't downloaded them yourself or you're just following the feed for this particular show,
you know to go back and get these episodes.
And as sometimes happens, episode four or a six was the community news for March 2024.
And there were two comments on that show.
I work and one with you because you do yours.
I had a senior moment on that recording.
So as my excuse anyway, and I used the word dire tribe in appropriately.
And so I apologize in to Scotty because it was his show I was talking about.
And commenting on his show for away three.
Let me read it.
Apologies Scotty.
In commenting on show for away through a called a dire tribe, which means a rant or critic writing.
I think I was probably going for discussion or discourse or similar.
It wasn't a dire tribe, I think.
I mean, the phase of library where we're sometimes don't pop into my mind when call for all the wrong wonders.
So thanks to Ken for pointing it out at the time.
And that's my excuse and I'm sticking with it.
I thought it was a very good excuse. What do you mean?
Some guy on the internet replied to Dave Morris.
Dear Dave, no worries.
I am known for panic-driven pro clutching nonsense.
Hopefully your show will encourage more men to discuss men's health.
Thank you.
Good. Yes.
Good show.
So the next one was getting started with did you come photo management software?
And unbelievably, this is by Henrik.
There are no comments on this.
Did you come is such a fantastic piece of software?
Yeah, I used it for a number of years.
But I think I loaded loads of pictures into it at one point years ago.
And just sort of left and there.
I don't take pictures much these days.
So it was really interesting to hear about it because it's changed a lot since I last used it.
And so it really tempted me to go back and do some stuff with it.
Organize things better.
Because it's all about editing stuff and changing stuff and organising it really the thing that I wanted it for.
Can I find that picture of such and such?
Absolutely.
Yes.
Because it's in that collection or it's searchable or whatever.
So yeah.
Excellent show.
Really good.
I have it on my list.
And this is the second on what I hope will be a series.
So good stuff.
Keep them coming.
Keep them coming.
Yeah.
And folks, you can contribute to HVR by giving you know post and other comments,
giving a little bit of positive feedback really helps.
Someday on the internet, I learned more bash tips.
And there's no comments on this and either.
But that's not going to stop us from commenting, Dave.
Indeed not.
No, it's some nice couple of scripts which are listed here and explained in a little detail in the show,
which I think is a great thing.
It's really nice to have more contributions to the bash scripting series,
which goes way, way back to the early days of HVR.
So yeah.
Yeah.
I was going to comment on this, but I think I actually messaged Scott himself
because there was an issue with his notes and said,
you want me to do this to your notes to fix them.
And by the way, the show is really good.
So I should make sure I do that.
I should be more public in my chitchat.
So yeah.
So I did find this to be very, very good at it.
We definitely need more of this sort of stuff, I'd say.
And I tend to have comments on my head,
which I serve reserved for commenting on this show,
but I probably should just type them in.
But then if there's a day where I forget to do that, people might feel like,
I have to comment on their show when I want to.
I know.
Sometimes I listen when I'm not available.
Sorry.
Yeah.
I usually do what you said, I think.
As listening, I'm sort of constructing a comment in my head,
and then I forget.
Because things constructed in my head tend to fall out fairly quickly.
So yeah, it's a, but yeah.
Oh, and he's, this show is actually in two series, although we can't do that.
But yeah, today I learned in the best scripting series,
which is, which I find quite amusing.
It'll be good.
We can use that one as a, and as an example,
when we do get to the point of fixing that issue.
Modifying Python scripts with some help from chat GPT.
This is from Mr X.
And he is using the HPR,
modifying a Python code to or with help of some chat GPT.
What do you think?
Excellent.
I've done the same.
I actually commented to him in person,
but forgot to write anything on the show itself.
I think I'm going to lose my janitor's badge if I keep this up.
But yeah, I like what he did here.
It was an interesting way.
Oh, a necessary way, I feel.
I don't think he could solve this easily,
but he just, he also wanted to use it as a way of finding out
how useful chat GPT is in help.
Exactly.
To solve these sorts of problems.
And that is excellent.
Yeah.
And he got there.
Do you know what?
He also made me think,
we need a series of shows about how you process Jason files in.
We do indeed.
We do indeed.
Yes.
You know, I like it.
I'll put that one day.
That may be a series that I'm going to contribute to.
As I'm living for a few years ago,
it's living in XML.
Now I'm living in Jason.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's an interesting subject to me.
Yeah, there will be a few episodes on that spoiler alert.
No comments on this one either,
which is playing civilization part three, part one.
And after doing this by a hookah, of course, who else?
A computer strategy, James.
And we had already civilization and civilization part two.
And now we're on civilization part three, part one.
That makes sense to me, at least.
Yes.
Yes.
You have to differentiate between the Roman heroes and the Arabic ones.
Exactly.
It's interesting what they do to make games more interesting over time,
particularly these strategy ones.
I find it interesting more than talking about the game and the programming,
the idea behind that a hookah has given us the stories.
In the developer's mind about what's going on,
and how their ad improvements and stuff.
So it's, yeah, it's a great insight, not only into how to play the game,
but the thoughts behind developing a game.
So great, great shows there.
Sort of high level view of the concept of games like this is quite interesting.
Yeah.
Cool.
So we had, Norris, with a test driven development demo,
using pi test to just to pi test, sorry, to do a test driven development demo.
And this I found was super, super useful for me.
This clearly explained the concept and will be used as a reference.
Absolutely guaranteed internally here.
And for explain to people what it is and how you use it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, I found it most intriguing.
I've not really spent any brain power on running out more about it.
So it was very good to hear this.
I've been, as I've been calling myself,
I wrote quite a lot of bash scripts for stuff.
And I find myself, when I was listening to this going,
I don't know if I would ever do test driven development.
And then as I was doing that, I was realizing everything that I'm doing within my script.
So I'm checking for this file.
Does this file exist?
Yes or no?
I'm checking for this.
So it will be like trivial as I'm writing it to write the equivalent test driven scenario.
Pull it out of my code.
If this file exists and is not empty, then blah.
Then you could have an assertion in the test file going assert that this file exists.
And so as you're developing, you can equally be doing the test driven.
So yeah, I don't know if that is a thing.
But more thought, more thought required by me.
And it's a great episode because it has me thinking about the whole thing.
Not necessarily, but I will do it or agree with it.
But I'm definitely thinking about it as a development model.
Yeah, it's a different mindset.
And it's quite interesting to hear, if only for that reason,
to make you rethink things you do.
When I was, when I became a, again, paid for,
I was going to say a professional program.
That's a bit hard for me.
When I got paid for doing programming,
I picked up a method which was very much all the rage in the 1970s
called stepwise refinement.
Where you wrote a program which said, you know, be an end and nothing in the middle.
And then you went, you put some comments in there and said,
at this point I'm going to do this, then I'm going to do that, then I'm going to do that.
Then you went to each comment and expanded it, which this was the refinement.
So you wrote out all the steps.
And sometimes you saw some sub steps that you needed to add in.
And then you went and refined them by expanding them.
So I did that, but it was, I don't know.
It was Glasgow computer science that originated from, I think,
but I'm not sure.
And it was in Pascal, because Pascal was the language that I used on,
on deck, backs, VMS, because that was their favorite language at the time.
That was the one that got the most support.
So that worked great.
For me, I suppose I sort of semi do that now, but not formally.
So it's these, these methodologies are quite interesting in, you know,
making you think in different ways or in organized ways.
So yeah, true.
Right now for something completely different.
Following day, we had more man talk with some guy on the internet talks about bidets and other things.
And there.
Yeah, yes.
There are two comments.
I'll read four keys one.
Oh, no.
I really wished I had more ideas for shows.
So I could help press down this kind of show from some guy in the internet to the reserve few smiley face.
And.
I like that.
Yes.
I think he's.
He's.
Yeah.
So you're donating on the concept of one.
Yes.
Second comment is from mad Swini squeezing at his show.
He says, I think I feel the show building up inside.
If only I could flush it out.
It's very good.
It's very good.
I kept hearing B day, which is I think the French pronunciation pronounces bidet.
And I kept going.
Good day.
Did you say your Australian Australian in my.
Because I.
Yeah, exactly.
Australian's a fair bit.
But I don't know how B day got turned into that.
But we do the same.
The money.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But yeah, it's my daughter was watching some show on YouTube.
Which was about somebody fitting one of these things.
And we're worried about whether you fit it on his toilet when he was in a.
An apartment rented apartment.
And nobody seemed to be all that bothered.
But yeah, it's just a sort of fairly shallow thing with a cold water supply.
So yeah, the chilly day.
That's going to be quite.
Yeah.
Chili.
Good tips there on.
I'm keeping the garden rules out of the sun, etc.
So if you want to know what that's about to listen to the show.
The following day was a requested show by myself to Claudio Miranda on mastodon.
And Claudio responded with a show installing postmarket OS on pine 64.
And all the steps involved in doing it.
And it's on my list of stuff to do.
But I just don't actually know what is the best.
A postmarket OS will give you loads of options for what was to install.
But I don't know which one.
I don't know what desktop environment is.
So if somebody has a tip for me that would be great.
I would appreciate it.
It was nice and nice and detailed.
Yeah, excellent.
So the next day we had Daniel with one year of Linux in which he.
The experiences of running Linux full time for a year.
For example, there are three comments and I'll do the first, which was R&B books in Linux.
I've never had any problems with Linux until Ubuntu 23.10 waiting for 24.04 LTS.
Foki says, thank you.
Thank you for your show.
Interesting to hear from someone coming from Windows to Linux with an open mind.
Being on Linux since 2001 and only using Windows when constrained to it by university or employer.
It's always good to get the view of the other side.
Absolutely.
Hendrik responded saying, enjoyable to learn about Linux user case and experience.
It was an enjoyable listen to your Linux experience.
I went over to Linux as my daily driver in December 2023.
Linux Mint Debian Edition and MDE.
We have different use cases but nevertheless interesting to learn some about your needs and experience.
Great stuff.
Excellent.
It was an interesting show.
It's good to hear that sort of viewpoint in a balanced way.
Absolutely.
And, yeah, so we'll panel it to him for doing that.
And the following day we had Delta Ray, 27 years of Linux, which rumbles on for 45 minutes.
An over exaggeration is over exaggerates about how awesome it is to use Linux.
And essentially what he does is go through every app that he has installed.
And this is very, very close to the what I'm running.
Instead of except CEO I'm running Alex D and what it is essentially a complete list of all the stuff that I currently have on my machine is also.
I'm very happy to see that probably because I follow him on master done stuff and I haven't installed and Twitter and have installed some utilities from command line.
That's all there.
There you go.
Three copies.
Excellent show.
It was my feeling too.
Yeah, I think he beats me in terms of years of Linux.
I can't get to 27.
I can't remember when I started it all clearly but so yeah, excellent.
I think I'm 23 minutes.
Yeah, I think I'm probably in there.
I can't remember that clearly.
I know it was a red hat when it was a desktop thing.
But yeah, so I was running that on a on a cast off PC that we could get from work because they clear that the student labs you could ask for one and you got an old criminal PC.
Yeah, it was red.
It was red hat.
Sorry, I was I installed Linux more than 20, you know, 25, maybe 27 years ago.
Both running with my daily driver will be 18, 90 years, 18 or 20 years.
Okay.
There we go.
Cool.
Anyone's welcome.
Comment.
No, no, it's good to hear these stories from long since.
So comment from Nick correction.
Hi, great podcast.
Thank you.
Small correction.
The Oracle virtual box extensions are not false, but they're free for personal use.
And Delta says, thanks, your right, Nick, thanks.
What I failed to mention during the podcast is that while it is indeed free for personal use, it's not available to make personal use claims anymore because I needed to use it at work.
And Oracle detects this and sends an astrogram to the organization asking them to pay.
Wow.
That's Oracle.
Yep.
Henry Cameron says, interesting review of your Linux softwares.
I like to show your review of your softwares include several I use.
Some have not heard of, but of interest and some I know not started to use and some not in my current need.
One of those I've installed and started to look at is Gramps, and I was happy to hear your positive comment about it, which gives me more confidence to use it.
When you talked about your early Linux days, it was when I used sun workstation with the Unix as my daily job driver.
I believe I started with sun in the 1990s, had it for probably more than a decade of job.
I liked the Unix environment, and I remember a colleague talked about Linux when I was very new, and I became interested in Linux, but it was much later I actually started to use Linux.
I could relate to several details in your story to my Unix background.
Finally, you mentioned the freedom to put the operating system in other software I want to on my device.
One big device, many have, is a car, and I believe modern cars lack software freedom.
Anyone with knowledge in modern cars, softwares, please enlighten us in a pod show.
Yes, very nice. That will be interesting indeed.
Yeah, I know nothing about that at all.
It would be fascinating to be able to hack a rubbish software that you often find on cars.
Over 10 years old. I suppose you expect the software to be rubbish, but you can't turn the radio off.
It's impossible to turn the radio off. What you do is you press the turn off and it just goes very quiet, and then it gradually creeps back up again.
You get the sound of the radio coming in when you restart the car later at very, very low level.
I asked the engineer at the garage, he said, oh, yeah, they're all doing that.
I think there's all the same software in all of them, so they all do that.
Yeah, yeah. So, you know, probably the show will go away.
Probably will.
So, yeah, good show. Could I say that already?
Yeah, good show.
It's, it's, yeah, very good. Oh, grams.
I was going to comment about grams, not, not think anybody's ever talked about on HBO that I would call.
I used to use it, somehow stopped using it because I ran out of real motivation to do it.
No, no, no, there's still lots, there's loads of lurking in, in censuses from ancient times.
I found one who was on a ship bound for the Boer War, which you believe in, in a censuses like that.
And my grandmother's brothers.
Anyway, yeah, grams has moved on enormously, such that I can't take my XML version of my database and turn it into grams anymore.
That's a project I really, really want to pick up on.
You don't have to hand craft the XML and stick it into the, into the, you know, hand read it and write and put it back into a grams.
But yeah, I'm about that, please.
I've stored a lot of information in there with the view that my, or my father was alive.
I focus more on getting information out of them whenever, whenever I was home visiting, I would take the time to ask them.
I'm asking about that.
So now I have all this information, but, you know, it's not cross-reference, it's not checked, it's not whatever.
So if there are people who have used grams, please do some shows on it, because it would be, yeah, it would be very useful for, for me, essentially.
And me.
Yeah, yeah, that would, that would be super.
Right.
Next.
Next one was power of twos.
And well, did you have the same thing Dave, when you were processing the show going, is this spam?
I did.
And I was, how the hell is it going to get laid out, because it was sending us a piece of plain text.
And of course, HTML would have just turned into one, but gigantic number.
Um, we're probably with spaces in it or something, but yeah, yeah.
And for those of you not looking at the show notes, it's basically, the show notes are two new line for new line, eight, new line, 16, new line, 32.
Yeah.
And that continues on for a lot of lines.
Yeah, yeah.
It's really good.
Forever.
Yes.
Who's trying to do mine?
And that's, I'll do those two and you can do your own results.
Okay.
Okay.
Wendy Gauss says, very enjoyable episode.
I can't wait to find out what happens in the sequel.
HVR is one, nine, two.
And I was going, what?
And then I realized, uh, this is four, nine, six, everybody.
Yes.
It takes a special brain, Wendy Gauss, to be able to figure that one out.
Thank you very much.
Brighton and Ohio says another example.
One of the powers of two is mentioned in Ender's game.
Ender's runs through the powers of two to claim, to calm himself down.
A nerdy way of counting to ten.
Enjoyable show.
That is lovely.
I like that.
Now, I used to suffer from insomnia when I was younger.
And I used to do powers of two in my head, um, two, uh, two or try two.
And I'm not very far, but that was one way of trying to, to sleep.
Um, anyway, I commented and my comment, uh, title is eight, three, eight, eight, six, oh, seven.
Great show of thanks.
It got me looking at slash, et cetera, slash services to remind myself of us about, in a signed
port.
That was the thing he was talking about.
Um, and then back in the 1970s, when I abandoned my biology PhD and got a job instead,
I ended up working in the computer service department at Lancaster University in the Northwest
of England, where we had an ICL 1900 series mainframe.
This is a 24-bit machine, which is magnet core memory, as you believe, running an operating system called
George III.
It's when, or, for instance, it's a nice cuddly name.
When somebody left, I stumbled into working in a assembly language program using the plan assembler
on ICL 200s, 1900s.
Of course, we had a source access to the operating system, which was on microfiche, which you
never want to do if you can help it.
And we're enhancing it with other universities in the region to implement an early form of networking,
a network called GANIT.
Uh, burnt into my memory from that day to this is the value of two to the 24 minus one,
which is eight, three, double, eight, six, oh, seven.
Of course, it's the largest sign integer that can be stored in 24 bits, slightly face.
Oh, and because I was looking at the HVR database today, I feel I am in the presence of greatness,
because not only is the show number 4096, the duration in seconds is 1024.
Wow.
That was a hundred percent look.
Isn't that wonderful?
Yeah.
But I think that's his original length, because we store that as opposed to adding the
interior.
Yeah.
So maybe he is crafted this specifically.
So this is why I say the presence of greatness, definitely, that takes some, some detail
to achieve that.
I wonder how many other little easter eggs there are in the show.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
Amazing.
I didn't enjoy that.
I don't know why powers are two, so I'm here.
I don't know where.
This was just a nice episode that really for me just is the sort of thing that HVR throws
off now.
And again, just.
You have no idea.
Just a lovely episode.
It's great, great work.
Following day, we'll take our jobs.
Of course, they will.
A bladder on about thoughts on robots taking our jobs about DoDoDoMe.
And this was an interesting one, actually.
And there it is.
Come on.
One thing that DoDoDoMe.
Oh, sorry.
I was track where we were as your turn, yeah.
You had the big spielder.
DoDoDoMe.
The next thing, the one thing I forgot to mention in the previous was when tech
had obsolete.
There have been new things for the people to do or make.
I'm not seeing the new things in this case.
And he also says, I know that people still smart people saying,
AI will not take your jobs.
But have you seen the latest at the very least taking heads should be worried.
Talking heads should be worried.
On the other hand, the people who rise the talking heads maybe just don't need the talking heads.
Part now, here's the video demo.
There's a link in there showing an example of AI taking our jobs.
But it was interesting from the point of view that, you know,
that's what computing has been doing since, you know, day one.
And the computers are going to take our jobs.
I remember my father lost his job as a result of it being computerized.
And the jobs replacing the jobs are, yes, there are jobs to replace the jobs,
but it's usually in order of magnitude fewer jobs, maybe higher value, but fewer jobs.
So there you go.
And I, he met the point about how many people he may have met unemployed by improving scripting and stuff.
And I was thinking, gosh, I didn't quite imagine that myself in my day.
Yep, yep.
Me too.
Me too.
Yeah, yeah.
The only comment I made to myself on this one, I'm terrible at writing comments to people.
I'm sorry.
Was that, yeah, I don't disagree at all, but a number of people warned.
It's what you just said that the number of jobs were diminished.
But that's the point at which we need UBR, universal basic income to,
because that's always been the vision of the future.
Robots will do things and we'll have less demand on us, which will be a good thing.
So long as we get it, because, you know, as things sound at the moment,
here we go.
We just have any more.
Socialist, communist point of views, yeah.
This is common sense.
This is common sense.
It's a common sense.
Yeah.
It's your official opinion, Dave.
It's my common sense.
Okay.
Anyway, that may or may not disagree with you, but that's my political opinion.
However, yeah, no, it is, it is interesting.
I feel like this is the first time that the IT industry have, you know,
oh gosh, this computer is taking our jobs might actually affect us.
And we're scared.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's true.
Yes, it's definitely going to make a massive difference in all sorts of things.
But yeah, it's, it's, yeah, I can't predict it.
And one part to me says, yeah, well, if you're such a bad programmer person,
like where an AI can do your job, then, you know, you shouldn't be doing that job.
And then on the other hand, I'm thinking, yeah, boss.
That call will not be made by that person.
That call will be made by that person's HR department.
So whether they are or they are not, it'll still be made.
The cost, the cost savings in their course will be made.
And then they inhernd mess that's left as a result will be left behind.
So, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
That was my political opinion.
Those opinions of mine and not that it just really does affect the public radio.
But this is just standing back, this is a great thing to have a show like that
also thrown into the mix where you're, you know, you're kind of forced to think
really about actions and reactions and stuff.
And you know, when we looked at the coupers who lost all their jobs
because aluminium barrels came and we kind of went, oh, I don't make barrels.
I don't care.
Oh, sure, sure, sure.
It's my son's working in the area of Ayurveda.
So I've said many times.
And his position exists because all the local banks, probably all the banks in the entire UK
have reduced the number of actual physical banks enormously.
So the times when you used to go and ask for advice about this, that the other local branch
just down the road have all gone.
And you're supposed to phone up some chatbot and have a chat with them with that with it.
You know, so it's there.
It's clear as clear as day.
But I don't know.
I'm glad that DODD dummy did this because I think he's got a clearer
view than I have.
I tend to get lost in the weeds very quickly thinking about this.
And so it's good to have his view point on it.
I think it's early days with the AI that we have at the moment.
It's it's predictive.
Very good predictive text pretending to be.
Somebody said it's a it's a Paris pretending to speak.
But yeah, we'll see.
We will see following the road trips without GPS.
A short off the cough discussion about how we navigated road trips in the past.
And this is by trade and great.
I mean, you might.
Great tips.
Basically, great.
And there was one comment.
Yes.
Archers 72 says road trips to that GPS.
This is an interesting show and I'm looking at the transcriptions to see what I'm missing.
I recently found myself also losing signal and got it back by cycling in and out of airplane mode to remedy the problem.
This to get me thinking that I should also have a backup as I travel semi frequently from Kentucky to the Chicago area suburbs.
Also because of my family situation.
Depending on which location I travel, it's between 350 and 400 miles.
With this large last road trip and also some roads that I wanted to avoid.
I did using OS say OS M and.
So he said osman which causes open which uses open street map in the background.
I would have to read the transcript to catch all your points, which were very interesting.
I'll probably be getting at least a handheld CB radio in the near future.
Also, it's been 20 years or so.
But I used to print out directions from map quest if the destination was somewhat local.
Thanks for your show.
Yeah.
I.
I both too.
I was thinking when I was listening to this, I was in the position where.
I went down in New Year's Eve to collect my daughter from a party somewhere.
And on the way back, it kept the navigation systems kept rerouting me over a ferry on the Rhine,
which a pulls death 10 o'clock in the night.
Everything the road was there.
So I ended up having to drive to Rotterdam, which is completely out of the way.
And then from there, like following the regular boring road signs up.
And yeah, thankfully, so I have those, I have the maps for this, you know, as a backup.
And thankfully, OSM Android now has the ability to allow you to go back via a specific direction.
So you can follow a, if you do a route down and you do route tracking, you can track that route back,
so you can go back the same way, which is excellent.
Oh, yeah, that's really nice. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I had a job as a van driver at one point, just to supplement my,
just a little, I heard about all your jobs.
Yeah, it was a part-time job as I was doing my advanced degree thingy.
And yeah, so, and that was way before GPS.
I got quite good at storing, that was driving around Manchester and the environment,
so sort of Lancashire area.
I got pretty good at working out routes myself.
But there were times when you'd come off a motorway and then onto a roundabout.
And then, oh, God, which one of my, which of these is these nine exits do I take?
So I evolved the method going round the roundabout several times to read all the exits.
And then, oh, it was number three.
Yeah, oh, thank goodness.
You know, because I don't know if anybody spotted that, I thought I was insane, maybe.
But it was a way of just sort of taking stock and also finding labors and sitting and looking at that,
was a common thing to do doing that sort of stuff.
Yeah, I got pretty good at it.
And for our American listeners, the roundabout is a circular four-way stop sign.
Traffic circle.
Four-way, the term that traffic circle.
The tendency is some cities have got lots of mobile phones.
Yeah, that's true.
They're not popular.
When I took my kids to America to do your semity in various places around California,
I sat for nights looking on Google Maps and working at all the routes.
And then I printed them out.
So we had a sheet for this stuff.
Yeah.
Even though we hired a car with GPS, it didn't work.
It didn't seem to get, it didn't charge from the car for some reason or other.
So you'd start off and then the thing would die.
You'd charge it in the hotel.
And then it would last, you know, for what?
We kept turning it off all the time.
So we actually used these maps for a bit.
What was that?
What was the name of the company?
I can't remember who we hired from, but they were Alamo.
That's right.
Alamo.
They said, oh, yeah, yeah.
We don't allow you to power stuff off our USBs in the car.
So how are we supposed to use this GPS?
I don't know.
I just work here.
Yeah.
Anyway.
Yeah.
But yeah, that's enough anecdote, I think.
But yeah, it's a fascinating subject.
It's the 72 comments about getting map quests, maps and stuff back in the day is also my experience in the UK version.
Always good to have a backup reckon.
Okay.
Following day, an introduction to home assistant, a new series all about home automation.
This time an introduction to home assistant, where I, more or less, read all the people's websites.
And what better method is exactly.
Henrik says, looking forward to learn more about home assistant.
I'm uncertain if when or to what extent I start with home automation.
Although it can be fun, I only want it in the case where it is better to our ad value.
Also, prefer a not convicted device.
Anyway, I have been looking at home assistants, which would be my first school for home automation.
So I'm looking forward to learn more about it here on the hacker public radio.
And I'm looking forward to having the time to do this.
Yes.
I also, as you know, because I've told you, I'm planning home assistant at some point, but not getting on with it very fast at the moment.
But yeah, yeah, that would be nice.
But I'm not, I think, probably have the same viewers.
Henrik, I don't really want to have cameras at my door and chatting with the guy delivering to the wrong house and stuff.
But yeah, something that opens and shuts the blinds would be nice.
That's what I hope to be able to do.
Build a foundation on this about an installing home assistant at least as a base.
And then then some sample use cases of, like, just turn the temperature or whatever, whatever we come across, see what's useful.
People can build upon that and refer to the, these shows, which are the foundations to get them into the, into the up to speak basically.
And hopefully you do shows about their experience.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Yep.
Charleston, South Carolina.
We visit South Carolina when we meet up with some friends.
This is a show from Hookah, who was traveling was early around about South Carolina.
It's a little while ago now because he's retired.
As you're tired from retiring and traveling with vehicle in Charleston, South Carolina.
And I do apologize to everybody going, Ken, that is not a South Carolina accent.
I appreciate that.
Well, so have you heard any of the Irish accents on American TV lately?
In my defense.
It's just, it's Charleston, by the way.
Well, as in the dance.
Yeah.
Very good.
No, it's absolutely.
Again, they look at the photos and read their signs, etc.
Yeah, yeah, I had a, I had a most enjoyable half hour or so hunting through all this stuff.
After listening to what, even while listening to the show, yeah, very good.
AIOMG, some other guy on the internet talks about artificial intelligence.
And this is operator.
And yeah, operator is operating as a completely different level to me with this AI agents.
This all makes, I was following it as I was listening to it.
But now for the life of me, I have no clue.
I just found it very, now I'm looking at it as very confusing thought of Dave, your thoughts.
Well, I had similar thoughts.
I wrote down here that I had, I missed about 90% of it.
But it feels like there's a lot of really important information, very valuable stuff in there.
But until I know more, I need more context to be able to dig into it more.
So I'm hoping that gradually I will learn more about this and be able to say,
oh, there was a show about this, I can go and check some stuff in there to find out more.
So yeah, it's, it's, yeah, I'm pretty much on the same level as you.
Yeah, but obviously he is using it for stuff that I'm not.
No, fantastic.
Yeah, massive notes.
This is really, really, I applaud.
The amount of work is gone into this.
Okay, the next day was R272 with more MPV quick tips.
And this was the text to speech version, which I was listening to.
And I really had to go to the transcript to go, what is, what is he saying?
I'm not sure the tips really, you're reading out all go slash dot zero, zero, zero, zero.
Was the best use of a text to speech ended.
No, no, no, those zeros really go.
It's, it's quite hard to understand the, the, the con, the full context,
that the full details of the show, because I, my brain gets stuck totally on the numbers.
I just can't, they sort of rattle about in my head while I should be listening to the next bit.
And I can't, because I'm stuck on those weird, weird chains of numbers,
which I'm trying somehow to, to make sense of.
And they're not really that important.
Yeah.
Well, the point was he had his history for MPV and bookmarks and stuff like that.
So it was reading that out.
And there was a lot of, a lot of stuff like URL links and stuff,
data codes and play times, which, if you were reading it, you would probably skip over,
you know, the links of the show notes.
You read the title of the link and then leave the, they listen to you.
Not that I'm saying you shouldn't send in a text to speech show.
It's just, if you're just sending in text to speech show, try and have just text and not computer.
Output.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
How far are just 72 doesn't, doesn't get annoyed at me now for saying that.
I think the concept of it was, was great.
But, yeah, the, especially I always take the time.
And as has Archers 72 and so to turn, turn my links into, into proper links,
not reveal their, their weirdness, you know, with all the commas and presents
and things in it.
Because it's, it's better for the, for the eyes, it's better for understanding.
Yeah.
So, of course, GTSN, can I do that?
It's going to borrow, borrow right in, I guess.
I'm wondering how you got the bookmarks like that.
Yes.
I've never, I use MPV all the time.
It's brilliant.
We use as a main media player at home, like literally the kids have to drop to a console,
change directory into the directory, MPV full screen, do the full Monty.
But it's classic.
Even, you know, you have those dark scenes where everything's moody and you can't see a thing.
Like, there's a one episode of Star Wars thing that was watching with the, with the,
with the, uh, Pucky.
And it was so dark.
It was like, there was nothing on, there's literally nothing on the screen.
But you could adjust by hitting three, four, five, six, seven, and eight.
You could increase, decrease the brightness, the sharpness, the gamma level.
So at least it was visible what they were doing on the screen.
Brilliant.
Brilliant player.
But Archer, something to do.
A show on bookmarking.
It would be excellent.
No, no, no, it's now running off on the, the official size of my show.
I've never been a show again.
That's, it's an interesting subject.
Oh, it says, uh, I've never got, got into MPV.
Oh, it's, it's classic.
Brilliant player.
Yeah, I know.
And I miss, Mr X is into it as well.
I've just sort of looked at it and thought, nah, not that one.
But, um, it's, uh, yeah, it's quite, uh, quite intriguing to, to use it for, for something like that.
I think I might, well, we'll do that.
Yep.
Cool.
Okay, we'll carry on.
What's in my bag?
Dave Hingney has a bag.
Uh, he's got a watch in it.
Hing says, nice to hear your first show of Dave.
I hope, uh, to listen to you again soon.
Cool.
Yeah.
Excellent.
And I liked that, uh, my messenger bag, actually.
And also, I liked the power bank.
That's cool.
Yes.
Yes, yes.
No, interesting stuff.
Although I don't tend to use messenger bags myself.
But, uh, this looks like a good, if this was a rock sack, I would probably, I would be interested.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, I've used messenger bags in the past, the ones with laptops and that sort of stuff.
But they're uncomfortable after, for me, anyway, after long use.
Whereas a rock sack, you can balance better.
You can even strap it around your waist and get the weight distributed better, I find for it.
It's a personal matter, it's personal things.
It's good.
I thought I took the, um, links out of those, uh, in the show notes, I see that they've got all the tracking links still on.
I thought I took all those out.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
How do they get past?
I don't know.
That's weird.
Okay.
And we'll have to give that out.
As a general principle, we, we, I think we agreed that we, we should maybe be doing that.
Um, because, and I was actually contemplating writing a script to do generic tracker stuff removal.
Um, as these, these being processed.
Yeah, I, yeah.
I went to the episode and edited it in the database to remove it.
It was kind of weird.
Why they're back.
Yeah, I don't, I don't know.
I, I didn't think to do it at the time.
And you, you, you, you commented about it after it.
So I just left it with you.
So we'll be able to get a myth to change this first.
Strange.
And maybe that Amazon did a restore of the database.
Yeah, that does.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Anyway, some other guy did an introduction to JQ part one.
Jason format using the JQ utility.
And this is what happens, Dave.
A show idea along and off somebody else will do it for you and steal all your thunder.
There's, there's not a huge lot of thunder there.
Actually, it's more of a sort of small paper bag being being exploded.
Um, but yeah, it's, yeah, it's, we've talked about this for ages as it being needed.
But it was Mr. X's show where he was, um, he was using Python to, to pass Jason,
which is all fine and good.
But if you want to do anything, um, the command line, then you really struggling without this.
Um, so I thought, okay, now it's the time to, uh, to start on this down this road.
So there we go.
And you've done another few episodes.
And when you've done those, then I can do other, we'll see, I'm interested to see where you end.
And then, uh, I'll, I'm not saying that I'm more of us than you, but I've done some fairly hairy stuff here.
You probably are because you've been using it more than I have.
But, uh, that's fine.
I mean, um, it's brilliant.
It's, it's a big subject.
It's an enormous object.
And I do not want to spend the next year working on it, particularly.
Um, one thing I discovered looking ahead just the other day is that, uh,
Jackie uses a regular expression engine, which I had not heard of before.
Uh-huh.
Uh-huh.
Which is an engine which tries to consolidate all the others.
You know, there's one used in Python.
There's one used in Perl.
Uh, there's one in JavaScript.
It tries to consolidate them all into one thing, which is, it's a good choice for JQ.
But, uh, you, you've got to, you've got to, but you can come in with your,
with pretty much all of you, uh, of your regular expression knowledge and use it.
But if you want to do the more advanced stuff, then you're going to have to go and do a reading about how,
how it moans in this, this moment.
So I don't think I should begin into that, that aspect of, uh, JQ.
So I think I'll leave that for the reader, or the listener, to get into more.
But yeah.
Excellent.
Um, the following day, my story, how to cure, uh,
I found the cure for my obesity, talk about historical weight gain and recently learned,
uh, so that how to lose weight.
And this is the, uh, Jason Fung fasting method.
Um, and there's one comment.
Is it my turn?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Traces.
Thank you for sharing.
Many of us have struggled with excess weight.
I've been using an intermittent fasting eating pattern.
Quite some time now with mixed results.
And I behave for my remaining meals and minimize my sugars, then all as well.
When I binge and eat half a box of cookies, it doesn't work so well.
So thanks for the inspiration to be more disciplined.
Fantastic.
I hope it goes well for, um, Yerun, um, maybe a follow-up show in a year?
Tell us all the word.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It, uh, I liked some of his, um, suggestions about, uh, effectively prolonging your,
your nighttime fast, which is what breakfast does as he pointed out.
Um, but by not eating, uh, your first meal or till later.
So that's, that's when I would not hurt off before that makes a lot of sense.
I actually tried, uh, the fast diet, uh, as they, as the person was called,
I, I did for about six months or so a few years ago.
It definitely helped.
And getting into the habit of just being, being hungry all day, uh, you can control it.
And then the meal that you have, this is one where you be fast all day and then at a meal at night.
Um, the meal that you have at night, which is supposed to be very pro tenacious and high fiber and stuff,
uh, is, is the most wonderful thing.
This is a treat, but you don't do it every day.
You do it, you know, two days a week or something like that.
It, it helped.
But, um, it's a very, very hard thing to do because you, uh, your body wants to eat stuff.
Of course, that's the way it's evolved and, uh, and designed as it were.
So yeah, it's, so yeah, good luck to your own.
Um, the following day we had my tribute to feeds by Henrik, uh, Henrik.
Feeds are useful and keep me up to date with new information for websites I'm interested in.
Yes.
Feeds are a thing and they're absolutely cool.
And we have lots of them.
One of them, by the way, um, which brings up two questions.
Um, on mastodon on the HPR channel, we, uh, have a lot of engagements with the community.
And one of the comments that I think on past was that somebody requesting not necessarily for HPR,
but, uh, for another, you know, to general call to all podcasters out there,
please include the transcripts as a feed.
And we, of course, have transcripts here on HPR.
So we should be producing a RSS feed with the transcripts.
It'll be trivial.
No, no problem there whatsoever.
Uh, the only thing is which version, uh, should we use community input, please advise, please advise over.
Um, so that was us.
Uh, great, great show.
Yeah.
I would also like to know how to get the feed out of mastodon.
I think we should include some of those comments here on, um, the community news.
So if you, if anybody has any, knows how to do that.
So that I don't have to do it.
Can you please tell us the regret?
Yeah, yeah.
I did manage to get, um, notifications coming out in a feed in Thunderbird,
but, uh, but it's not very reliable.
And notifications I get.
So, uh, yeah, I'd like to know that as well.
There's, there's, there's bits of mastodon, which are still quite strange, I find.
Um, I've no idea what lists are.
Anyway, that's a whole, so by the way, somebody do, uh, introduction to, uh, to mastodon for us to regret.
Yes.
Then the next day, which was, I think the last day, is that correct, Dave?
It is.
Yep.
Uh, response to HBR 40, 65 shoutout to a shoutout about the framework laptop by Swift 110.
And this is, uh, more stuff about the, um, new news was talking about the initial, um, about, uh, the framework laptop and stuff.
So this was a response to that.
Those framework laptops look really cool and upgradable and awesome.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Very tempted, drooling at the mouth.
If I didn't have enough computers.
Yeah, yeah, it's, uh, same here, really.
A more desktop, these days rather than laptop, but, uh, yeah.
If I was in the microphone laptop, that would be one of which would be very keen on.
So that was this.
What else was in the docketive?
So we have a couple of comments from previous shows.
Um, I'll start with a news show by some guy on the internet.
And we get comment number two on that from El Muscle about George Santos.
Uh, it was, uh, was mentioned on that particular episode.
An excellent podcast on Santos from a left queer perspective explicit in brackets.
Bad Gays, George Santos, episode webpage, and he gives a link to badgayspod.poorbeam.com.
And media file, also, uh, podbeam link on that subject.
Yeah.
And there was a comment on the Norrist, uh, making a, um, duri timer.
An operator does some free, um, free diagnosis.
Thank you.
You got a day, bro.
And a picture to the autism spectrum disorder.
A page.
Although, I don't think it's this one.
Yes.
Um, I got that.
I got, I mean, I understood.
Anyway, it was coming from.
And yeah, it's once you become alerted to these things.
And you, uh, you see it everywhere.
Just true.
Um, in the, we're skipping over the events counter.
There's a link there in the short.
That'll probably be moving to the main page.
Um, in other business, Craig Maloney, host of the open metal cast, uh,
has passed away.
And, um, uh, we're putting together a little bit of, um,
remembrance for him.
Um, we're going to, uh, do that this month, uh, possibly playing one of the episodes.
Um, so if there's anything if, uh, he was, uh, it was unbelievable.
The number of communities that he was involved in, um, uh,
like Tarot and Pepper and Carrot.
A lot of, he was, uh, one of the cold maintainers over there.
He was involved in Linux user groups.
And there's a link there to his obituary, uh, Greg guy.
We'll be sorely missed by the community.
And, um, so if you have anything in any way affected your life, uh,
and you want to contribute anything to this, uh, episode, um,
feel free to do so.
Either text and I'll read it out.
Or if you have some audio, you can send it in to me.
That'll be great.
Over to you, Dave.
Yes.
Well, I just put an item in about one of the, uh,
issues that was raised on Get You Repository, which was, uh,
to do with, uh, using Markdown for show notes.
And, um, the issue was that if you're using, if you use syntax highlighting for
fenced code blocks, that's where you, you write a bit of script or whatever,
whatever code you're writing, you put three back ticks before and after it.
But the first set of back ticks are followed by the name of the language.
And you expect in certain contexts for, um, script for the, um,
highlighting to be enabled.
So you get different colors for the various elements of the language.
But this doesn't work for us.
And the reason for that is that, um,
well, I've turned it off because the way it's implemented, uh, using
Pandoc is that it adds a lot of div and span tags around the bits of,
of text that, uh, to be highlighted.
And when that became available and we tried sending it to archive.org,
then we found that all of the tags were stripped out.
Um, so you lost, you lost any highlighting that, uh, that you might have wanted added.
Um, so what I've said is that I will look to see if I can, uh,
whether that restrictions have been lifted, whether that stripping out has finished or not.
And the other thought is, well, put the, uh, the, um,
the complex, the colored stuff in the notes on the HBR site in the static site.
And if it gets stripped out on, on archive.org will so be it.
Um, we'll, we'll not, we'll not show any tears on it.
So I'm just making the point that I'm going to try and look at that over the,
over the next month and see what's the best way through.
I'm on a question.
We've done the migration of the websites, uh, and stuff.
So we have content that's in the database.
So we've got the HBR hub, which has got their PHP stuff that can really only be done in one place.
And we've got the automatic generating stuff, which looks at the database and then generates all the static files.
But aside from that, there are general static files that don't,
but are not part of the database that we need to keep.
For example, host images and, um, uh,
uh, wild files of the host introducing themselves.
Hello, my name is Ken.
For example, those are outside of that as are the show notes.
As are they, and not the show notes, but as are they, um, extended show notes when that's the case, images or attachments or source code and stuff like that.
So it was always a million attention to have an RSS, you know, transparency.
If you transparency layer, so if you imagine it as you have a blank disk and then you or sync up all the static stuff.
And then you have on top of that, you superimpose the dynamically generated stuff from the database.
It should, with both of those things, you should be able to get everything.
And then one of the other transparencies is the media files, which will be a choice, whether you download those or not.
From the internet archive or locally.
So I'm, so that's work that's ongoing.
And I haven't documented that as yes.
I know, Ken.
I know I've been bugging you about a bridge.
We have, this is a subject which has passed, passed, passed us by.
We have, we have told one another about it and told ourselves about it, probably as well.
But we've not necessarily moved forward significantly.
I, yeah, so I absolutely agree.
And we do need to reach some decisions about how we do that.
And the reason I bring it up now is that I'm in the process of clearing out.
So I'm trying to get that second computer at home sort of, but every time I do, I run into other issues.
And I've got a large terabyte size disk drive that can associate with that.
And now we're bandwidth.
I have half a gig of upload that I can dedicate to serving HPR files, which would be more than off I reckon.
So the infrastructure is being worked on in order to be able to do that.
And the implementation itself is, is some rsync script switch.
It shouldn't be too bad.
But if somebody has a way of advising us on how to track media outside of gate.
So I don't know here we use artefactory as a method of doing that.
But what is the other way of tracking stuff, tracking files and check sums of files.
We're doing that manually in the database.
And we're also doing a little bit in Git.
But I don't want all the images and web files being in Git.
And equally, it's a pain having them in the database having to manage that in the database.
Is there a like tool that I can go up guess and install Blah and pointed at something and go here.
This is managed this for me.
There is a tool I just wrote for you and Pearl.
No, no, having a bad day.
I'm not ridden yet.
There is something called Git and Annex, which I've heard people using for that type of thing,
where you've got a lot of non-gitable in appropriate for Git type files.
But you want to track them all through Git and Annex is one.
And I think there's a number of others that are similar to it.
I don't have any direct experience.
I've just heard people talking about them.
So yeah, hopefully we'll find that or be pointed in that sort of direction by anybody who knows about them.
Yep, so that's written in Haskell.
God, if there was only somebody who knew Haskell here.
But I can talk to us about this.
Apparently, JQ is originally written in Haskell.
That was not written in C.
But yeah, cool, eh?
Cool.
So I think that's it, Dave.
I think it is.
Yes, yes, that's everything.
Okay.
And thanks again for adjusting the time to do this.
Problem.
Tune in tomorrow for another exciting episode of Hacker.
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