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Episode: 4221
Title: HPR4221: HPR Community News for September 2024
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4221/hpr4221.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 21:40:00
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4221 from Monday the 7th of October 2024.
Today's show is entitled HPR Community News for September 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 September
2024.
Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, young as the matches and allos tassadour.
This is HPR Community News for September 2024 and my name is Ken Fallon and joining me this
evening is…
Hello Dave Morris is here.
Dave Morris in the house.
HPR is a community podcast where shows are contributed by listeners very much like you.
And in fact, looking at the queue, it could do with some more listeners,
getting off their boat and recording some shows.
After this, I'm going to be posting another two additional shows from the emergency queue,
which will bring down the amount of shows and the emergency queue as well,
or the reserve queue as we're calling it now.
So, if you have not submitted a show to HPR, please look at the record button on your mobile device,
or if you don't have a device, you're coming from a country, you don't have a microphone.
Please get in contact with us.
We have people all over the world and we can funnel recording devices to you through whatever
issues the regime that is operating your country may be under.
So, please, please, please get in touch.
If you're a listener and have thought about doing podcasts and don't know what to talk about,
the very first show should be high.
My name is Insert Your Name here.
And yes, I would consider it very funny if I received a show that's from somebody with
Insert Your Name here as your name.
I'm probably sitting now.
I probably won't in the future.
How do you care for what you wish for exactly?
So, please send in the show.
The first thing is how you got to be listening to HPR in the first place.
That's your first show.
Talking about all the tech.
All the people that inspired you, all the tech that inspired you,
to the point where you felt like picking up on microphone.
That's a good start.
Then you have the first show done.
Then Dave and I and everybody else will go through your show with a fine tooth comb
and come up with a little big list of other shows that you can send us in.
But that's our secret plan, which we never divulge to anyone.
But seriously, all messing aside, if you're a regular host and haven't submitted a show this year,
as in in 2024, where this is an excellent opportunity to get your new year's resolution
out of the way by sending in a show.
And also, good excuse if you've got shows in the waiting pile time to dust them off.
Call it done.
Close enough for jazz.
You can make a series out of it and finish it there and send in what you have, okay?
Don't want to rush people's shows.
You don't have to send in crap.
But finish what you're finished and send it in, yeah?
Indeed.
Okay, what is his spiritive?
Well, now you ask, I've often wondered this much.
No, it's a podcast where we receive contributions from the community, which you believe.
And it really works and it's been working for many, many years now,
that people send in shows, all sorts.
And so long as they are of interest to hackers and that that's a very, very broad spectrum,
they are they're perfectly acceptable.
And you should just look through the the history of HBR and some of the shows that have existed in
the past, been sent in the past and you will find there's an enormous range and really
wonderful things to listen to, by the way.
So yeah, that's that's that's my analysis of this situation.
Yep, very good.
And this showed that you're listening to.
So the governance of HBR, we hopefully will be I have in my head Dave that will be able to do
all of this stuff because we're going to our camp and we're going to have plenty of time.
And I know going to it that I'll think, oh, we'll have plenty of time on the booth and we'll
redesign the web page and we'll have lots to discuss.
But what will happen is we end up talking to people and then we are driving back in the car
going, why didn't we get all the stuff done that we wanted to do?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think we've done this before talking about, we can talk through,
talk about through, okay, maybe 2012 when I first met you.
What we discussed didn't happen, didn't we?
No, we did a great, very good time.
Yeah, it was really good, it was one, that's the important thing.
So if we get to us good and well, if we don't, it's good and well also.
But on your HPR, Dave and I and several other people,
Ron is back and Norris are some of the managers in the back end,
Dave and I tend to take care of the regular running of the show.
Basically, I'm just a bash script, somebody in shows, somebody in shows.
Dave does their actual work, Ron, to stop to the website.
Norris is working, hopefully, on the master done thing.
Want to talk to people in one thing, that is one thing I do want to talk to people about
in Oddcamp, because there's going to be a lot of Open Clutch Oddcamp.
By the way, if you haven't, if you don't know what it is, it's an Open Clutch Your event,
Barakam style, where they're very much like HPR.
They talks are given by members of the community with the exception of two rooms
where they're scheduled, and as it happens, I am giving a talk about the
amateur radio series here on Hacker Public Radio, so hopefully, if you go on to Oddcamp,
you'll pop in and listen to that.
And I got distracted again, Dave. What was the talk about?
No idea. Anyway, governments, Dave and I are we're the managers and we work behind the scenes
and this is an opportunity for us to tell you stuff that's been going on in the HPR community
for the last month and key among them. Oh yeah, I was talking about the master done thing.
So there's a want to integrate master done with HPR. So technically, I think Norris has a good
idea of how to do it. Technically, I also have a good idea of how to integrate it into the current
common system, so it wants to disrupt things too much. The only thing that's out there is
some legal questions and I'd like to get the feel for what the community thinks about that,
and that's the opportunity to do that over a few beers in Oddcamp would be ideal.
So that's kind of where I'm going with that. But Anu, the most fun part, Dave, of this community
new show is introducing the new horse and you get that honor and we do have a new host
I'm delighted to say and has the rejoices in the wonderful name of Harry Larry.
Not to be mistaken, but the other Harry Larry, which we found out also exists the master done.
Really? I didn't know that. I never introduced the soul.
That's what we got. Okay, very good.
Master done, yes. Quite a nice place to hang out.
Particularly when you apply liberal filters and blocking.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you can sign up to all the manner of channels or of chat as well,
which I found wonderful by subscribing to hashtag. So you can be inundated with all sorts of
wonderful things like pictures of cats, if that's yours. Yeah, I find my feed
overrun by cats, despite my filter. A few cats are there, there's five plus one.
I think it was my daughter and I who said, oh, look, you can get cats and we both clicked it and
yeah, so that's great. Anu, what we do here, and the reason for this show in the first
space was because I felt that we knew hosts, especially we're not getting the feedback
that they deserve on the shows. So what we do is Dave and I go through all the shows here
that were aired in the previous month and give you a, you know,
could ever run down what they're about, what we thought of them, et cetera, et cetera. But it's
also meant that I've ended up recommending the feed for this particular show to
new people so that they don't get swamped by the gigabytes of shows that we have of a day.
So Dave and I will now proceed to do that. And the first one was the HBIR community news for
last month. Did we annoy anyone, Dave? I don't know. We annoyed them. We suddenly got some responses.
So yeah, so we had one from Troller Coaster who said, why an exclamation might go to a mark.
Instead of commenting here, I made a small recording. Anyway, my takeaway is that I should learn
to put the key message in the first minute of a podcast so people who drop off early at least
get that message. So we commented on his show last time and we might have sort of missed the
key point that he was putting forward a little bit. I certainly didn't because I think we,
yeah, well, we can comment on his show. We gave him to believe that we had missed the key point
perhaps. But I don't think we did either. But there you go. Okay, Brian and Ohio said,
if you could do that, I'll redo my own response. Oh, okay. Oh, sorry, yeah, I didn't
realise you had it. Brian and Ohio said, single board computer, which didn't response to
Ken's comment on this. Ken, you should try banana pie M1. It's an all-winner A20 single call
that's affordable. It runs Slackware 15.0 and so it has a secure stable OS available.
There's Slackware ARM official site and it gives the URL for it.
And by the way, thanks, Brian, for that comment. So I found I went and looked for that
in on the Indian Amazon or unknown various different sites and that came around to 6,750 rupees,
which works out European at about 80 euros 39 cents and sort of value for money equivalents based
on the price for feeding for comparing a restaurant bill from the Netherlands with a restaurant
bill from India. And I reckon that would put that at about 800 dollars. So that one will be
way too expensive. So I'm still looking for equivalent ones if we can.
Something OpenWRT might be the way to go, but yeah, more advice. And of course people in India
please comment on sort of networking devices that you can, some sort of device that you can get
locally that we can put Linux on, that's got network connections, ideally physical internet
connections on it. Comments please. The next day we have the interview about our camp. So after
five years away, COVID, et cetera, et cetera, we had our camp. So that is excellent. That's coming
up. They also were interviewed on Floss Weekly this week. Oh, I didn't know. That's really good.
Yeah, doing the rounds. Good stuff. I'm so looking forward to it again.
There's a nice group of people and the only thing is Pete Cannon won't be there, unfortunately.
Oh, okay. Yeah, I'm hoping many of our HPR hosts will be there as well. So something
look forward to. Yes. So we had the next day, Lee, our hobbies, pathological, personal
reflections on hobby, obsessive interest, and mental health. Yeah. It's over. Yeah, you know,
I, I, my comments were to myself. It's a, I don't think hobbies are pathological, but I can see
why you might think that, you know, the sort of thing where you get so absorbed into it because
if you're, where your brain works, that you, you, you, you spend your entire day doing a particular
thing and suddenly realize it's through in the morning or something, which I've done myself. So,
you know, but but still don't see those pathological. It's a person anyway. No, no, no,
I'm sorry. No, I'm not sure. Sorry. No, I'm not sure.
Over.
D&T replies patholologies. Thank you, Dave. All correct. Who needs chat GPT when I have Dave.
Thank you for your thought, provoking show, thoughts on how, thoughts on the show paralyze,
paralyze in much the same way as my many obsessions and disparate pursuits. No idea which way to go,
which approach to take too many commons impossible to choose. But will be a natural face.
Yes, yes. I always say it's like the cartoon and the guys waiting for a lift and there's two of
them and they both arrive at the same time and they can't take either because you can't choose
which one. And I do that. I have been known to do that, not that precise thing, but the equivalent,
you know, so it's it's a classic. Now, I would put myself, you know, listening to this, I'm obviously
listening from the point of view of Lee and kind of similar situation. But when I think about
normal people, right? Then, you know, watching the footy on a weekend, the amount of time that's
devoted, time and energy during the day, during the week and thingy. I'm going, okay, we're just
maybe it is pathological. Now that I think about that actually, you go to your own pub, you go to
your own, okay? Yeah. Yeah, it's it's an interesting discussion. I think the things that Lee
was talking about didn't seem to me to be pathological at such, but yeah, you got to you got to
learn to control what should I say, your enthusiasm or your obsession perhaps? Is it an obsession?
Yeah, but it is, is the obsession allowed if it's something that everybody does?
No, you're allowed to, you're allowed to go nuts about soccer or rugby or whatever or cricket
or whatever. But yeah, if you're going obsessed about something that nobody else is interested in,
then that's kind of weird. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Just, you just, you don't conform in some way or
therefore it's wrong. So I don't quite go along with that one. Yeah, good show, good show. We're
not afraid to talk about stuff here on HBO. No, no, it was a bit of a ground breaker, as far as I was
concerned, it's something that needs more more discussion, I think. I hope Lee makes it to
Alka Camp, that would be good to have them sign the table. Yeah, we need to note to self, make
sure to pack, just get my pack this weekend as well. Anyway, they almost last New Year's show,
speaking of people who are not afraid to talk. There's a huge amount of links, it's been a while
since I listened to this because I've listened to them all and you're looking at the show notes
and go, which one is this? Ah, yes, okay, I remember that. Great show note. Yeah, the notes are amazing,
I'm just honky and who is this? Is it, oh, I forgot my clothes hang on them. Yeah, we're too old,
it's currently coming back. Yeah, but it was same last year, we were amazed, I was pulled over by
the quality of the notes. I think Scotty contributes as well. Yeah, Scotty and H, I'm looking at a H
for some reason, I will get it, it's important to credit people. The following day, we had an
introduction to Doctor Who. Wow, this was a, this was a popular one. Hammeron said streaming Doctor
Who. Hello, another place where you can currently stream random episodes of classic Doctor Who
in the United States is Pluto.tv. Brian and Ohio says shows, thanks so much for this series,
I've always wanted to get into Doctor Who, but I had trouble diving in because of the show's
complexity, but like a good museum, I now have a guide. Thanks, I hope I keep them going.
Excellent. D&T says, I've never watched Doctor Who, but I am a Peter Capaldi fan and David
Tennant fan of their other work. I have been curious to watch Doctor Who ever since hearing of
the Doctor's a long time ago. Thanks for the series, looking forward to more on Doctor Who.
And I tried to, this is what it's been, which interests me a lot. So I put my typing where my
mouth wasn't, did a comment as well. So I said, excellent start. I watched Doctor Who from the first
show in 1963, and I was 13, about to turn 75, by the way. Yeah, yeah, just so you know,
I'm an old fan. I watched it fairly frequently until 1989, but was often in places where there was
no access, like being in university where I didn't own a TV and it was hard to go to the student's
union and watch one because I really wanted to watch it or whatever. And I lost interest towards
the end. When it regenerated, whatever that was, then I was keen to watch again, and my daughter was
also enthusiastic. So we watched until Matt Smith left, but I haven't watched since. We did watch
Torchwood, which was a spin-off from 2006 and enjoyed that. And just to hooky, you might want to
add the Sarah Jane Adventures to your list of spin-off shows. This was another show I watched
in my daughter who was in the age range, the show was aimed at at the time, and I certainly found
it watchful myself. Thanks for doing this. I'm looking forward to hearing more. Very good, eh?
Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. I really am looking forward to this because it's not. I used to follow
several podcasts at one point, and I first got into podcasts. I saw a lot of Doctor Who podcasts
on available. I couldn't, you know, it's the one topic going over and over and over. So I
lose interest after a few years, but it's nice to just be back. And I would definitely go watch
episodes again if there was a simple way of getting hold of them. It's supposed to go and buy them,
well, in the answer. Yeah, it's hard to know if they're still available, but yes. So the following
day we had you, you yourself, doing today, I learned stuff. And I've been meaning to, so in which
you did today, I learned about dates and links, merging files with paste, and that was it too.
And I've been tempted to do a date show myself, because I use this quite a lot, so much so I wrote
a program module to do, take weird formats of dates, and convert them to, so it's like someone
and or epoch, UTC. Cool, cool, cool. It was good to see this, good to see this. Yep, date is
really quite an impressive bit of code, because they have got some pretty scary parts going on
in that string that you can provide after the the height of D option. So although I did in this
was, of course, I found that a point, a place where it didn't work, a case where it didn't work,
and a surprise to find that, but it's still amazingly impressive. So yeah, cool.
And the past thing I listened to a few times and I'm trying to think why I would want to do it that
way. Well, what would your alternative be? My hypercube and print, but how do you
interspers the commas between everything but not at the end? How do you prevent the end one?
I just do a said and then do another said to remove the last one. That's what I've been doing
for years, yeah, yeah. So I make it and then it's like, oh shit, there's one on the end,
it'll take that off and then I get off. But this thing knows how to do it, and it's really,
really easy to use. So, so I definitely will use that in future. It just, just, cool sort of
appeals to my, my tidy mind, which I don't have, but it just feels, feels better, more complete.
And another one for the road trip is Mr. X, and replacing a battery in his Kenwood Part 3,
to which he had some success spoiler. Yeah, that machine is amazing.
Yeah, but the batteries are buried so deep. These, these, presumably because of the assumption is
they are last for a long, long, long time, but I'll thus say, I'm a terrarious kit. It's so expensive,
it's unreal. Yeah, yeah. And just make them like this. There are comments on the next, on the
final one, I think it's what we'll move on. Setting up DUNAS on a Raspberry Pi by
Kevye, of course. And this is a, this is a very good one, something that you'd want to do. I was
shocked at the, I had a discussion with Kevye actually on, mastered on, and that entirely
discussion has now lost to time. So I really do need to actually, Kevye is coming as well,
to talk about. Yes, he is, he's coming down with Andrew. He's glying to the two guys,
go, I think, and then get a lift down. So yeah, when you leave him out of Hebrides,
he's going down camp is a big thing. It's the first, it will be his first one. Oh, fantastic.
I'm looking forward to it now. And I'm glad I'm taking the Monday as well, just so, not
Russian away. So yeah, yeah, yeah, that would be good.
Vass. Yeah, and it essentially was just a shock about how many times they updated,
they, they IP addresses on his ISP. Yes, it's something to do with his location, because
that's, yeah, yeah, that's not something you do on a network.
I know ISP doesn't do that normally, unless they're, they have to.
Yeah. And so they, I would go, okay, fine, but any more than that is like overkill.
The, when I had an IDSL line, it would not update very often at all. In the other days,
when I had that, that, you know, it would be months, if you reset your router, then it would,
if you get into a different address, but otherwise it tended not to. But then like,
my ISP has got fixed address, so it's not, not been an issue for me.
Yeah, same here on the, hopefully, IPv6 and get rid of all those.
Okay, the following day, we had a liberal bus importing external data from GemLog.
Now, about this show, it was great to see. And I must say, in using it, I was going,
is that possible? To which I went and tried it, and couldn't find how, how to do it.
And then I realized that there's this quirk that within liberal bus, if you press okay,
it doesn't work, but if you press enter, it does when you paste in the URL.
Right, right, right. I have used this every single day since every single working day,
since I've heard about this, it is awesome. It absolutely is awesome.
Yeah, I haven't done that sort of thing for years, since I've stopped working.
But yeah, I've done it. And yeah, I don't know what we star office could star office do. I can't
remember the horrible Excel. Probably can do it. I don't know. But pasting it, it's not like
you copy a piece of the table. It goes out, gets the table from the website.
Yep, yep, yep. Oh, it's absolutely awesome. Yep, no, that is quite an exceptional thing.
I mean, insert this file, which I've already downloaded, and many things can do, I think,
but yeah, this one's particularly good. Super duper. Sometimes I think I should maybe put
comments that I'm commenting in the comments for the shows. That would probably be a good thing,
rather than just, just here. Yeah, well, I keep a little note of things I want to say,
but sometimes I just feel, you know, adding a comment to it is probably the best thing to do.
That's just, I rarely do it, mind you, even though I intend to, usually.
Now, Tony Costa did a show almost getting a heart attack, fierce funny, fierce funny,
except for the fact that we were commenting about taking on the project of organizing
software freedom day, not talking about organizing a software freedom day. So very important,
the troll away. Actually, don't troll. I fucking, yeah, sorry, yes, that apologies if that
offended you, but really trolls just stay away from the network. We don't want you. Thank you
very much. It's just a waste of time. We have very little time as it is without you wasting
our resources and we're a volunteer project, so go pick on some of the else. Thank you.
Yes, but no, it's about taking on the software freedom day project itself, not software freedom day.
So it was good to see, actually, that the day went off and lots of people, there were lots of events
all around the world, and hopefully next year, a little bit of momentum after COVID, and we're
winding up the wheel again, a little bit of promotion of that. I will be sure, I will
sure to mention this many times as I'll camp. Yep, yep, yep. No, it's a great thing,
a great thing, but yeah, looking forward to next year. And now that I have an insider in the local
library here, my son's start of working for the library. Oh wow, thank you. Wow, you know,
just stacking shelves, but he's better stacking shelves in there than in the supermarket. So,
no offense to anybody stacking shelves in the supermarket, it's just, yeah, it's a direction
that you would like to go. So yeah, they sometimes have rooms and sponsor events and stuff like that,
so I might keep an eye out for that. In my completely free and open schedule, that is not filled with
anything else. Yeah, yeah, I know. So we have some guy on the internet with a show new to
GNU Linux resources talks about, if you're new to Linux, some resources that you can get, this was a
good, hopefully people will hit this, you know, the first day. Yeah, yeah, it's a great thing to do.
Yeah, I'm going to agree with what you're saying. And I think he references the fact that he
stumbled across older guides, which referred to G-Rough and all that stuff. And I've certainly been
there myself in the learning unit, you know, oh, is how you write a G-Rough or Rough or whatever,
there is other Roughs macro. You'll find this, you swore on you and you go, what?
Why are you telling me this stuff? But yeah, still the round is, yeah, I mean, I was just looking
at Panda Manual today. And it said, oh, yeah, you can do this G-Rough macro thing in your document
by this method. And yeah, right, okay, never, ever, ever going to use it,
use it for 30 years, so it never will. Yeah, but if you're putting in examples, you know, it's like
what are the examples of the time of the year. People, it's been used enormously, it was used to
produce lots of man pages back in the day. So yeah, but it's not on my list of requirements.
So the following day, we had a response to episode HBR 1949, and this was episode 4207. So yeah,
it would be in the in the desert, you know, and it was a show, of course, by D&T,
about John Colbs 2016 show, about Cobal Reader, which can be found at Cobalreader.rocks.
And there was one comment from a Dave Morris. Like I said, I was trying to do more comments this
that the business, you know, I'm terribly fussy about words and how they're spoken and all that stuff.
Yeah, you didn't know that, did you? No, no, that was a surprise me telling you that, I know.
So I went and looked at, of course, it's both of me. Is it Calibre or Calibre, or is it just the word
calibre? So I went looking for the answer. And the guy who wrote it, COVID Goil, whose creator says
on the in the history, which I'll link to, I should read it rather than paraphrase it. COVID
Goil, the creator calibre says this on the history section of the URL of the book.
The name Calibre was chosen by my wife, criticar, that's me. The Libre in Calibre stands for
Calibre, stands for freedom, indicating that Calibre is a free and open source product modifiable
by all. Nonetheless, Calibre should be pronounced as Calibre, not Calibre. So, and I say to
do you enjoy your show and as it happens, I've been using Cambridge on my phone for the past few
months where it does a fine job. Interesting. Calibre, Calibre, Calibre. Calibre is a, I mean,
is Calibre as in Calibre of a bullet or something, you know. Exactly. Interesting.
Okay, very good. Will you approve? Just please, please me.
Because I've often pondered over how to say it. But moving on to the following day,
zero-one, plain text programs by Harry Larry. And yeah, introductory show. He had seen our
our my post from Spectrum 24 of our booth and responded to that saying that he was going to stand
on the show and not only has he been true to his word, he's been true to his word twice. So,
there you go. Excellent. Excellent. Yeah, it's an interesting start too. My only slight
puzzlement was I wasn't entirely clear what a plain text program was. Is it just something that
doesn't have a GUI, which case I might as a way, somewhere I write most of my program. I don't
bother with GUIs, these plain text, but is it, it would have been, it becomes more obvious.
It probably will do as it as time goes on, become more obvious. And there were loads of
plummets. First from Claudio M. Hello there. Hello, hello, SDF, great episode. Hey, Harry Larry,
really enjoyed your episode and looking forward to more like this. Nice to see more SDF first
contributing episodes to Hacker Public Radio. We should have somebody from, we should do an
interview with SDF actually. Yeah, yeah. Remind me to do that. Or better, yes. Organize
somebody knows anybody on the SDF team and can forward me on their details. I'll get in contact
and arrange something. No, it's interesting. SDF is good. I'm also SDF, although not very often,
I joined up to the pain at a certain amount every year thingy, but yeah, but I don't use it as
much as I should. Anyway, Brian, I know how I have comments. The hook. Well, I'm interested to see
where this goes. Don't delay too long. Let's see that plain text. Hello, world demo. Then I
don't simulate it. And then Beezer says, plain text programs, hi, Harry Larry. Some years ago,
from my own amusement, I experimented with using a file system as an alternative to the database.
This nearly cracked me up, but then I knew it was Beezer so fine. I had to index. I had an index
file containing all the keys beginning with A, another for B, and so on. And this was read
sequentially. The key was followed by a long integer, which was a file pointer all set to another
containing the actual data once again, one for A, and one for B, etc. So I fixed that. I was
amazed how fast retrieval was, but it was impractical for anything else and updates that altered
the length for just one record of the data field required recalculating all the pointers in the group.
Okay. Yep, we continue on. Also the lack of flexible query mechanism limited its use.
I recall the fax VMS used index files, but the index and the data were somehow combined into a
single file. Super fast for retrieval, but again, no query mechanism beyond the record key.
It was an interesting exercise, but I had found SQLite to be the ideal way of handling
stun and the data in standalone applications. Cool. And this guy Dave Morris put his
aura in again regarding VMS and index files. Hi, Beezer. I managed a fax VMS cluster in,
well, I meant to say late 1980s, but it started 1987. And then open VMS, they changed its name
on a deck alpha from around 1995. And it was this was a heritage university in Edinburgh.
I implemented a system for managing VMS accounts in 1988, which really needed a database.
Since we have no budget for this, I used ISAM, which is the file type he's referring to,
indexed sequential access method files to make a poor man's database. So VMS ISAM files were
configured through a commanded face and later with an editor accessing the record management
for services, RMS facilities, which VMS just as an aside was renowned for. And there's not been
much like it still exists, by the way, isn't in the past. You can still install a VMS system with
this stuff a few. So I'm on it. Anyway, back to the the comment records of fixed length, but could
have many keys. The indexes and data records were in the same file. I remember being shocked that
there was nothing similar in Unix as we moved away from VMS. And then I discovered Postgres.
Yes, you did. Yeah, fully aware that you did. Well, yeah, yeah. But VMS, VMS is very cool.
It was, yeah, it was I spent 17 years or something being a VMS in system manager or some
such thing. And yeah, really got into my under my skin and I enjoyed it too. It will possibly
be make a footnote in my presentation to our cover. Yes, the following day episode is the final
episode of the New Year show. Great to see that going out in September. Again, excellent, excellent
show notes. Hunky McGoo was it? No, that's Hunky McGoo and who did still can't think of it.
Somebody please comment who was that did that. Yes, in the back of my mind, the name, but I can't quite
bring it, bring it forward. Somebody with a historical famous historical person as a handle.
But I can't remember what it was. It'll come to us. We can put it in the show notes.
So yeah, I have it for next week. Playing civilization part one four, part one,
biohuka. And I remember struggling with the text to speech,
lady, to get this pronounced properly. Again, loads of interesting to see the modifications
that were met over time. But we would truly need somebody who's into video games to comment on
these shows to do them justice. Yeah, yeah. It is interesting. But no, I imagine myself was
the way this thing is developing is quite a study in its own writing, actually, because it's from
what Hunky was describing. It's moving in very, very interesting directions. And the next day,
we had operator with neurodiverse TV movies. You can look in the transcripts for those.
DIY liquid conductive paint, cold hands and feet, some tips about that. And in the CPU info apps
for which there's a bash script in the show notes. I know the one of the operators today are
learned or goes to the well of ideas, pulls out a book and we have no idea what I'm going to get.
But it's always going to be interesting. Yeah, absolutely. These are tremendous. So no comments
on that one as yet. And the final one on Mr X is replacing the batteries and the radio.
And the first comment was from Hendrik Hemrin engineering. Isn't the inside of a chemo radio
a beautiful creation. PBAs, speaker cables and so on when the radio is unboxed. Mr X says
reengineering. Hi, Henrik. Thanks for this nice comment. That you appreciate the inside of
my radio. And yes, I also appreciate the aesthetics of it. They certainly don't make them like this
anymore. That is for sure. Yeah, yeah. Quite great. So another wonderful looking device.
And heavy too. Oh, yeah. Oh, my god. He's got the movie was lifted up. I was like,
oh, it's one of those such good leisure fingers on. So speaking of presentations and all the rest,
speaking of that photo, you can see the photo itself in the making waves day one hallway track
of spectrum 24. And where I chatted with the president of the IRA, I am
international amateur radio union region one, which is European China basically everywhere except
the Americas and Pacific setting up amateur radio as a technical school, radio
strumming from a the Paris radio telescope, a mesh com and sat dump. And what was interesting
was that during during the conference, there was the flooding happening in Switzerland. And
the mesh com network that he had put in place in his hometown with his home club was in
an operation providing emergency contact support and stuff. Yeah. As he was away and couldn't get
home. Yeah. But still, yeah, it's it's quite impressive. I've been following it in a the
mesh mesh com and similar things. The just from a peripheral standpoint, not really being a radio
person very much, but it's quite fascinating what it is and how it works and stuff,
how relatively simple it is to get involved if you want to. And as I say, you don't need a license
for some of the stuff in the mesh com team. And then from the sat dump, you definitely don't need
a license for a lot of it. If you're only receiving, it's, you know, you can by the case and
download it. Because then again, if you start getting interested in it, you know, who's to know?
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I can see how that would become quite fascinating. But if you can sort of get maps
and stuff of these satellites. But yeah, it's something I know people, I know people who have
got into this type of thing, monitoring planes and that sort of stuff with the same sort of kit.
But I've never never got far enough to into it myself to do it. But again, that will be making
a tangential comment in my on-camp presentation. And in line with our scheduling guidelines
of posting interviews as quickly as possible, we have making ways day two, where I talk about the
M17 protocol, the open or, sorry, I interviewed people about the M17 protocol, which is an open protocol
for communicating over, you know, low signals to low stuff. OpenRTX, which is a free and open
source firmware for replacing firmware and radios. So that, you know, what's that that use
the open source firmware that you could load on media players back in the day? Rockbox.
Think about it as a rockbox for your radio. RF Swift is a like Docker container
tools that allows you to very quickly on your standard workstation if you've got Docker.
It takes away the pain of trying to configure RF connectors or, you know, you just want to
listen to some of those satellite stuff. You just download it and away you go.
Then the very low frequency stuff, mind blowing, really mind blowing. And finally, TRX control,
which is allows you to kind of control all your amateur radio case with this control software.
And I imagine it would also be useful just for regular control of other devices as well. So
if you're looking for a standard protocol and he was talking with the cross-pollination,
with the openRTX guys to see how they could and the M17 people, how they could all work together
to build on each other's work. So that was the whole point of of that day. So fantastic.
Okay. Lee then treats us to three servers. Is it a comment on the second?
Oh, yes, sorry. Go ahead over it.
Trey says, love these. So much innovation. And you're between, say, I can't speak,
you're between segments of CW. Call your name just for.
Okay. Reignited my desire to learn more, more code well. I need to put together a plan and follow
through and produce a related show in brackets. So do I. So do I.
Yes, yes, yes, yes. I'm now suffering from subscribing to all these how to learn more
code stuff, knowing that the only way to do it will be spend 15 minutes in the morning or 15 minutes
in the night every single day. That's much, much better to buy kits and download applications
of those sorts. Anyway, now finally, Lee, my home lab setup and not only that, but the history of his
home lab setup and how he got on and what he has got now. A lot of inspiration for me.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I posted the notes from his Reddit. Yeah, good reference.
With his approval, but there's a mistake I see, which I have not yet fixed. The first
now sort of thing is repeated. Or at least it's redundant.
I'll use the update. So I'll fix that. I meant to do it before this show, but haven't managed.
But yeah, it's really impressive. I like the picture. I love the pictures of this sort of
stuff. I'd love to be able to just to do something like that myself, actually. So I've just got
things going in the place. I might do one now on what I have now, because I will,
I have plans to replace all of it, but I'm not sure how to do that. Again, more conversations
over a few beers that I'll camp on record. Now, the following day, down the rabbit hole with
some guy on the internet, some guy on the internet talks about good Samaritan laws. And essentially,
yeah, let's read the comment. I think, yeah, Beezer will say good Samaritan's high.
So I'm going, what do you want to do it? Actually. Beezer says good Samaritan's high Scotty back
in the early 80s. I worked in Egypt for about six months. On several occasions, I was strongly
advised by locals not to help anybody in distress who may require hospitalisation. The reason
was that if the patient could not afford to pay the bills, which almost certainly they couldn't,
the person summoning an ambulance would be held liable for all costs. Health care at the time
is supposedly free, but it was so ineffective that the patient would be long dead before a public
sector ambulance arrived, hence resorting to private alternatives. Because of the entertaining
standard of driving, car crashes were regular occurrences, but rarely would you see any bystanders
do anything more than just look. I don't think there was any lack of compassion or empathy,
just reluctance of the practical level to risk taking on a potentially large cost for a stranger.
That's an interesting answer. That's an awful thing. There's a lot there. There's a lot there.
And I was horrified when I heard this episode. Just literally horrified.
If I don't know, it's just we have health care here and there's the assumption that
boom, as quickly as possible you aid. I'm a safety marshal or work, so
I wouldn't even think not to help somebody regardless. Yes, they trained you not to stand back
and evaluate the situation first. During that training, they were saying, what happens if
somebody dies? Well, under Dutch law, you've done your best. Even if you resuscitate somebody
that's got their don't resuscitate me back, you won't be held responsible. You've done your best.
You won't be held responsible for the bills because it's everybody's got national
and insurance. By default, you have to under law. And if you don't, it will be given to you.
Yes, I don't know. It did paint a picture that I was not
fully aware of and was quite shocked to hear how to say it.
Yes, I think universal health care is a very important thing. It isn't political. It's just
everybody. You listen to this should have universal health care. Just you are part of the universe
and you should have health care. If you get sick, if you don't, and the more people who sign up
for it, it's just mathematically, the more people who sign up, the less burden it is on everybody else.
I wanted to discuss that with my wife. They show really, I haven't had an opportunity because
it's only been a few days ago, so I haven't had an opportunity to discuss it with her. So maybe
I'll come back on this. That would be good. Is that it, Dave? That's all the shows. That's all
them there are shows. Yeah. So what else have we got? You've got some comments, six comments on
six previous shows to go through. Yeah, I'd put a comment on to the future of HBR Absorb by
Nightwise, because Alan Pope posted a mustard on, so I stole it and posted it here. The link to
his blog is there. Basically, what he did was he went through podcasts listening communities
for several of the podcasts that he knows about. We worked in one of them and looked at the ways
to respond back. This isn't a dig it. Nightwise or anything. This is just a general I found
this interesting and I'm constantly on the lookout for how can we improve stuff. So email addresses
13 out of 18 shows of email addresses. Nine of them had mustard on accounts, eight had Twitter,
eight had discord, four had telegram, five had IRC, two had discourse, three had slack, two had
linked in, two had web forms, three had signals, one had a WhatsApp group, one had a Facebook group.
So of that, we have email, we have mustard on, we have Twitter, we don't have discord,
we do have telegram, we do have IRC, we don't have discord, we don't have slack, we do have LinkedIn,
we do have a web form, we don't have a signal group, we don't have a WhatsApp group,
but we do have Facebook. Wow. That's that and signals and metrics, which isn't there.
Yeah, but it's something great. Yeah, it's a lot to manage, you know, that's what you know.
Is it good to be 18 of 18, but 18 is as you say, we're missing signal,
or we're missing metrics, which is like a big free liberal open source place for teams.
Do we have anything on teams? Badger 2040, an episode by Kettie, who did the thing
on the primary badge for which I configured and brought it to Spectrum 24, and very soon I
will be engaging us for a camp just as a by the way. Good, good, good.
Don't we have a lot of my bag part two by operator, which we won't go through here because it's
we need to put that into the show notes, actually. Well, now you say that I have done that very thing.
Did I not tell you? I probably didn't. Yes, I hoiked all of that.
Oh, you did. Yes. And put it into the show itself. So I don't know whether,
under those circumstances, the comment should be taken away, I don't see.
No, just leave it there. It's not in likes. Yeah. There's repetition. So yeah, yeah, there's
there's a there's a good list of what's in the bag there, which is appreciated.
So did you do Delta Reyes one? Yep. Delta Ray. Well, that's the Blender 3D tutorial thing
that he did. And Scotty says, I did it. I know the greatest blender artist in the world.
Thanks for the show. And the skills. BS, I also recorded the adventure. He proposed to a
YouTube video that he made of him doing this, this fine thing.
No, that's that's fantastic. And I have that video. And I don't know what to do with it.
Let's talk about that. And they're listening audience go. Oh, yeah, it's a thought.
Hacking HP or pulse by Ken Thalon. I won't comment by D&T.
Thank you, Mr. Onley. No, okay. I'll do Mr. Exo. Mr. Exo says.
Thank you for the reminder. This is the releasing backup batteries on my Kenwood Part 1.
And this was in reply to a tray. Thanks for the kind words, tray of my apologies and delay
in replying. I really must be more diligent at checking the comments and always great
when people take the time to reply. Glad you enjoyed the show. The Icom 735 looks like a fine
radio and is likely more reliable than my Kenwood TS 940. So probably a very sensible choice.
I've had a few VHF and UHF Icom radios over the years and have always been very pleased with them.
Good luck with your internal battery. I hope it doesn't cause an issue. It's a worry,
this sort of thing as there is always a risk, whatever you do. Hope you get a chance
to get some HF contacts. Cool, cool. So shall I do the D&T comment to your
your hacking HBR hose? D&T says scheduling and the reserve queue. Very sensible scheduling guidelines.
But I obviously don't know why we leave it to the multitude of hosts to follow them.
If it were up to me, all shows would go into one queue and they'd get scheduling
following some set of transparent rules automatically if possible. Reserving a date would be only
at least one or two months out. Then you could do things like ensuring new hosts always get the
end slot from the day they upload. The only issue is we'd lose the psychological effect of the
reserve queue as a buffer between today and the end of the project. The problem with the current
way is that since we talk about technology and the hosts are always learning more things,
it's nearly impossible for a show to be evergreen enough to sit in the reserve queue as long as
they usually do. Well, I have... Yeah, no, that's a valid point, but it's also...
It's also not really because we're a community thing and when we were doing a
based on the rules, what essentially happened was people would get annoyed. Not knowing why I posted
this show before somebody else because I put up four shows and I wanted them posted and we
scheduled them according to the scheduling guidelines and then you get annoyed. Now, I could
automate that with a script, but the same thing would happen that there would be bias in the show
queues. As we saw this week, there were some shows where I brought the rules because it was interviews,
so I wanted those going out earlier and all that sort of thing. Yeah, I think that episode
from about the Kobo reader that we took out of the reserve queue is as valid now as it was when
I went in. You just need to be careful about what those shows are that are going into the queue,
and that's a thing that I'm keeping an eye on. As people post shows to the reserve queue,
I'll just have a look at the title and see is it something that can go into the reserve queue or not?
But what we could do, and this is what I was thinking of doing, was giving the host the option
to just press a button to pick the best day based on the available slots and stuff.
You know what, let's not overthink it. You go to the website, you either pick a day or you press
the reserve queue, and maybe we can make it a little bit. Already, I'm worried that there's
too much information up there when you're posting a show, and then on the other hand, there's
never no information because people miss the stuff that the extra stuff is in the about page,
and then people are missing it there, so yeah, it's a tough one. But hopefully redesign,
if we had somebody who knew about designing websites, then might give us a hand.
Yeah, yeah, that would be good. Yes, it's certainly looking better now than it has for
forever, really. It's certainly making moves towards being more easy to navigate. I'm never
good at navigating websites. They always puzzle me because I don't see the thing I'm expecting to
see. The thing I want is actually there in front of my eyes, but I just don't appreciate what it is.
That sort of thing, and so yeah, but somebody who has
skilled in the area to advise us would appear tremendously.
The whole thought process behind the future of HBR episode really had me focusing on
what we need to present on the main page. And actually, I was talking, I was on the
U-Random podcast, probably shouldn't have given that away, but yeah, the other night, and
talking about their feedback, mostly talking about their feedback when I should have been actually
just doing U-Random stuff. I should actually go on that again myself back, just doing U-Random
and U-Random podcast, but there you go. But I do have a fairly good idea. What I don't have
is any design skills, but what I do have is the Libra Office Templates. I saw that maybe we can
design the home page as a Libra Office PowerPoint, and then convert it to a dynamic website after
that. Just basically PowerPoint presentation of like here are different views of what we think
should be on the main page, just a quick and easy way for people to be able to give us feedback.
And then we can call this, doing the calling is the easy part, we just
now it's easier with the templating system that we have.
True, true, true. Yeah, yeah. I was having a lunchtime conversation with Mr. X
a couple of weeks ago, and we were saying we do stumble over, both the stumble over,
finding things on the HBO site, and Mr. X says, so his solution is always to go to the site map,
because the site map points to things that you have to go levels, go other levels to find,
but you can see them on the site map. And maybe just occurred to me that we should make more,
put more emphasis on the site map. What do you think? Yeah, the point is that we inherited the design.
And more or less stuck with it, but you know, I read as and it's the HBO site was from back in the
day before RSS kind of was a popular thing, and then we had their RSS feeds, well, their RSS
feeds were there all along, but a lot of people will go to the website to download the episode,
you know, you you weren't just going to randomly download everything because you were,
you were minding your feed and stuff or reminding your bandwidth, so
with RSS feeds and stuff, I think the usage of the website has changed a lot. So a
complete redesign is in order and basically flatten the whole thing, and some things are obvious
like one. Yeah, and we're not involved in some stuff enough, and other stuff we're involved in
too much. So, but we'll get a balance of it. Yep, yep, that's good, that's good. But basically,
anything that's on the site map, in site map itself is not that complicated. It should be there
on the main page, boom, you know, right there, 40. Yep, and then also simplify the menu as well,
which will make, make things a lot easier, just one menu, boom, that's it. Yep. Good, okay.
Good, good, good. Then we have Desmond's comments, then we have Billing List discussions.
Let's see if there was anything. There is nothing. I don't see, I'm getting a 404 for the page.
Yep. Did you set? Did you set? No, I did not send one out. No, my brain's been a bit broken,
so I can pick it up. The reminder I have in my to-do list is part of a calendar, and
somehow I'm going to manage to screw it up so I didn't get a reminder, which shows I'm driven by
Bash Scripts, as you were saying earlier. How's it going? How's it going?
How's it going? Bash Script failed, therefore, it didn't happen. So there's nothing. It's not even
me saying we're recording, community news, not even that. Okay, that has to be a first start,
Ricken. But good thing, you're right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's usually, if there's nothing else,
it's me doing my- Yeah, exactly. Please send us some stuff.
The events calendar, I'll camp, obviously. Just in case you haven't heard, there's a
show coming up called, I can't talk about that, my goodness. And can you do any other business
appellees? Yes, so last month I was talking about repairing shows where they had external files,
but they got lost in the in the move. And so this time I can say that it's got difficult to do
the last few because the shows are sort of laid out in different ways and stuff.
And my tolerance of doing them was, I can't even manage about five a day. It's really got
complicated. I'm going to have a lie down. But nevertheless, I've managed to fulfill the project,
finished the project, and there's none left to do. And I've given a database report of
350 to do, 350 to done none left. Just to prove that I'm not talking complete rubbish,
we're not maybe I am, but my database is rubbish too. So just to comment that as doing this was
putting all the photos and scripts and things back together with the shows, there might be some
that got missed, but I have no easy means of finding that out. But if there are, then I have
the mechanism for repairing them. But along the way, I've also been adding the transcripts to
archive.org because they also disappeared when we moved. So all of the shows of process have
their transcripts. You click on the transcript to link at the bottom of the page, then you will
get it. But there's quite a lot in the old, the show is going back from, I don't know what number
2000 and something maybe, the links are not, they don't get anyway, they don't go anyway.
So next thing I'm going to work on them, which is a much simpler task. I hopefully get that done,
and what promise to get it done within the month, but I'm going to do it for Christmas, I think.
Yeah, there's, and the redesign as well, I think, will what I want to do is also get that
get it defined clearly on pen and paper with you. What we're going to do with the R-Sync thing,
so that not everything needs to be engaged. I'm not really sure how best to handle that,
but we'll see. Also a thing for in the pub, or the three-hour car journey.
Yeah, bring a notebook. Yeah, absolutely. We don't need an notebook when we can record the whole thing
and release it as a show. Okay, with the smell of dinner wafting down here, I'm going to call
a hole to this. Have we missed anything? I can't believe missed anything. No, that's all finished.
Well, with that, I'll see you Friday, Dave. Indeed, I'll be in touch about exactly what we're
going to do on Friday. Okay, exactly. Well, we need to sort out the logistics of that process.
Yeah, exactly. I need to put a call out any amateur radio guys going to
on-hand bring some stuff with you. Some interesting stuff, so we can have it at the
HBR booth and walk around and encourage people to contribute.
Contribute shows about amateur radio, but also get people interested in amateur radio.
Yeah, so with that, tune in tomorrow for another exciting episode of Hacker, Public Radio.
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