hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr1418.txt

Episode: 1418
Title: HPR1418: 2013-2014 HPR New Year Show Part 3 2013-12-31T22:00:00Z to 2014-01-01T04:00:00Z
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1418/hpr1418.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 01:57:21

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Thank you.
I think you ended up on the end of my recording there right we need a rule for flying
rich and only and only people who have not crashed an aircraft can discuss guns there
you go and not crash from two and a half times yes we still okay good that still leaves
me and cookies you're not you're not gay then much nope and me and me oh I clicked
model aircraft all right have I started a new have I started a new recording then yes
we have to remind people of the ongoing fundraiser how long how long was the
recordings I mean how long for the coins get synced anyway and until the
stop there will have a yeah well what we're doing is we're breaking them into two
hour chunks okay so the rest of Europe is in this recording now then I guess
isn't in you yet yeah well I've reserved five slots but last year went
actually to ten slots so I don't know what's going to happen I'm just
wondering actually are we liable to hear from co-nominal tonight I was wondering
that he was only come on he does know about it because he tweeted a zero
yeah because I I we need to seriously ask if development on crunch bank has
has grand to a halt because him and Bobo Bex have discovered mine minecraft I'm
gonna have to go on with their server and just start griefing and I'll get
that'll get it started again oh my test is the new hotness anyway can you use
minecraft data with mine test no yeah by Ken by Ken bam I'm gonna step away for a
minute too see when you get back well more than a minute but you get the idea I'm
not counting yeah guys I'm jumping out for about an hour to take care of my
chores and I'll be back all right you can use the microwave then oh god if
Ken's gone who's in charge Pokey I'll do it well let the inmates run the
asylum go ahead pickle for the next year New Year's I've got an idea I think I'm
gonna do it what's that we let we let Pokey run KPO every two weeks so it
can't come out too much worse than that give us KPO what's you to say about KPO nice
things really nice things pickle help me fantastic thing well if a look if a
looking for a discussion um has anyone the anyone used to subscribe to
touch radar and then remove that from their feed after they moved after all
the the regulars moved on their Linux voice but the people the people keep
keep subscribing to touch radar after that as well I've actually never listened
to touch radar and I don't know why well I listen to touch radio radar but you
know before they all left and then all of a sudden in my feed I got a
podcast from the new people it takes radar and well I'm not gonna not gonna say
if it was any good or not well that that was my thing because it seemed to me
the impression I got was I mean that was a complete boat out of the blue for me
when I was listening to that one episode of talks radar and right at the end
all of them announced and we've all resigned essentially from future publishing
I'm like what what did that come from is it is and I was checking my diaries
like this is an April April the first doesn't it can't be April the first like a
delayed episode or something like what are they serious and then yet turns out
they had um but I thought well what harms to talk radar after that because
surely because it seems to me that all the social media has followed the
original hosts like Andrew and Mike and Ben and all the rest of them it seems
to have followed them with Linux voice rather than stayed with talks radar but
there is still a talks radar and that they've done one episode and for me I've
listened to that one episode and I was not impressed to be to be quite honest
I was not impressed but I think that was more to do with the fact that these
guys are complete strangers the names are can strange to me then voices are
strange to me and the people I don't know when all of a sudden they're thrown
into the breach and said I'm like you guys are doing the podcast for now on you
know make something or have it and it just felt wrong it felt like Linux
talks radar is just moved to a different location the old talks radar and the
new talks radar just I mean they'll probably get better they will get better
I don't dare say they will but it just fuels odd at the moment and that's the
more than one episode so far so who knows I hope they get better I'm still
subscribed anyway but I'm just wondering if anyone any thoughts on that you know
for me it was it was awful odd when when I heard the first the first new new
podcast but actually they weren't so bad it you know it brand new to them and
what what impressed me is they didn't say anything negative about the
former host and that's the way it should be and Linux voice they haven't
said anything negative they just were going in a different direction so actually
I think both groups are gentlemen and that's in today's roles you don't see
that a whole lot well I was gonna say they probably I know at least one of the
X Linux format guys is with will be with Linux voice had to wait for a
no-computer or I would not be surprised if there was stuff in their
contracts that prevented them from saying anything negative about future
publishing on the departure yeah that's true but I mean even neither group
even insinuated anything other than the fact that there was a change of
direction when they really some of them didn't have a non-compete clause and
could have said whatever in the heck they wanted but just chose to you know
sometimes the best thing to do is not say anything negative just you know
trudge ahead and struct you do venture you know it sometimes works out better
that way you get a little more respect well I mean I think of contracts it's not
a case of the podcasters of contracts they're not podcasters essentially they
are writers for a magazine that's the old talks radar people who have now moved
to Linux voice and the new people that have replaced them they're people who
write the podcast is just some extra bit that they do every two weeks or
whatever they get together and from hour to show and record a series of
things and put a podcast that helps promote the magazine and helps promote
the brand but they're not podcasters the writers so yeah they do have
contracts as writers with future publishing you know so they've got to
cannot honor that you know well keep in mind keep in mind the fact I never I've
never listened to touch radar I don't know whether or not the guys who had now
doing that are just guys future publishing thought hell we've got to keep
this going and shoved into that project and then they the the guys who are
actually doing touch radar now don't actually know much about the guys who
are doing it previously I don't think I just want to touch radar you don't
actually you know the only one and I mean this yeah I mean Linux format is you
know obviously very popular magazine and then there's things like Linux user
developer and there's a magazine but I mean obviously a lot of people are
very passionate about these magazines I've personally bought magazines here
and there I never really got sucked into buying magazines but a description
case of Linux voice I've actually did do the campaign I did I have gone for
year subscription and the fail on the thing because I realized that magazine
was going to happen when I did that and I thought you know why not it's a bit
different it's like it says they're going to give some of the profits back to
the community the content will be online after nine months and you know there's
no shareholders or anything like that because it's so you know it's it's a
police to get wasted through a magazine different way in this day and age you
know in this time yeah another thing I should know actually I mean I've I've
picked up I've picked up Linux format all the time and read it and always found
it good but the thing that should be noted is it is a publisher can turn around to
the staff of a single publication and do something really nasty very quickly
this is a frequent occurrence in the British magazine industry and also future
publishing themselves are well known for doing this they've they've done it quite a
lot to other titles in their stable what one of one of the fears that I had
when they all said or we're leaving Tuxtradar and they couldn't disclose at
the time what they would really do and then you thought well okay they're all
they're all hand their jobs in so that means they're not going to be doing
Tuxtradar that's fine but it says that's the end of Tuxtradar in its current
form with its current hosts and then the impression I got was well what have
they got they've got FA who who for whatever reason didn't or couldn't
resign on mass with the rest of them and then they've got the other guy that
they brought in who was a Windows guy that they were trying to introduce the
Windows of Linux to and he was he was basically new to the whole Linux thing
and I just thought that when Tuxtradar started back up again with the new
people that that was who it was going to be it was going to be a bunch of
Windows people who didn't really know much about Linux and then the most
experienced Linux person there would be FA and it turns out actually that
seems to be that was unfounded because it seems to be there was excuse me the
staff that were doing the podcast weren't the only Linux writers seemed to be
they had quite a few other Linux people working on Linux format that they
stepped in and were all of a sudden you know sure they're making their hand right
you guys are doing the podcast as well but they are equally knowledgeable about
Linux so the quality isn't going down it's just that these guys are still new
to the scene now but see I wonder about that because because they were linked
with a magazine it may be that a lot of the material that they had for the
podcasters prepared way ahead of time and the first couple of episodes of
Tuxtradar will be using material that was already sitting there ready and the
people have been brought in to do it now with just reading off that
crypt sheet and will not want know what to do in a couple of episodes no the
impression I go off from episode one was the of the new Toxtradar was these
guys are not all that confident in the mic they don't have the format
organized yet the Linux voice carried on the exact same format but they've
changed the names of different segments so the things we've found in the
last two weeks instead of discoveries of the fortnight things like that so
it's obvious that the Tuxtradar has essentially moved to a new new URL and
that's essentially it so these guys are trying to find their way and they do
appear to be Linux people to be fair to them they do appear to be Linux
people and they do appear to have to be writers who they're the right that's
that's their job and there's happened to be a microphone shoved in front of every
two weeks and saying right you're doing the podcast from now on and they're
trying to find their way so I mean I'm trying to give them credit I've only had
one episode and it's I think it's a case of just wait and see the give them a
few episodes and let them let them find their feet you know now fair enough I'll
give it a listen is this the next voice now this is this is the this is the people
that been brought in by future to keep running Toxtradar Toxtradar
for you to still up is it sorry yeah it's that was a thing it was when they
when all the original people announced they were all leaving future and they
just say this is the last Tuxtradar in its current form not this is the last
Tuxtradar and it has been like three or four weeks maybe a gap and then yeah
they've had one episode since where it's come all new people totally new people
all new hosts new voices I have never heard names I have never heard and they're
trying to sort of find their way and you get the impression these people are not
podcasters and they've been kind of almost cattle prodding in front of the
mic it's like right we need a podcast you're the one next guys go do it you know
I always feel sorry for them yeah but it's good there's another legs podcast out there
is good there's loads already absolutely loads of them yeah there's some good ones
after this does Krivin's count as one limb actually we wondered about that I've
actually sort of rebranded that we started off as going to be a Linux and
fostering a podcast we're meeting the more we went on it's kind of more
general technology so we've kind of decided to rebrand a little bit because
it's just it's easier than trying to find the stories to match the
match the PR than it is to just choose the PR to match the reality of
we're paired with turned up you know was anybody listened to Linux
Luddites yes good choice yes I quite enjoyed it of course I knew what
Luddites were yes I've been called a few times yeah I just done a really good
jump on that yes excellent in fact I I answered a tweet from Joe not knowing
who he was and recommended his podcast to him good one you know a podcast that
as soon as I see where it comes from people are gonna go but I actually give
a chance there's tech snap from Jupyter Broadcasting it's incredible it really
is incredible it's like I don't don't really rate Chris very much but when he's
when he's out of that feedback loop when he's talking to a real human being
Alan's amazing Alan's just a regular bloke and he is so knowledgeable that
these BSD guy is so so knowledgeable and when Chris doesn't have that feedback
loop to get caught in it's actually a really good show it's probably the only
Jupyter Broadcasting should recommend but tech snap is really really good I just
still can't go near Jupyter Broadcasting and not be put off by the memory of
Lundig now that's that's a problem though is it's the presentation style of
Brian and Chris together they they get caught up in a feedback loop the hope
QVC presenter the shopping channel presenter style presentation that's
that's that puts off a lot of people to be fair and the thing is I mean when
Brian left last he got replaced by Matt and Matt is basically Brian 2.0 he does
the exact same thing forget about all that just put that all that I said Alan
is just a regular bloke Alan Alan comes across like a really down to
erga I really nice guy and he is so so knowledgeable he is the tech he is the
admin he is well in their quotes he is the teacher and he actually keeps Chris
out of that feedback loop and honestly tech snap is on is really worth a
listen it's very technical but honestly it's worth a listen do you need to
subscribe to the video podcasts or can we is there enough information in the
audio I do the org feed and audio org feed that's what I've been
listening to for about six months now have they changed have they changed a
whole style of the I hate to say it's what I'm gonna call it a jackass radio rock
DJ style thing that's what pissed me off that's I mean that's the actual I'm sorry
but that's actually bullshit that actually pissed me off enough to not ever
want to listen to him that's about the nicest description I've ever heard I
think to be fair that is that is Chris and Brian but but that's what I'm
trying to say to you when Chris doesn't have that feedback loop the bounds
off of and make it make it bad it doesn't work it wasn't it wasn't even it
wasn't even like a feedback loop or anything this was the style of their show
from the opening they had this whole big booming rock voice boy name that
they just turned me completely off just from the next five seconds of any
episode yeah Linux action show and the big booming overproduced voice and all
this other garbage yeah I think I think they have but I think to be fair to
text now but I think with Alan as I said Alan is just a regular bloke is a
totally regular bloke and with him as a co-host honestly I mean there is
stoke some of Chris's presentation so you're not going to avoid that because
it is as Alan Chris but seriously I would honestly recommend it it's the only
jute or broadcasting show I would recommend I would seriously recommend it
I'll listen to the opening and find out if I can take it it was that whole style
that just bothered me wasn't even the person's the people or the content it was
the style of the show I thought it was just I was too freaking old for their for
their style but I guess I guess listen into a few other comments I might be
that I'm just not an old fart might just been something with their format well
I'm gonna start doing every podcast I'm on like that we know here's a thing I
mean I may be old in respect but I'm I listen to a lot of newer music and
stuff and I try to keep up with with a fair amount of things that are going on
I may not like all of it but I actually gravitate towards a fair amount of
newer things but you know what the problem is that whole style of
presentation and that that actually came out of the the 80s and 90s you know
it's something they need to drop and just get to doing a regular show that
doesn't get overproduced and exaggerated like that I totally agree with that
I completely agree with that and Lars is still that style but Texnap as I said
when when you've only got one side of that feedback loop Chris Chris is
actually quite tolerable in Texnap but mainly because Alan's in charge Chris
presents it but Alan's in charge anytime they do a story Alan always
under plays it he never ever sensationalizes anything no matter how much
Chris wants to draw attention and do is he's hyping the whole story and all
this happened and this happened but Alan is very much down there these very
much go by the facts can a guy and it's always anything what you say on that
Alan and if he has he'll interrupt and it just won't let the segment go on
until he's finished explaining like he's little caviar and he's little
details and he's always under playing it honestly I cannot recommend Texnap
enough the other Jupiter broadcasting shows I cannot say that for okay cool
let's give it a listen any other recommendations sorry through go ahead
I've got a reason not to listen to it to another Linux podcast
why is that full circle podcast the horrible the horrible horrible impersonations
of Don La Fontaine they they drove me nuts
does this work explain does everyone not know who Don La Fontaine is no I don't
know who Harry Belafonte is no Don La Fontaine was a
voice actor who died in he died in 2008 actually and he's the guy yes exactly
the deep voice voice actor who became a cliche he did like 5,000 trailer voice
service but it's the horrible horrible ideas impersonation you know I'm full
circle does of him that drives me up the wall I'm gonna I'm gonna clip in there
I don't think that's who they're impersonating I believe it's meant to be Batman I think
no I think it's supposed to be the yeah the deep voice deep voice but I thought
about no no seriously this or if you listen he it's the way he for the way that
opening speech is phrased on every episode is meant to sound like a trailer
voice over he's impersonating Don La Fontaine and I doubt he even knows who the guy was
guy that's not just now I don't know lasty anyway back at the point yeah that's a good show
I I would like to jump in here sorry I've been listening to the stream while I ran
some errands but I'm back now and if you guys don't mind I'd like to jump in and defend
the Linux action show because I used to actually really really like that show a lot and I
actually appreciated their style you can laugh all you want I don't mind doesn't bother me at all
and I'm gonna say it probably is because you guys are old funny daddies that you didn't like the
style because I really appreciated the style and the effort that they put into the show
what ticked me off about the show was when they decided to go all video and their attitude to
people who said they didn't want video they weren't gonna be able to watch it it was just the way
they kind of condescended to the listening audience who had supported them you know this whole time
that really and that was all Brian and that pissed me off tremendously and Chris kind of
followed along and Chris has always been a bit of a follower so I mean right up until then I
really liked that show a lot and I even I even have to say that I kind of understood Brian's
flip flopping and waffling with freeing his own software because he was looking for a business
model that doesn't truly exist anywhere else and and you know I thought it was worth giving him
the shot because he did honestly attempt to to make that work and he did free his software so
you know I don't know if I've defended everything that has been said negative about him but I do
feel that those things are true for me but I can't say I've listened to the to the conversation I
just came in with the last piece of about the Linux action show I would like to say I completely
and a hundred percent agree with what you just said and my comments in the email that was a lot
longer on the Linux voice that I sent in and sorry not Linux voice bad voltage some of you may have
heard that feedback that I had in there about that specifically about the show trying to build
community and my comment was about can the community trust the presenters when all of them
showed at one stage in another where they stopped the podcast or pod case in case of journey
or switched audio formats in the case of Brian now I think it's important I had a very good
discussion with the with the act about this in a private email and I think they were all
bit popped about this but I personally think that's pod fading is something that you you build up
an amount of listeners who tune in every week to you to hear you and they expect to show and
they give up all their time to listen to your show and then when you stop you have a duty to all
the people who work to your forums to all the people who have been around in that community you
have a duty to end this in a in a way that is compassionate to community now I rightly mentioned
that you know at the end of log radio they didn't know they were going to end so that was that and
they get the community as much promotion as they as they have but I think I completely agree with
you my the only podcast that I've ever stopped subscribing to was was the Linux action show was
exactly for that reason was because they disregard for the community and pod loyal podcast
to listen to the other time that's all they have to say about that well I mean in defense of
Brian I mean it's not just yeah I know as much said I don't like the presentation style and I
think the feedback work with Brian and Chris and now with all of the action show it's Martin
Chris it's basically the same thing in defense of Brian and Chris when you take them out of that
that feedback loop with each other they seem to be decent people I mean they're not they're not
nasty guys Brian on bad voltage is fine I like Brian on bad voltage because he doesn't it doesn't have
that QVC that shopping channel presenter type foil to get caught in the loop with
and Jono I can and they just don't do that when the same when you take Chris out of that loop
and put him with Alan and text now there it's just normal guys so I think it's just maybe a bad
combination that creates that it's like the wrong recipe creates that kind of nasty kind of
cheesy kind of loop that turns people off I don't know but as I say in defense of Brian
beat bad voltage is excellent with encoding Brian I like Brian on bad voltage see I kind of
enjoyed the cheesiness I knew it was all tongue and cheek it wasn't you know intended to be
you know specifically legitimate and intention it was it was meant to be fun and I liked the
excitement that it brought to the show I just hated when they switched to video which I understood
them doing but I hated how they treated the audience when they did it and the other thing I forgot
that I hated was when they switched to the computer action show and they did it again and they
were like well we'll go back to audio but screw our audience F of ever I hated that as well
I liked I liked their chemistry together I liked the excitement they brought to Linux to the
topic to the desktops the attention that they brought to it I loved when they would go at it with
with lug radio that that was fantastic the cross-pollination the tongue and cheek of all of it
and it was just you know Brian's attitude the way he treated the listeners that bothered me
but if we're talking about someone who I don't like or you know people in podcasts who you know
I disapprove of of like their moral fiber we're talking you brought up John O'Bacon and that's
a guy I really can't bring myself to like anymore because for years he ragged on act for being
a free software advocate until he won until act said you know what screw this free software thing
and for that I don't think I can ever listen to a John O'Bacon show or forgive him for the way
that he treated act until he won out and just bullied him see I don't forgive them but I constantly
ask both of them when the band's getting back together yes both of who John O'Landag
yeah I was one of those guys when I mean I came to lug radio very very late in the game
when I discovered Linux and discovered podcasts lug radio was already on like I think season four
or something but did you go back and listen to all of them I listened to a lot of them then you
were there from the start then you're no different than anybody else yeah I don't know about that
but I came way to the game anyway and I when I was listening through the back episodes I hated
I absolutely hated them but as the episodes went on I my respect for act just just went up and up
and up and they quickly became or gradually became like my favourite of the lug radio guys and then
again when it came to I mean I hadn't I didn't even know about bad voltage I hadn't heard any
of the buzz at all it was just like oh there's just a new thing I happened to catch I
I subtracted to to to John O on Google Plus and I happened to see him like sharing like bad
voltage and I was like what's this and clicked on and it was like oh it's a new podcast about
John O'Landag and I was like oh that automatically that's that's got me downloading you know
but yeah I have the utmost respect for act I hated him to begin with but he's completely one
me over I just like to make it clear at this point that I've built most respect for John O'Landag
for act for Jeremy and for Brian with a while thank you Brian with a while yeah I think all
of them are very very good podcasters don't get me wrong I very very supportive of all of them
they were all very nice guys to talk to individually and I just do have I do have an issue with
highlighting the fact that they need to be respectful of your audience in in the same way that
we all need to be respectful of our audience that especially they're during the community news you
got to remember that's other people don't aren't on the on the mailing list you got to you know
what we're trying to do with the orca campaign that there are people who have websites
are not accessible so I really don't have any issue with any of their shows presentations either
I met to be honest and poke poke about the John O'Land acting those guys have been for instance
forever and I don't think he was able to convince act on free software thing one way or the other
the guy is going to battle to those exactly I was gonna say I don't I honestly don't think acts
acts attitude on free software ever change you just became less vocal about it I don't think it
I don't know how to seriously I don't think his beliefs actually change she just became a little less
vocal about it listen to the very last episode he was like you know what maybe I am too hard
core and free software where maybe I will try this this stuff that you guys have been using he
he literally denounced it on the last episode and I'm not like radio yes on the very last episode
and I'm not saying that John O I think it was the very last episode maybe it wasn't but and I'm not
saying that he was mean to act I'm not saying that he was not his friend I get that I get the whole
good nature ribbing thing but he did not let up on him until he won yeah but that's the whole
point of the show that was the premise of their show they were constantly they were at each other
constantly constantly kicking each other in the spot exactly I think yeah I don't know I think
to be fair to all to all of them I'm not not just those guys but also wider as well I think there's
so many people who were all broadly in the same camp though slightly different views without
and they all grow through different periods in our lives as well and their opinions change
their experiences change but we're all broadly on the same team and I think you you can't it's
it's kind of you don't really want to go too harsh on people who put their time and their effort
and their their energy and their mental process and and making something a little bit better
even if it is on something that slightly doesn't quite agree with you and the vagina I think
that's that's one good thing about the whole open source kind of free software sort of creative
culture um thing we can all be be grateful for I think yeah and don't get me wrong I I like what
John O'Producers he's a very good podcaster I I don't want to say that he's in an anyway untalented
he's he's got a lot of talent at this I just I think he really showed his true colors uh you know
with with the way that he treated act over the years and in regards to free software now he's
probably a great guy to sit and have a beer with and obviously he was a great guy to sit and chat with
because the chemistry was great on that show no matter who was on it throughout the years I just
don't believe he gives a shit about free software and he advocated strongly for all those years
against it so I I don't like him for that reason I think that a more to do with the fact that
that was joining canonical at the time and that he was coming back accepted that they that
canonical have to believe as free software was the goal was non free software was a very
difficult time at the time at least I would also temper your view of of lug radio because this
is a show where they would have a quiz where they would all give each other electric shocks for fun
and also for the audience's entertainment yes it's a great idea I don't disapprove of any of
that I just think all of the times that John was sticking it to that that John oh was sticking
it to act I think he meant it that's my only point I think he meant it because they have been
life-loved friends just see that last part again FXB I cut with Ken said I didn't catch what you
said they they have been friends since they were very small kids so they do dig the boot into each
other a bit harder than they would with anyone else an act does it too yeah I I get it but I mean
had the role has been reversed had in the last episode you know Axe said well you know John
oh I'd like you to come to work for canonical and John oh said you're right I do like free software
I'll I think it's probably the way to go I wouldn't be saying that act was a bad guy for sticking
to his guns and that I just you know the whole time that show was on John oh was preaching proprietary
software that's all yeah but I mean I my when I was saying earlier I don't think
that Axe actual belief about free software changed he just became less vocal about it this is
based on conversations I had with him at conferences after log radio ended yes well I mean that
that perception um but see when you say about um John oh preaching proprietary software I don't
buy that at all I think that there's some realities when when he's a musician when he's dealing
with the realities of the proprietary hardware world in in music then he is really restricted
but there's there's not a lot he can do to change that and so he is restricted in that respect
but the idea of even Axe softening his stands I think everyone I mean point me to someone who
doesn't soften their stands from under 20s their 30s their 40s but when they grow up
Bell Stolman's an exception fit enough but most people grow up well count point to
broam then broam is a staunch free software advocate and I would say he's he's gotten more staunch
about that clap too um you know I'd like to say in some respects myself but in other respects you
know I I have not stuck strictly with free software as I wish I could you know I've I've caved
in some areas where there's not a free software uh solution for everyone caves the point is
where your line is is wait do you draw the line at saying oh this is proprietary hardware so I
don't use it well you know if if it's going to be proprietary hardware and you use it then you've
caved it's a point of where you cave it's well we use proprietary software or if there's not a
sort of there's not a free software driver for it then I won't use it it's all about the line
and where you cave everyone caves it's just a matter of where you cave well everyone except RMS
he's the exception everyone caves it's just a case of where and where you draw the line between
practicality and your your sort of ethics and your beliefs no I don't think so I don't think
that's where the line was drawn and I don't think that's where act through the line because for
years when there was no free software solution to a problem he wrote his own solution he's a
coder he has the tools and the ability to work around these things he just finally and I honestly
believe a lot of it had to do with the argument that that he got from you know I wouldn't say
everybody on the show but certainly from John O and sometimes from a couple of the other guys
that had the the major impact on him I believe and I'm not basing this on having personal
conversations with him or anything after the show I'm just basing this on listening to every
single episode in order of that show is that he their arguments had an effect on him over time
and mostly it was John O driving that counter argument I would I would you would drop a line
to him and ask because it's the only dependent with knowing can I just say that I am very happy
that Jeremy has returned because his I don't know if many people were subscribed to the Linux
questions podcast that was a very insightful podcast that he used to do and whenever there was
a controversial topic on Linux he would give a clear and very often slightly different as to
very different view of what was going on. So also I would like to chime in and say that
if this will web FXB brome to some extent and pokey we are the last people that should talk about
people digging at each other I mean we do it all the time. Oh come on you know
that I am all for good natured ribbing that's not what I mean what I mean is that I honestly
believe John O to be sincere in all those times that he spoke out against free software he used
act as that target because act is a good friend and there's good natured ribbing that exists yes
but he he was not a free software advocate he never was. Well I mean that's for me he comes down
to what's the point of debate now surely if you I mean my thinking is if you want to go into
debate with someone and you with someone with an opposing point of view you must be willing to
to concede what that point of view says if they're what what they're saying actually makes sense to
you then you must be willing to concede that and sort of factor that in your own world view see
you know what maybe on that point they might have a point because other than that you're just
talking at each other and when you're just talking at each other that's not interesting it's not
interesting for the people who are taking part because they're just waiting for a set of space
to speak and plan on what they're going to say rather than actually listening it's not it's not
entertaining for the listener of a podcast if they happen to be recording it because they're not
going to get opposing points of view I mean surely you know influencing each other through logic
and through debate that can only be a good thing that that seems to me that isn't not the point of
scientific progress I don't think so I don't think it's the point of a debate at all you so if you
went into a debate with the intention of having your mind changed you're not a very good debater
I'm not saying not to go into a debate with an open mind because certainly someone might expose you
to something you haven't thought of or some information you didn't know before but if you're going
into a moral debate with the intention of having your mind changed I don't think I'd say it I think
most of the time a debate on moral grounds at least maybe not technical but if you're debating
morality the point is probably to hear the other side to build your own defenses and find holes in
that other side not arguments yeah I get I get that but the point is you should be willing to
concede where logic where logic applies if the other if if you're debating partner
produces some point that you think actually you know what that that makes sense you
doesn't make any sense for you just to dismiss that even if it does make sense so it's not about
being wanting to be for your mind to be changed that's about being willing to be to have your
mind changed through that debate if they can make enough sense that that changes that then you
should be willing to to concede that not to be willing to hear logic yes but just because someone
makes you know at first of all they weren't debating logic they were debating morality is is the
first thing you know John O's point was that immoral functionality or morality should be abandoned
for functionality was his basic point he never argued he never said that that free software was
immoral he said it was the moral thing to do but you should abandon that for functionality now
an act was saying that to do that you have to compromise your morals and he was unwilling to do so
for the longest time and John O convinced him to compromise his morals that's the part that I
dislike I I think that that act in and of itself convincing someone else to abandon their morality
is an immoral act and that's what I did that's what I dislike about John O
well I mean you can't you can't best sense that's I don't see this as a moral thing or ethical thing
as more a political thing you don't see free software as a moral issue I think it's the right
way to go but ideally I mean you're not going to convince people to say right do you mean the
correct way to go or the morally right thing to do what do you mean by right yeah I mean I mean
the correct way to go I would love to see free software everywhere whether it's GPL or MIT or
whatever so it's not a moral issue to you I'm not always sure what I'm saying is what I'm saying is
if you want to convince people you've got to go and practicalities and practicalities is on
wanting people over on doing the same things that they do just now but doing it with a free
software solution rather than a proprietary solution I think that's a kind of practical way to
look at it rather than an if there's no I mean you said someone said that what I found when he
found that the only solution was proprietary that he would create his own solution that's fine
he's a coda not everyone is a coda so not everyone can do that he can so the point is if you
cannot create your own solution and there is no free software solution your moral choice then
becomes do I do without this just to maintain my morals or do I compromise and use a proprietary
solution for this particular purpose and still push for a free software solution somewhere down the
line that I can switch to and that's where I think journal is he's more the I would rather it be
free software but if it has to be proprietary then it has to be proprietary and I'll use it you know
I think that's he's more a more a practical guy and defensive journal I think he's more a practical
guy than a hard line if it's not free software I'm not going to do it can I guy okay interjection
here interjection because there is a point here that you got into talking about whether or not
choice of software was a moral issue and in the IRC I actually I personally I don't think it's
necessarily a moral issue I think it's more of an ethical issue as opposed to moral and the second
thing is by the way remember I'm the guy who earlier on the show that actually compared to RMS so
I've actually taken a much harder line apparently than most people over time so just answer that in
you define the difference for me between morals and ethics morals has to do more with belief systems
whereas ethics are more clear cut law based you know law type system I'm going to go and do the
children fireworks thing so I'll be on in a few minutes to say good night and then I'll see
tomorrow right yeah morals and ethics and yeah that's an interesting subject I think because I was
thinking earlier with the BIOS we were talking about call boot yeah well I think with BIOS that
for a lot of people you know is think about it but Jimin changing your pray systems from windows
to Linux let's say let you know let's distribution that's that's a big jump right there but
when you're talking about the BIOS I think for the average person even the you know leaving the
technical people who know why I could go in there and I could switch my BIOS if I got
capital hardware but even if they do I think most people would not do this but you can't accept
for those who know about it and know who went through it enough or have the moral you know it's
not good to those think that they shouldn't use proprietary software because the moral issue is
those are people I think they were switched to call boot but in general I think most people
even if they had to compatible hardware would not switch their BIOS over unless they had got some
like proper you know technical advantages let's say I mean that's just one example I'm sure there's
others I'm using that as my example of moral and practical and I'd like to comment yeah one thing
uh that I wanted to add on on the whole topic of it I'm not sure I see such a clear cut
definition between morals and ethics and and even if there was I don't know for certain
that it changes my point of view on it at all and I'll throw in there a third word and I'll say
principles and a good friend of mine once said to me that standing on your principles always
costs you something and I don't know if that's any different than standing by your morals or
obeying your your own code of ethics but certainly it does cost if it didn't cost anything what
would be the point of of standing up for that at all and as I see you know what we're talking about
that act stood on his principles and it cost him some degree of functionality and the argument
that I oppose the argument that I felt that John O'Made the whole time during lug radio was
that act should not stand on these principles not that his principles were incorrect not that
not that he um well just that he should abandon his own principles and and the carrot that he
always dangled in front of him was not functionality it was popularity and maybe that's the part
that I left out from before maybe that's what you know why I feel like I'm not making my point
clearly and and I'm not you know upset with anybody for not getting it I think it's me but the fact
that you know John O'Made was always we need more Linux users because then we can go and and
begin to turn the system free well you can't turn a proprietary system free just because it's
popular that is popular if you bring people to it if it's popular because it works then who cares
if that's why they came for it they don't care about the morality behind it or the ethics behind it
or whichever word you choose to use there if people come to Linux because it's a free system then
they can work on the functionality and then bring that crowd in it's just it's a matter of
which way you go about it as far as you know bringing users in goes and I don't see any
any logic behind the way that John O'Made would argue to bring users in and he still would argue
that actually abandon his his principles for the goal of popularity does that make any more sense
than the way I've been describing it I I didn't I think so I mean I didn't I didn't listen to
like radio myself so I was just sort of saying I listened to that discussion but I think what
you're trying to say I might have it completely wrong but you're sort of saying if I can wear this
it's love like commercial and proprietary and kind of bringing people into Linux say that way
or in another way is that what you mean as well kind of or yeah that was always John O'Made was
the more users we have then the more the the companies will will give to us and the better it will
get and Axe argument was always no we make free software better and then that brings the the
people in to be used John O'Made wanted the system to be better right he did he wants the the
entire Linux a new Linux system to be better he just wanted it better his his road plan was to
bring users in get more people involved and then by Linux's popularity get hardware manufacturers
to write more drivers whereas Axe was no we need free drivers so the system works then the
popularity comes it's it's a chicken and egg which which one breeds the other and yeah yeah
so yeah it'll be like it's like bunty now isn't it bunty and conical now are the kind of we're
going to do this and we're going to have the commercial touch and we're going to bring people in
like that right for example and then you got your other distroge a community distroge etc for
Dora or Margea whatever you know community distroge sounds how much about that I think that's
you're saying as well kind of I think so but Poki let me let me say this what you were saying about
moral and ethical you're making out there's a lot of us right now that by that description would be
immoral and you know and not doing the the the right thing because we are forced to use
unfree software because of our work because of something we want to to let technology do
and I I'm misunderstanding you and I know I know you Poki so I know you're not you're not saying
that the folks that use proprietary software are immoral and unethical no not unless they believe
saying it's a better there is a better way and I want to get that across for the folks that don't
know you like you know I've been listening to you I'm talking to you many times yeah and and I want
to make sure that they know that you're not you're not calling them immoral or unethical not you
said it's a better way not unless they believe it to be immoral and unethical if if I myself
believe in free software and I do and then I use proprietary software and I do then that is
immoral and it is I'm not saying I'm not looking down from an ivory tower saying you people
shouldn't do this I'm saying we shouldn't do it is I proprietary software is an immoral and
unethical thing and yes I use it and and do I make excuses yes I do do I take the easy way out
yes I do I thought that Act was a role model and he was someone that I would have like to have
been like some day with enough work on my part and and and I feel like John O took that role model
away from me so yeah I look at this as a case of you know it's practicalities if something that
that's not free software does what you need it to do then you should absolutely champion it
but in other hand you want to get stuff done and if this if the closest thing that free software
can provide doesn't cut it then you're cutting your nose off despite your face just to go with
those ethics I mean I don't I'm not I'm not a photograph guy but if I need some advanced
features of Photoshop I'd be I'd be selling myself short by using the gimp if it doesn't do what
it needs what I need to do if I do need it to need it to do if it can do what I do need to do
then I'll absolutely use the gimp the point is if you're not um if you're not like lowering yourself
just to keep within that ethic then it's great but ultimately it's about where the line draws I
mean I can still even if I need those advanced features of Photoshop I can still advocate
free software and advocate that there should be a good quality real competitive of the Photoshop
with those features that's free software but in the meantime until that happens I'm still going
to use Photoshop sure and if and from from your standpoint as I understand it you don't think
that it's an ethical debate so I don't have any ground to stand on to argue this with you
but I could stand there if if you know brome for instance were to tell me that he was using
Photoshop to edit his photos I could say to him that's an immoral choice because his morality his
ethics I could say it's an unethical just whatever word you'd like me to use I know brome
enough to know that he believes in free software for the moral purposes of it not just the
technical ones not just because he thinks it's a good idea so I could make that argument with him
I can't make that argument with you if you don't think it's a moral issue now I could debate you
as to why I think that it's a moral issue and I could try to convince you of that but it's a
whole different topic yeah this is very interesting but um we need well we've got new years coming up
but um we should carry the songs to the new years things we need to read it out let me
yes I don't have that open anymore crashed on my page uh well I have it open and this time around
we are sending our greetings to Germany and 43 more countries and a number of cities include
Brussels Madrid Paris and Rome and also we want to mention to make sure to go check out the
fundraiser for Orca and the Accessible Computing Foundation please check out their fundraiser on
Indiegogo or go to their website happy new year happy new year happy new year
you know everybody happy new year good uh got me towards Vallejo
Denmark Denmark Noria Tuskland Holland uh Frank Creek or Moonga andra
you know if I was more sort of uh recently averaged and Hollywood Babylon I could
bust a bit of the Germans uh with the Ralph Garman and Kevin and I did say yeah yeah yeah yeah
yeah I did do it yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah what language was that what language do I do
speaking now I'm gonna say you were speaking um no I think it was but everyone was speaking over each
other there so I don't know so I do it again if they didn't go very properly got me towards Vallejo
Denmark Holland Tuskland Frank Creek or Spanien or uh or Moonga andra you'd say latenske
I have a new year this is Claudio M it's the same in Hyde it's been a while since I've
gone here I don't know if you guys can hear me all right well Claudio M is what I can't hear you
good to be able to say no no a dain yeah that would be me well you can have Swedish so I did a
Swedish way I'm in your neighborhood and I'm I'm I'm gonna guess here that's saying uh welcome to
message them as well who's probably listening at this point now she's she's uh in the living room
right now with her son we're all getting ready to but you're not in my parents house you're not in my
neighborhood because I'm in England so it's really the next one's mine really so yeah anyway let's
come with the ethics mold discussion because I was getting pretty interested I think well
before you start let me say uh hate flying rich hey man um I'm gonna have to ask something I've said
about as much as I am able to say on it but I'm by no means the the smartest person in the room
on that subject so I think well you were trying to say it as well at the end it's like if some of
these got for example uh let's say an FSF membership maybe if they didn't just pay for them really
just a more in bold for example so you didn't just pay for that membership you're actually in bold
doing whatever you're doing there and then you're going off to you're gonna go excusing something
proprietary right but when you don't need to then somebody could say to that person because you say
you know what you're doing is morally wrong because you believe in all these FSF principles and you're
now doing the opposite is that what you meant as well poke at the end I think you did yeah yeah that's
almost exactly what I meant um but you know if I were a stronger person in this regard I would
probably take it a step further as I believe Richard Stalman does and I hate to speak for him but I
think I've been here everyone but have been here again a point that I believe again I don't
want to put words in his mouth but a point that I believe he's made that I can't make is he feels
that that moral line should be drawn and where you decide you need to use that software um you know
where is one of us might say well geez I hate to use proprietary software but I need to because
my work requires me to VPN into a server he would take the standpoint he would say that you
should not work there because they're asking you to do something immoral I'm not strong enough
to make that argument but it is an argument that's out there yeah that that's the one for me I
think it's about everyone unless you're RMS I mean set aside him he he walks the walk mean all
this I honestly I tip my heart off to the guy he absolutely walks the walk he truly does and thank
you say if he really does I mean I don't agree with some of the stuff he says but he absolutely
walks the walk you cannot hold that against him but the vast majority of us are a case of practicality
first it's whatever gets gets the job done and if you can get get that same job done with the same
efficiency and all that with free software you should absolutely use it and it's where you start
having to choose between well okay it's not as good and I have to compromise here here and here
if I use a free software version is it really worth it what might be it might not be would I like
it to be available in a year's time or two years time and go back and revisit it and say oh yeah
there is there is something that meets that now I'll use that instead I think that's that's certainly
where I come down is I'm looking at practicalities first and in the long term thinking I want there to
be a free software version of absolutely everything but while there's not then I'll use free software
as much as I possibly can and then compromise where I absolutely have to and honestly I think
that's where Jono comes in I think as well I mean I think what you like about it but I think
that's where Jono comes down as well I will say all other issues aside Jono Bacon is an
indefensible human being because I've seen him sing karaoke you know I guess you know what's
kind of there is a real line that they end up walking here and it's kind of like where I've
had I've had to draw a line too because look I've got to be employed I've got to you know have
money to support myself and to actually give back to the community but almost all the employers
I've worked for have put proprietary software in front of me even though I'm using it in support
of free software so I'm kind of in this you know stuck position where as much as I want to outside
of work I can always use only open source software you know only free software but when I when I
go into that office I'm stuck sitting down and the machine has got windows installed on it
well how about this one is like how about how about this right um the power stations using
proprietary software the plane is using proprietary software so if you've got to be like if you're
really moral then how you're going to have electricity how you're going to want to plane I'll feel
that's going a bit streamed I'm just making a doing a thing here so that's exactly right if
you know are totally for free software then you need to stay the hell off of the internet because
every major pipeline is is is proprietary ran so you need to get all RMS you get off the internet
100% and he he won't but he you know that's just you know the truth that's about looking at where you
want the world to be and I absolutely am 100% on an RMS's side I want the world to be
fully free software and free hardware but the point is it's about getting there you're not going
to get there overnight you're not going to convince people who have been proprietary trained overnight
just to open up everything so it's about getting there and during that getting there with this
there's going to be compromises there's going to be you have to do some do stuff that you're not
really that comfortable with to get to the to the wider goal to the bigger bigger picture it's
slightly but concentrating on the bigger picture we what we all to our own our own individual
sort of differences we all are on the same army essentially it's not a military thing but
we're all essentially in the same army we all want free software to be to be the major thing
you know on long term I do too no my thing is call it like it is if RMS says yep I think that
it should have free and open that's wonderful but just don't you know don't say well I'm you know
special because I won't use proprietary software just say you know we need to go from top to
bottom and make it free software and open not just don't just say I'm I'm something it's something
that we constantly have to battle against and and fight for and I think slowly but surely we're
getting there but it's going to be something that's I mean I don't see it maybe in our lifetime
in it but eventually it's something that we would you know we have to continue finding the minute we
stop the minute we say all we give up and again I also commend RMS because his stance is what got
has gotten a lot of us and not just him but a lot a bunch of others also are don't what
happens a lot of us to take this yeah I do not buy for a minute the if you if you don't like
proprietary software staff airplane staff the internet those things are completely out of your
control you don't have no say in it other than what example you can set so I I don't see how you
can tell Richard Stahlman staff an airplane or stay off the internet those things are not under
his control the things that he has control over he keeps proprietary software off of and to a
large degree so do many of us in this room okay John John Paul at the point there was like I
said I was making them doing a thing but I should have said that internet as well that's the
primate sample it's like if you're going to not you've pie software then you can't you know
you're not supposed to be able to you can't use those websites because even type of proprietary
stuff on the server and then you know so it's electricity I said planes it could be TV channels
get it could be you know if you want to go too far you can't buy packaging because it was made
using photo shop or you know you can get as far as you want without just doing a thing it's sort
yeah yeah I mean even even broadly the internet argument even just before we separate that out
even the internet even I mean we know the BSD and Linux is very dominant on the server side
on the internet but that doesn't affect the freeware sorry the firmware on the on the servers
that are running the motherboard and things like that which is also proprietary so that's what
that's that's the point I'm trying to get there's a line somewhere that it's about where you're
comfortable drawing that line and some people like RMS have a line that's way further back than
everyone else most people have a line that's a lot further forward from them that's more practical
that says yeah I'd prefer free software if you have free software I'll have that but if you don't
well you know if I really have to go to proprietary just to get this service I really need this service
so yeah just this once give me proprietary but please make free software in the future I think
that's more a matter of can we push as much as possible to try to remove proprietary things say
from our work environment that's that's the approach I've been taking you know there's a lot of
times where people have come up and have wanted to use a tools and one of the projects that I'm
working on that are proprietary tools and as often as possible I look and see is there anything in
the the base like red hat repose that gives them the same functionality and we'll do the job as
well as whatever tool they're proposing to use that's the way I think we go about pushing back
and trying to open things up so things aren't as proprietary yeah free software is an ideal it's
something we all aspire to RMS is the idealist who we all look to for the inspiration to aspire to
use nothing but free software yes it's impossible to use nothing but free software to do everything
we need to do in our daily life particularly in the workplace but we can still aspire to it and
software itself is constantly evolving so as projects mature the replace proprietary
applications and software that we use daily we will get closer to the ideal well you look for
you can even look for every little opportunity like I was pointing out what one of the things that
one of the things that came up was actually at work they wanted to use a basically like a
sniffing tool well the tool they had mine was actually proprietary tool and I said well why can't we
go ahead and use like wireshark or something like that you know why can't we use something that's
out there already that's actually available on its open source yeah that's how bundle is a good
example as well actually because you know people say oh yeah we need all these games on
dinner to get people over which I'm sure it's true to some extent but I mean there's greatest
handle on list pay what we want gives to charity mr. developers gives to them pay how much you
want you know and all that and being cross-platform usually not always sometimes bundles only windows
but you know that's proprietary software you know it's close sources get out there
depends actually there is one very good example of free software and careful licensing being used
for a commercial game in the humble bundle there is a game called after look it up I think it's
steel storm or something it's a top-down shooter it uses no no no no it's not it's a top-down
shooter beneath the steel skies one of my favorite point click adventures actually but I have to
look it up in my humble list but it's a top-down shooter it uses a completely open engine and the
game assets are actually the creative commons licensed but the licenses have been carefully
chosen and interact in such a way that they can sell it sell the game itself ready to play as a
commercial product but all the components are freely available yeah but I mean what I was
trying to say as well is it's kind of like in general a lot of people like you're right we're
going to go to open source we're going to have three software you know we're going to have like
the buffers going to have five thoughts we're going to have less than that but then when it comes
to games I get the impression they were going to scale by online you know I've got the impression
from quite a few people they're kind of making a section where it comes to games they think you
know what don't any good open source games and so I can go but I'm just people on the internet
what people you know people say right yeah but this is the willingness of the individual at stake
this is the willingness of the individual to go out and look for a title that suits what they want
to play yeah yeah and whether whether or not that whether or not that title happens to be open source
or commercial software there's no way to tell but there are enough both commercial open source
and carefully licensed titles out there that it all it takes is the effort for an individual to look
yeah I agree with that but a lot won't and so anyway well that's the individual they kind of
make the exception you think right it's okay I can boil these commercial games to the notes
that's fine and in certain cases that's what people do or they want the windows titles over and
they don't actually look around like you're saying as well and they don't go look around
and think actually you know what is all these great open source games out there that aren't so
known and you know and they think it's okay to just I mean it's their choice it's a moral
like we're talking about moral that's yeah but that's what I mean it is a matter of individual choice
that's never going to change even if there are open opportunities available it's just if they're there
so I'm thinking it's more a case of winning on merit it's about being the better product the
better yeah exactly so for example Firefox no one gives a hoot that it's open source
it's a damn good browser when people are comparing against i.e. and windows it's a damn good
browser that's why they choose Firefox even though clue what open source is what free software is
they don't care about any of the ethics that goes along with that the morals or whatever
they they install Firefox because it's a damn good browser and it stands in its own because
it's a better product that that that for me is what free software should be is once you've got a
product that can stand on its own merits and be the better product that's why I guess that's
well that's when you choose it that's that's exactly what I meant is that there are if you go
if you go and look for a first-person shooter game there are commercial carefully licensed and
completely open titles that are easily comparable in quality it's down to the individual to choose
but what we need to do is try and make sure that there are absolutely top-notch open open
choices available and that's what Mozilla Foundation have done in terms of houses with Firefox
well speaking of that let's move on to your favorite alternatives to proprietary software and
even some lesser known ones that you've used discuss well since there's a silence a gap of
silence here I'm going to chip in for one that I've been advocating for a while now and no it's
not not a loss I'm not going to go into that I'm not going to go into that that was last year
that was last year I ain't biting that was a joy no twin-pane file managers no no no no no for any
writers out there for any people who write who like to to get sucked into writing fiction and whatever
I can honestly recommend the focus writer it is brilliant absolutely brilliant it is free
software I believe it's an every repo you can think of whatever Linux distribution you're thinking
of you're running check your repos it'll be there it's a it's a it's a distractionless
writing application the idea is it takes away all the taskbar it takes away the clock takes away
the system trade it takes away absolutely everything so that all you've got is your words
and for that for a writer is unbelievable I've not seen I don't know if there anything like that on
Windows or the Mac I have no clue but the focus writer is wonderful and so yeah that's me filled
the silence and I believe somebody I can't think for the life of me who at some point this year
did an HPR episode on distractionless writing tools that it fit that one yeah I can
visually remember that I think I think the bloke with Scottish as well although I couldn't
admit I couldn't quite remember offhand somewhere up there I'll mention one of my actually
three of my favorites um I've really been digging light zone as far as using like shooting
in raw format and developing that into JPEG and doing all that it's the edits I need and I also
use dark table for that um sometimes like there are things I can't do in dark table I can do easily
you're well if I can do it in dark tables just easier to do it in light zone um and there are other
things like uh like you know easier red eye reduction that works better in the GAMP and that's my
third favorite yeah I'll offer one um it's actually an add-on to the GAMP called GMIC GMIC is
basically its own photo processing language but they have literally hundreds and hundreds of filters
that they supply in in the plugin and it's just phenomenal what you can do with it
well there's another one as well when I mean there's some podcasts that are meant to be just
they're just regular news they're time dated essentially but there's other ones that are
genuinely knowledge based they're passing on um knowledge and instruction and tutorials to you
that it's worth relisting over and over and over again to get the right kind of context
now I found that there's a what's called sound converter there's various different ways of
spelling it there's sound converter with a K which is a KDE um front end there's sound converter
which is is an application um like a command line thing and then there's a GTK version but the
idea is you've got like a little GTK app that converts um a whole queue of audio files from one
format to another and what I do with some podcasts that are um worthy of keeping and worthy of
listening to over and over and over what I'll do is convert them from like whatever format MP3
to a low bit re org file um so it's small file size like mono and whatever um so that I can
listen to an archive them over and over and over and um so yeah sound converter is fantastic
I've got a couple to our virtually one was a very recent discovery which I don't know if anyone
is familiar with an application Windows called Fraps that's used for doing screen capture in games
um but there's a lot of people I've seen asking around if there is an equivalent and there are
there's a few ways of using um ffmpeg or abcon on the command line to catch your whole screen but
they're very they tend to be fairly resource intensive and you can do it with um VLCO as well but
again there's a bit of overhead but somebody has written a very very simple tool called literally
simple screen recorder and it is it's uh it's a goody program it's very nicely put together very
simple very little overhead and I've had some great quality screen chapters out of it with almost
well next no stuttering or tearing I will put the link for that on the aetherpad
okay my turn I guess um so I I think yeah use things like uh what you stand the programs really
but when you think of like favorite Linux apps or whatever um obviously I'm gonna have to put
like a game comes to mind called a meal strom or mael strom which is like an astrologer is
turned into mael I think yeah strom so there's that and then we talk about some people mentioned
graphics so um for me obviously tox paint comes to mind it's a very um for anyone with
the inner child still in them you know give a go and can make some fun pictures or you can
actually use it for actual um uh paint you know little basic designs and so it's not really a
proper graphics tool but that's a bit of fun and then you get things like and then obviously
because it's the notes you've got all these you've got loads of different paint programs things
like I think as empty paint or something like that I didn't really tend to have installed but
when it's there and it's in distra and I've been that one I think it's that one I think
now that's okay and then you've got all the file managers but we're going to talk about that
then you get all you're like less um you know you get you less known programs in a way like
if you want a different texture so you think geol it or keol it and you think oh I want to try
to be a little bit different it's graphical and you get things like leaf pad and it's full of choice
and that's the looks but um there was a program who uh that I found that out about more recently
which I'm still meaning to try out um unfortunately it's not in the repotalist distribution
I'm using it a minute I try to get it in there anyway it's called jitsy and it's uh an open
saw skype alternative I haven't actually used it myself yet but it's in um some of the distros
and the repos and it's supposed to be really good software because people are some certain people
recommend somewhere my love was recommending it as well so I obviously that's uh where family
look at for the uh as a pop-up skype alternative I haven't used it myself
they're like I just said yet so jitsy I assume is a very good uh package as well
that's j-j-i-t-s-i-g-i-t-s-i you know that's that's quite a good segue you couldn't have managed that
even if you were reading my mind I was going to say the one thing the thing that we are all
using to record this is mumbo now mumbo was one of those times mumbo is like uh um it's almost
an alternative to skype albeit the skype provides the the screen name the authentication and the server
at the same time mumbo requires that you need to know you need to need a more more server um to join
but essentially it's very very similar as Voight uh but murmur and mumbo is absolutely fantastic
so many podcasts would record through mumbo and what krivens we'd be doing mumbo
tux jamb use mumbo as well that mumbo is fantastic when mumbo is doing right now
yeah mumbo is absolutely amazing uh and mumbo what you're hearing right now is recorded through mumbo
it's all internally there's a record button and mumbo and everything you're hearing through
the hbr recording is through someone one of the people in this chart recording it and and
you know putting it out mumbo the quality of the recording the quality of the sound recording the
quality of the the voice recording is so much better in skype it's unbelievable uh mumbo is
absolutely incredible as long as you've got the the right server to join and as long as you get
all the basics to get you over that little hump to get you started uh mumbo is it kicks it kicks
skype something rotten it really does um i believe you can get it for windows you can get it for
every platform yeah you can for windows as well yeah i thought so i mean i've only ever used
them Linux but you can get it full multi platform and mumbo is absolutely incredible
there anything is of course with mumbo is because you know it was full games i think it's
well in game chat and obviously podcasting so it's just a voice thing whereas this jits
so yeah i mean if you go on the site it kind of explains it but um you know it's like a proper
skype all time if you can do video you can do this you can do that so i'm sure that's probably
worth having a look into for anyone interested in that well jessie isn't that just a sip
um thing where it's like it's almost like sort of skype where you're doing
screen name to screen name albeit in the case of um set some name code on whatever the service is
you know um you know a key guard whatever it does the same thing it does more than that it does sip
it does google talk it does xmpp it does facebook xmpp dot net messenger service yahoo messenger
a i m and i cq so it does a whole bunch of protocols not just the one in fact i just installed it so
plus if if you have a properly configured server i believe you can do video over the sip
protocol yes yes it does do video i have a couple of quick favorites if you guys don't mind me
jumping in and jumping back out real quick go for um i love k i d three and easy tag i don't even
know if there are proprietary solutions to the problem of tag and audio but probably not
those two things are fantastic and i got to say another one of my very favorites uh is audacity
and i do stuff with that that i mean you've got to pay big money for for you know audio editors
yeah yeah that's interesting kind of we'll forgot audacity even though we like it yeah
and then and i have and i have to throw in as as the last one it's it's not only it's the best
software for its purpose that i know of is a jeep otter i love jeep otter yeah i have to say
actually on monday night so on klubbins night usually audacity and and um easy tag of the two
things that come out uh for naming the i d three tags and the title and the author and stuff
that i've got a whole template for that but without those two um yeah and yeah they are very good
to have to say audacity seems to be rather very very good for what it does i think it's limited
for some people but i think for podcasters it's absolutely amazing um i was going to toss in here
yeah i love easy tag too i use that all the time but there's another alternative as far as an open
source project goes it's called puddle tag which actually is pretty good from what i've seen
although i find it a little bit now now it's uh quite intuitive for me as easy tag um i just sort of
thought of something again um there's this idea that you know cad is like oh you when you see back
back actually i can't remember the name of these programs but i've read articles and so on
the past and apparently that's some actually pretty good uh linux cad programs out there
i'll see i don't have names right now but something's about that anyway
i used to find a video mox uh really good as well for joining like av files uh but that
seems to go kind of off the off the boil a little bit recently i don't know if they've changed
things or or whatever i don't know i just it seemed to be really good it's just but then after
a while it kind of no i went a bit off i'll just throw that this out there that i really like
etherpad oh yeah etherpad yes oh and then you get these um etherpad yeah and then there's you
got these like pirate pad sites and stuff like and like um put text online and you can then just
collaborate with people and they can connect and they can work on your text together yeah well the
pirate pirate that was just one of many many many etherpad instances running on of the main
that was etherpad you were still using it was just you didn't have to be using it on the pirate
pad um the main that's all yes i'm gonna toss out there um WordPress i'm living in WordPress
days and just the the flexibility of it has has become phenomenal and i've an understanding a little
bit more about the internals of it and where they've gone with that from just a simple blogging
platform into really a cms system with a incredible um structure behind it in terms of events and
messages and and what you can do with it is amazing well where you can really applaud WordPress for
is the upgradability when it goes to a new version of WordPress you can almost bit your house on the
fact that if you upgrade nothing's gonna go wrong instead they've got that absolutely nailed they've
got upgrading the modules they've started the plugins from the backend interface through the web
through the website you can upgrade your modules nothing's gonna go wrong you can upgrade WordPress
nothing's gonna go wrong they've absolutely nailed that i mean i i'm a dripple advocate but that's
one thing they've yet to quite figure out right yeah actually actually in wordpress i was looking
something on the codex and that and they actually have an initiative that's actually called plugins
first so in other words as they're developing stuff they're doing everything they can to bring
the plugin developers in to work with them on the new versions that are in development so that
they're up to date when they do the release so that's a huge initiative internally with them
well i want to i've just remembered what we're talking about text and words um i remember to
of course that i'll also really like abby word i i mean for basic little text i was a big
thing either office or open office which is good which is good but for a basic thing i think abby
word is very good for basic text as uh then it's obviously do you and you merit as well which i
haven't really used for a spreadsheet but i'm assuming that's good and then there was uh
cut k-office or it's called color girls thing now isn't it but yeah there's that as well
but we like abby words yeah well on the office sweeps i've always maintained
that it's always it's the minority of people who need the the advanced features of microsoft
office and they're always going to need the the microsoft office you're never going to never going
to appeal to them but the vast majority of people who use microsoft office don't need
anywhere near the advanced features i've got a million one features who which they'll never even
exist they'll always use and for those people anything from j-google docs or a
liberal office or open office or whatever gnumeric or whatever that will suffice them absolutely
fine it's just that minority um so i think there's a huge thing there it's a bit of familiarity
more than anything else i think the vast majority of people would go on quite
fine with any alternative to to make consult office yeah k5 tux and i were both going to
toss a labor office into this because i i'm absolutely 150 percent stunned and happy with the way
labor office has developed since they split off from open office office they've just done a phenomenal
job not to change the topic but also i don't want to miss an opportunity um if a hooker's still here
since he's the authority on this i wonder if there is anything available in microsoft's office
programs that's not available in liberal office oh and of course he's not he's muted and deafened
all right my bad macros or that's what people think isn't that you think oh
is that office macros it work in leabals access macros see it's access now it's i said visual
basic macros yeah it does to convert all your crap over you can't just immediately
yeah sorry j-just in the response to n-like bill now i rc who was a crunch bank from fans
i'm using crunch bank um i represent um last year in the new york in the new york the new
new year's thing and when con phenomenal when i left i was like yeah um it was almost like
i was i was star struck um but don't tell him i use crunch bank everything i do is crunch
bank so where's the crunch bank family i'm here i represent well i use it for core nominal
and bubble backs to be here i think that's what he was actually asking okay i'm using the
magia linux distribution and i sometimes contribute here and there to that the mandri before
can say i'll do that as well um just and we got the full release coming out on the first
of february and time scheduled for the posdem in bustles so that should be quite interesting
going off to bustles and then to posdem and then having new release and um i seem maybe for
using other disperse hip yeah any questions or what disperse of people using anywhere actually
well i'm using a slack wear on my uh on my desktop machines i were 64 and uh fedora on my laptop
so i'm still on 19 haven't created a 20 yet debian testing everywhere
i'm on sebi on the gen 2 fork and uh somebody said uh you know one of the other applications that
i'll bring up is uh e-max e-max and vim you if you want text editors you need to edit files and
stuff those two are neck and neck with each other all the time i don't know i nearly i nearly
got into that i mean i found out about it and or something online and still great once i see and
all that downloaded the um dvd and i don't think i had installed or going the music playing and
i didn't install or something happened but i'm really going to tab you in but birch machine
did and um as far as i know it's just like sort of a bit like linux min in the sense of you've
got a lot of pre install stuff and it's easier to use and while you're the expert in that one i guess
would i just stop uh the recording for one second okay thank you see you all in the morning
yeah good night good night ken hey ken so long ken i'm gonna dip out myself to uh hope you
it for those are for those of you already on the other side happy new year and for those of you
still on 2013 uh i guess we'll ring them out together have a good one everybody and hopefully
i'll be on on my tomorrow about 2013 is 2013 is nearly over in the UK so about 20 minutes to go
for me and so by the other side i think you're talking about 2014 and not death
yes he's talking about 2014 oh i'm just checking and i guess i guess that depends we don't know
yet it could have played their way well that case happy new year happy new year
life everything take care guys i'll try and get on um uh tomorrow for me if i can
yeah okay but i'm here have a good one everybody bye bye now
bye Claudio yeah so but we know that what distributions that we are running that's
current time i mean i i've already declared my my love for crunchback um i'm using crunchback at
this moment in time to talk to all used good people um i prefer crunchback with open box
i might add um not not xfce um so what what are we all using you know someone mentioned to dora
i'm interested but is it there's the kind of stream from one for me actually because i
i do have seen as uh you know there's a lot of people seen as a kd distribution because that's
what i'm dream of and etc but now i actually won't go down gillome free in this this road by choice
normally and um so that's kind of interesting as well but yeah it's a it's a kd in a gillome
this road that's what's mainly sport where it does a desktop environment and the repose
and it was still there we weren't quite again let's say more about this one
as i said dinner dude sorry as i said uh i'm i'm running sabion i've been running it for
a year and a half now and nice rolling distro it doesn't uh i've ever releasing to mess up
on me the only time i've had any problem is with part of my french but the fucking Nvidia driver which
is a big crowd outside but other than that and i can't blame that on on uh sabion so that's that's
been my only deal yeah you can blame that on linus that's part of the f world and then video
no you know you know what after i had problems with that i actually grabbed that picture of
linus flying the bird at an Nvidia and i actually posted that all over the place and said this is
what i now thoroughly agree with linus as far as Nvidia goes that i was i was so pissed it wasn't
even funny it what it took me to actually get that driver to reinstall and rebuild correctly was
just beyond anything you can imagine it took me over three fucking hours to get that thing working
again three fucking hours it had my system broke you know you know fun fun laying off i was on
Twitter myself poppy i was talking to poppy on on Twitter and he had said about he had spoken to
someone who had reinstalled gen 2 for the fourth time in a month and i'm like what
why did you do that are you kidding that's like a week's worth of install time i mean i have never
tried gen 2 because it's incredibly long install time and my only response to that i think i
responded twice to that but the main one was there really is something to be said for a distribution
that you can go from whatever you have now to a completely fresh install or and updated
okay you've still got the data backups and whatever but i fully updated and installed new system
within 30 minutes there's something to be said for that what was that was that happening or
yes and my in my case it would be crunch buying or meant or i've been to or whatever but yeah there
is something to be said for that the first majority of distributions do that but gen 2 is not
a little bit in my guess but gen 2 appeals to a certain kind of user who wants everything
tuned just to the way that they feel that their system should work and they're willing to invest
the time and the extra effort in doing that and for them it works perfectly well you know
gen 2 is useful if what you really want to do is actually understand how a Linux system is built
if you actually want to understand the user space and the tool chain and how everything actually
fits together that's where gen 2 and especially if you can go back to a stage zero build which
i think they don't offer anymore that's really the way to understand it um price seven or eight
years ago i think it was i spent a nice long Christmas weekend like four or five days literally
actually installing and then wiping and then installing and then wiping and then installing
gen 2 just so i could actually go through and tweak a number of the options change things around like
the file system configuration and a number of different features and that so i actually got a
really good understanding of Linux from actually doing that and that's just short of going down
to Linux from scratch you know that's about the next the only step further you can go and actually
really get to everything yeah i think i think but but something like gen 2 or Linux from scratch
it's a case of are you really going to get that much benefit in terms of that those few extra CPU
cycles or that few extra megabytes of RAM that's really going to make it kick compared to something
that's pre-installed and i think that used to be the case but recently no i can't honestly can't
see that really now um so it's like why bother honestly you you you you would you would be surprised
just by changing some of the flags and that and how actually what libraries and things are actually
getting loaded and getting linked into things and that yeah you can actually make huge difference
you can i mean profile wise on a machine you can change and optimize it to do all sorts of things
that you wouldn't even imagine normally using like devian or a statically built system i don't have
any experience with gen 2 myself i just haven't done it but i think there's more of a use case for it
than simply learning and my favorite gen 2 story that i ever heard and i'll get it wrong of course
was uh it was Jeremy from the uh distrocast podcast which i know some people don't like that and
don't like him and whatever but i like them and i like him and his use case for it was he compiled
his own kernel on gen 2 for his server in such a way that he got all of the core functionality
of his server into l2 cache and you know saying that you have a small distro or small kernel
at some point you know if it's on your hard drive it's academic but if you literally can or even
if it's in ram you know at some point but if you literally can get it all into l2 cache and even
using your ram anymore that there's got to be a tremendous performance jump for doing something
like that i think that case is spoken for in smaller embedded systems where you have you know memory
and cpu cycle limitations and that's another case that can be used outside of the education case
but from the education perspective i think everyone should do that once
maybe twice the lfs or or gen 2 but then why would you do it again i mean once once you understand
what you understand i'm not sure there is something like the security as well
yes there yeah that's thing yeah the whole range of options you have in terms of
of setting up the profile of your system and actually having control over it is a huge use case
it's not just a matter of educating yourself or building for an embedded system or you know
ability to get a specialized kernel that everything can fit in l2 cache there there's a lot of
things that can make big differences in terms of how things are set up in that and i mean literally
there are literally thousands upon thousands of options and they can make a big difference especially
via three combinations so let's clean that yeah and let's not forget ricer is a naval gaisers i mean
just because you're not into that yourself doesn't mean somebody else shouldn't be
no and i think that's why things like gen 2 are still there because there are use cases that fit
you know but from from the perspective of the someone who's doing it for the education i mean
i think you can take any Linux distribution or forget distribution just the kernel itself
which is the part i think that matters here and because it's become modularized
and the flags are easier to you know to access and the build system has become easier since the
two and two four trains that you don't need gen 2 specifically to get the security performance
enhancements you want i think you could do it with any distro you choose and that's not to say
that there's no reason you shouldn't use gen 2 but i don't think you have to to get those benefits
i would disagree with that primarily because here's here's why i would disagree because the
kernel is only is the core part of the system but there's this whole user space and the whole tool
chain and if you don't understand if you you know need this knowledge and need to have a fairly
technical knowledge having the ability to understand how the tool chain is built and how the
user space tools are built is actually pretty important and that that's one of the things that
again it's not necessarily for everybody you know the average person coming off the street like
you know like this will web or you know somebody else maybe doesn't need to have all of that
information but there are a number of cases where you need to actually understand those things if
you're in a more technical situation or you know like you know i do a lot of infrastructure work
i really do need to understand how those things work so as i'm configuring a server and as i'm
you know setting up things to actually run a specific type of application i actually understand
what's going on right i'm going to go off very soon because well i'm going to it's a new year's
here nilly so i'll be back a bit later nearly didn't leave the new year in the UK
see you later happy nearly nearly new year are we uh we count down about 10 minutes yeah
yeah about 10 minutes well it digs it kind of just said you know this web isn't average
what i meant was the average use case and i granted i used this web as an example but he may not
actually have the average use case too so that's you know i was just kind of making a point of
there are people that the the standard out of the box configuration works for
but it doesn't necessarily work for everybody yeah well i mean i mean i think i mean a lot of people
here are what you would happily get classes geeks i'm not really or even hackers or whatever
i'm not really that type of person i'm sort of i like to customize the desktop in a way that
that works for me but beyond that i want things just to work i want to switch switch the machine on
and have work i'm all for easy use case rather than fussing about trying to
to figure out why things aren't working and then things like that so i think a lot of a lot of
people who consider themselves geeks would be appalled at that they want to find things and they want
to get to to you know optimize things in just a right way i don't really care about that to be
honest um you know things like arch i mean arch is a prime example i've tried to
extort install arch think twice now and twice afield because it was just much for me um i mean i
don't really care to the nth degree about how things work i just want something there's a decent
a decent basic default and that does me give me a chance to give me a way to
to to overrule the the the UI that i'm supposed to interface with right and the ton and something
that suits me that's that i'm familiar with and i'm happy with that you know i think i think
i think that's i've got a lot of geeks can i maybe take a bit but except no no not not this one in
particular because i'm a huge fan of the ease of use case and for two reasons one for myself i
love a system that is easy to install and easy to use and doesn't waste a lot of my time
but going back to the idea that we should advocate free software wherever and whenever possible
one of the easiest ways to do that for those who couldn't care less is to present an ease of
use case where i don't know what you call it by intention i think you're gonna call it um i mean
me i love crunch bang i use crunch bang it's i'm on crunch bang right now with open box
i would not recommend open box to any newbie user coming from windows or whatever
primarily for the reason that crunch bang involves um you know manually creating the menu entries
that's that's the one thing and there's no icons i mean the fact that there's no icons that's a
feature to me that would be a bug to almost everyone i know but that's a feature to me i don't want
icons on my desktop i hate icons on my desktop i actively fight against that so the fact that
crunch bang doesn't even offer that or open box should i say it doesn't even offer that that's
perfect for me the fact that that that it's crunch bang in that case is uh a stable it's um
debing you switch it on your guaranteed it's going to work um that's a feature to me it's old to
other people that's a feature to me i would not recommend as far as ease of use and recommend to
new users and new people to learn next and whatever i would not in a not in a million years
recommend open box because of the extra um little and the little involvement that you need to take
on your system um i just wouldn't do it uh but if it's set up for them that's ideal
i was making a point somewhere so where did i cut out i didn't hear you cut out at all
oh okay that's good i guess my point was made then the reminder yeah and i was actually
gonna say i mean i actually agree with both this will web and k5 tux i'm not saying that that
everybody should always you know have all this knowledge and that and in fact i do believe there
is a case for the the ease of use um scenario hey at home here i don't want to sit here and maintain
my boxes all the time i don't want to have to sit here and do a whole bunch of extra work just to
get we know everything done no i mean i went through that as a learning experience and a knowledge
experience for myself for the role that i need to actually where i need to actually apply that
so i think the thing is that it's a good thing to actually have these just rows like arch and gen 2
out there so you can use them if you need them but it's also good to have crunch bangs or debian
or fedora you know anything that'll give you a good quick setup or even umboon 2 in this case
so you know or mint you know that there it's a matter of having different roles for different needs
i think everybody likes easy to use things it's just what is easy for you and what are you comfortable
with and i like the ease of use uh use case for new users but what i like even more than easy to use
is easy to learn because if you think about it you know pretty much everything on the command line
is easy to use you've got a command and argument uh you know and and uh and uh you know what you want
that command to execute on that's really easy to use but it's not easy to learn um you know if
you need to say it again uh so you all you need is a distro that drops you to a command shell
and lets you load all of your modules manually and then start up your network interface is in the
maybe start up x if you're feeling lazy right that's all how is the command line hard to learn what's
wrong with you i can do everything you need to know it when you teach it and it's easy to teach
clearly because you do such a good job and when you teach it we're we're all right there with you but
but you can't just drop somebody on it Dan do you want that just because Dan came in that was
that was beautiful and then you welcome back Dan the those that tons of done
yeah the those that tons of done and we're talking about free free as in an all you being served since
uh in dance case yes that free also it's i'm free Dan are you free boy they're
i'm free okay i wonder how many people in our audience aren't even going to get that reference
hey what what would do to manager is game using i can ask a match what what what when does
manager are you using uh what what is top of the army it depends the right right now on this
machine i'm using xfc you for any other machine it's like uh flux box yeah i wonder i wonder actually
i mean i love xfc as well i mean i'm using the open box just now but i flit between that and
xfc i'm happy to use both i'll i'll advocate both but i wonder is something like cinnamon is that
winning over xfc people i mean is that something that xfc people in general are sort of keeping a
i thought of an i on and saying oh maybe i could you know i i don't know is it
well i ask me i i have used cinnamon i've used xfc and i don't see anything that cinnamon offers
that xfc doesn't do better yeah the migration to xfc since no three came out has actually been
pretty big from everything i've heard a red and seen i mean this is another thing it's like
i i never choose a desktop environment based on um anything about the the look and feel in
ease of use it's always about resource use for me like i'm i'm on elementary os at the moment
and i can see it's sort of it's using some gtk stuff i actually don't know what the desktop
environment is but it works for me and it's and it runs fast so i'm cool with that
well you know if i if i made for just a second because i was giving this a lot of thought
the past week because i had to switch over to os 10 at work and i hadn't used os 10 in like ten
years and uh i thought to myself when it fired up it looks the same it hasn't really changed much
it does look stupidly old doesn't it hey well yeah yeah and i thought to myself well man this
this doesn't feel like fresh it's just the same it's like windows never really changed much till
hey and then i got thinking about well what am i complaining about because for the past 15 years
i've been using like flux box and uh and window maker before that and i use xfce and i had used
canoman kd on occasion but anytime i use any other window manager i end up or desktop environment
i end up setting it up like flux box so there's no reason to use any other ones because i just use
flux box what am i complaining about and then i thought to myself i should really give canome 3 a
try again because now that i have to deal with os 10 on a regular basis i'm curious to see how it
compares to os 10 and whether i would be equally as frustrated with canome 3 as i am with os 10 or
would canome 3 fill the shortcomings that i find in os 10's functionality for my day-to-day work
okay i'm gonna break in here because we are at the hour mark and we need to go ahead and
talk about new years for a lot of the united kingdom including we have london and kasa
blanca doublin lizbin listed in there and i think this will have you're in this one too aren't you
happy new year motherfuckers yeah yeah motherfuckers um yeah i was going to say that i was actually going to
question that and then i was walking thought actually you know what actually he's right
and and we also need to uh do a quick stop and recent kind of recordings
because we didn't get it in that time ha ha it was on the end
ah can can we go back for a minute because i think k five tux wanted to say something about
easy to learn and he was on a roll there so i'd love to hear which it to say their k five
well actually i was going to i was actually going to create a diversion in the topic so if we
want to continue on the use of use case we should probably do that but when we get to the end i
do have something that that comes back to it well my my only comment on that is there's
the little things i mean i've never really used a mic in anger so i'm talking about going
comparing windows to to linux and that's just a little things that in linux just seems so common
sense and and i'll look for that in whatever desktop environment whatever window manager
the one of the things is that if i right click on the desktop i expect my functions my program
menu to appear underneath my point of i don't care whether it's xfce whether it's good home whether it's
kde whether open but i don't open box i don't care i expect that to happen and i get so frustrated
when i have to use windows i keep forgetting that it doesn't happen with windows and you're right
clicking the windows desktop program menu doesn't appear you have to go down the start menu to get
your programs menu that drives me absolutely bonkers yeah i mean when some other desktop environments
like kde uh known two doesn't do it it's most of the other ones like xfce has the application
menu in the right click as well um i've never used lxde i would guess it does open flux i'd
remember that i even think fivwim fvwm remember that i think it's like one of the default you
uh things you can put in an open vst i think even that has it too yeah i don't mind that
as being an option i think kde sorry xfce 4.4 to 4.6 i think it was they had it where you could
switch it in the options to to show on your your folder structure whatever it was or the applications
and you either are and then when they moved up to the new version right i think it was 4.6 to 4
4.4 to 4.6 maybe 4.4.6 to 4.8 i can't remember exactly what they then combined it and i thought
that was brilliant that's absolutely brilliant that that ticks all the boxes uh but to not have
the applications menu when you're right click that just drives me up so i like let me just i get a
run for dinner so let me just say real quick before it gets too far away what Dan said about OS 10
and for the last i don't know three or four years the only time i've seen OS 10 was at my sister's
house where they have one and i will say that visually when it was created it was very well done
it has the gloss it has the shine etc etc but in the past three or four years maybe in five years
when i looked at it what i saw was something that was very well done and was done fashionably
and it seems very out of fashion now it seems very out of date it reminds me of looking at
pictures of well-dressed people in the nineties okay i was going to toss in here you know one of
the things that we kind of get i think will be spoiled with with Linux and that is that we have
all these choices of desktops but not that but window managers like Dan was saying where he's
actually liking fluxbox who's a nice lightweight window manager that he can configure the way he
wants it to but then we also get into things that that allow us to work completely differently
like tiling window managers like awesome you know and there's nothing like that in any of these
other computing platforms and it's just really nice to actually have that option available
well one of the things one of the things there is i came from a windows background when i came to
Linux i came from windows and the whole idea of there being more than one desktop this just
it's just completely alien so when you come to windows that's sorry come you come to Linux and
you hear there's all these all these there's virtual desktops you can click on you all these
it's something that's never once entered your enter your comprehension of your workflow it's
just something you don't even notice at all and the more you use Linux i mean for the i mean it's
only the last 30 years or a couple of maybe even year and a half that i've started to actually
use virtual desktops despite the fact that i've i mean i've been using Linux full time from 2007
maybe 2008 i know that a lot of people a lot earlier than me i'm kind of late in that regard so
so be it but the point is even for the the first few years i've been using Linux i've only ever
used it as a single desktop and even although i know there's extra desktops there just never even
accosting me in my workflow to use more than one and once you start to grok that kind of concept
and once you start to use that then when you get back onto using the windows and you only have one
desktop you're like oh what do you do now it's just doesn't work right it's broken yes yeah i love
the i love the idea that with window managers and having things broken down that way it's almost like
you have uh Lincoln logs or or LEGOs that you can actually build the desktop you want you can actually
build a system you want and make it work the way you want it to the point of basically optimizing your
workflow such that you can you can do whatever you want to and do it in the most efficient way
available to you and that's the thing that hit me sound chaser and poke you with and this
away with what all you're saying is they've been it's been coming for a while that they were given
out MacBook Pros to our people in our department and and my supervisors like oh you know we were
walking in the hall the one day and i said i'm kind of worried about getting one because it's going
to reduce my productivity because my workflow and he's like oh no no you mean you you're just
gonna it's gonna be so much more productive you just wait and see it's gonna be light years
of of that and the problem is the more i think about what people are saying and Richard brought
this up on the last episode too is i have a specific i have tailored my system my my linux systems
to the way of my workflow and i can do that but i can't do that on OS 10 and you get the perspective
of somebody coming from windows to os 10 and they're like whoa your workflow is gonna be a whole lot
better i think that's true but going from a system that i can tailor to my needs to my the way
i work perfectly and going into os 10 it's it's a jarring experience because i'm very constricted
and i like i don't like the way that this works but i can't change it yeah i'll give you one of the
examples and i brought up awesome actually for a reason one of the things that awesome has
out of the box that you just don't get on windows and well let's say windows you don't even get
multiple desktops but then awesome took it takes this step further where you can actually treat
your monitors independently so you can actually basically have the equivalent of like 20 desktops
if you've got you know two monitors and you can actually have combinations of things on different
monitors and different desktops so you can actually optimize where you place things and actually
switch between them in any combinations that you want and i want to say something
it's one second this with desktops they definitely care for better adding more than one
like kde doesn't make very well with exfce and the ether so you do have to be really careful sometimes
when adding a desktop on top of another one but yeah i do like the fact you've got different
desktops and all that's i like it's quite a few different desktops that i actually like one
60 TA i like them like a one's LXTA some people like and some people don't and i think it's just
all choice and it's like the great thing about looks you've got that choice well one of the other
things as well that even if setting aside the virtual desktops i mean even just considering your
normal workflow and again i'm going back to windows versus Linux here if you're used to windows
and you're used to the single desktop metaphor even going back to that now one of the things
that once you've got used to Linux and you're still working on that same desktop well actually two
of the things that that when you go back to windows and it doesn't do it just feels feels
feels wrong it feels like it's missing something one is that you cannot grab anywhere in the window
and move it anywhere you have to grab the title bar and move it in windows that drives me nuts
you don't have the space to move it while you're screwed but the the more important one is the idea
of the creating that you can only scroll in the active window in windows where where in Linux
you scroll and it's whatever window the mouse the pointer happens to be over the amount of times
that's caught me out as unbelievable excuse me i think a lot of people here they'll use
Linux at home something some form and they'll go to worker college or school or whatever
and they'll use windows there and they have to sort of compare it they have to sort of switch
that mindset over to to to using one thing at home and using one thing elsewhere and the idea of
having to make a window active before you can scroll down or scroll up it's just nuts
all right i'll jump in here you know what drives me nuts more than that no good focus follows
mouse you know why two monitors are really popular in windows it's because if you
on Linux is in kde and nomen any desktop environment right it is friggin trivial to set
fuzzy or sloppy focus region you know or focus follows mouse and then you have a maximized
window and something in front of it like a normal window so it's no tiling window managers but
you just have a window on top of a maximized window and you're typing into the the normal size
window and you're referring to something in the maximized window on Linux yeah you're right
i can just move my mouse over it'll make the window active but it'll need to i can just scroll
down and then move my mouse back and keep typing on windows i have to click in that and crap it
brought that window to the front now i have to spend all this friggin time finding that other
window in the old tab menu or however it is and bringing it back up and getting all back oh it
tries me fricking insane you want to know why you want to know why there's no good uh pointer
uh mouse follows for focus in windows it's because of the way they do dialogues they have modular
dialogues that once you actually get one of those opened up your focus follows mouse will not work
at all no matter what and that's one of the biggest baloney ways of designing software especially
designing a graphical interface i have ever seen and i used to actually have an extension that i
used in like windows 95 and windows xp and it didn't work all the time because of the way those
dialogues are set up and it was just as gross as yes it was yeah because of the way the message
users set up and it's just atrociously bad and that's one of the things that points to
bad design in windows and unfortunately they've had to carry it they've had to grandfather in
a long because they they implemented it early and it drives me nuts see i kind of think of it as
when you're trying to explain to people what this actually means for them i can i think of this
along the whole smoking and a smoking thing on pubs it's like if you are spending your lifetime
in a pub and there's smoke everywhere and you don't know any different there's nothing you know
that is different um that as soon as you accidentally stumble across an open window and you smell
the fresh air that's effectively discovering linux and you smell the fresh air and you sort of take
a few steps out there and you realize actually there's a different way to life there's a different way
to do things you then look back on that smokey pub uh something that they really wanted going
there it's because all the people in there don't know any different because that's all they've
ever known but you know different because you've seen the alternate way of life you've you've
smelled the fresh air and you don't really want to go back in there and you want to try and pull
people out of that smokey environment because you know it's better for you it's you know it's better
for them but you don't want to preach to them um so that's the kind of the way that i look at the
difference between linux and the windows it's like linux is the fresh air windows is the smokey
pub that everyone knows everyone's familiar with and everyone doesn't know any different from
it's like that's what life is it's it's the smokey pub that's just the way things are
and that killed the conversation well i can fill in with my topic change of better work
well i feel that i've killed the conversation so feel free to change the topic on something else
all right well i actually wanted to group a couple of things um when i first came into this
conversation about two hours ago um there was you know a lot of talk about free software and
advocacy and all of that kind of stuff which you know i'm a proponent of and and i'm interested
in free software and all of that um and then we were talking about the ease of use case and
presenting you know open source and free software let's call it free software to those who
may not use it or or whatever their case may be and then we talked about games as well and
the fact that you know open source games are new and up and coming and there are a lot of good
options out there um but to be fair there are probably more popular close source games as well
but what i what i was wondering at least in my own head is um for for those forget
forget the ease of use case and the ease of learning case let's let's go with the case of those
who don't care to learn don't want to learn those who buy their systems with proprietary operating
systems use them every day couldn't care less about free software anything like that yes we should
you know let those people know that there are alternatives out there but um forgetting the ideological
perspective if a person knows that their privacy um is probably going to be compromised by something
nefarious in a closed source piece of software but they don't necessarily care about that thing
um ideological arguments aside i'm really curious what other folks might think the the danger to
that is i know ideologically we can speak to the dangers and i have my own ideas about what the
dangers are for those people who are stuck in that mindset but from a practical perspective i
can't feel particularly passionate about those dangers and i'm not sure that the people affected
necessarily feel those effects either and i'd like to hear what other people uh think those
dangers might be and what are they aligned with my thoughts i think a lot of people don't recognize
that the the connection between their real life privacy and their online privacy they don't
recognize the fact that their data has been sold to insurance companies and and all that i think
that's one of those kind of um you know time bombs with a delay on on the timer thing comes where
they find like five years down the line they find their their life insurance is just skyrocketed
uh in price because their unbeknownst to them their life insurance company has bought some data
from facebook or google plus or whatever whatever it is twitter or whatever and they happen to decide
oh you're a high risk case um you're really um you know you're partying a lot you're sort of
skiing wild drunk and whatever chances are you're going to claim quite a lot so therefore we're
going to charge you quite a lot and they'll bring in some exemptions like oh well you can't claim
for this in the next thing and i think it's going to be a down the line where people realize oh shoot
what have i done and by that time it's already too late their data is already through the system
and companies have already bought into it and by that time there's nothing they can do
being that open source and free software is kind of a new thing you know for the last
20 years or so i mean do you feel then that we are already a victim of that having not had the
option of opting out of those privacy concerns before and we had something else to go to or was
it not an issue then well i would certainly argue that this time progresses
business models change and companies get involved and
they spot new opportunities and i would think that data mining is something that google especially
got on to really early on in the whole um mining your use case to set to sell you target
that was pretty much a google thing um the facebook quickly followed um and i think others took a
file to get a groc on to that and then and work it however they do that microsoft arguably to
this deal to this day are still trying to figure out how to to work with that um but yeah i think
in the moment it's we're kind of in the age of that's becoming normality now but if in the last
few years yes can i build not to that so if you haven't sort of bought into that in the last few
years yeah you may have protected yourself i don't know but another hand what does that mean because
you hear over and over that people who employers who want to employ people they'll google someone's
name they'll google that that applicant's name and if that applicant comes up completely blank
that's suspicious the fact that they don't have a facebook profile they don't have a google plus
profile or don't have a twitter profile they don't have anything um the fact that all of that
it just seems to be very suspicious um and that counts against them rather than the fact that
they have and that they're a decent human being you know so it's like it's almost like
the more you avoid giving your data up and the more you resist the more it counts against you
i think there are some werewolves out on the moors there yeah i've got neighbors upstairs who are
currently dancing and singing um yeah you probably heard that they'll be forever more immortalized
unnamed on the hbr new year episode hey guys we're gonna uh start uh dinner and then i hear we have
some champagne so i don't know if i'll be back but if not uh happy new years guys happy new year
theater yeah happy new year you all right well i don't want to have a personal conversation with
whistle web about uh about this particular topic so i think it's time for someone else to come
up with something that we can all jump in on well i tried earlier on for uh you know as much as
this pains me i i i'm i'm very borderline on the whole chromebook whether it works for me or not
i'm so borderline um that i keep looking at that and i keep looking at the tech news and i keep
saying chromebooks and the src27e uh just really appeals to me it just hits all the right spots
but the whole idea of Linux taking over on the laptop yeah i think the chromebook is
is definitely doing it um gradually and i think 2020 2014 will be a year where the chromebook explodes
i mean i don't know if that's a talking point or not well i don't know i it probably will i think
the chromebook is sort of an extension it i think it's an extension of the netbook era the kind of
skip to generation where the netbook was it seemed like a really cool idea we figured out it
wasn't and then the chromebook comes in taking a lesson from where that failed and filling a niche
for those folks who um you know fit the ease of use um case you know probably older generations
and those who aren't particularly tech savvy but know they want to get on Facebook or use Skype or
um you know whatever it is the things people do just just so they can do the things they do without
having to know anything and those that's most of the people i know who just want something to work
they power it on they don't care that it costs money and they don't care that there is a privacy
concern and i don't know i can't feel passionate enough to to to turn them from doing that because
i don't know that there's any practical danger to any of that in in the span of their lifetime that
they're going to care about um i i advocate free software wherever possible and for those people
who are even remotely open to suggestion um i do that but i think most don't care and i'm not sure
that it's it matters that they don't care yeah exactly right do you still do you still help them
though i i will help them to the extent that they wish to be helped um but no further
yeah i think that that's a that's a big thing i mean i i hear people who say or i've changed my
girlfriend's computer over to Linux over night and the he and i just think that's absolutely
atrocious you should not do that you should always involve the person that's because it's them
that it's going to have to be involved on it it's it's it's a it's a consensual thing you can't
do it enforce people on to some system that they're not used to because it's your own agenda you
can't do that um but i think for a lot of people i think something as simple as it what as simple
as a tablet or a chromebook or something like that something that's not windows um that they can
just buy out this out of a retailer out of best buyer whatever um they can take home and this
you use i think that's a huge boom and i think what i think Microsoft really must be
cracking their pants basically that that the low end um taking customers away from them they cannot
be pleased uh i just don't see it with the chromebooks yet they just don't look like the the general
public it will uh grab a hold of them like they do with with the box with windows on it uh i think
really linux would have a better um go of it than chromebook to to me but uh you know people want
you know want to turn the machine on go to do their facebook and and and things like that and if
the machine will do that they'll be happy uh the chromebooks will do that but then when
somebody says well you know you need this this or that software you know the just the little
things in chromebook won't do it that that's what's going to hurt them i don't mind helping people
with their computers whatsoever if they're using free software and the people who
ask me for if if if i'm not obligated if i'm not obliged to help a person i'll caveat it with
that if i'm not obliged to help a person or to to help and get something done i don't mind helping
it all with free software any any help any assistance i can give in that regard i will
and i'm very fortunate in that my friends know and understand this and several of them
because they know they can get free help with free software you know free help with a small
f with free software with the with a capital f um they have switched to free software because to them
it's worth it just to have the free help um now and those are my friends i'm fortunate enough
to have friends like that now there are people who i am obliged to help with non free software
like family members who you know i owe a family loyalty as well as other you know personal
debts too that i will help with non free software because i'm obligated to but i'm not going to
go out of my way to help somebody with non free software in in any other regard so i i've been very
fortunate that way well my thing is i don't you know if it's free software or not free software
you know i don't feel obliged with some folks to help them but i i will you know just because that's just
you know this is just the way i look at things if somebody needs help i i don't mind giving them help
but i you know i understand people wanting to push push them in the direction of free software
i agree the free software is much better in the long run and in the short run just because of
the freedom involved well i mean i agree as well in free software that's one of the things that
Google appeared to be doing is that they'll discontinue the free software version of
their own applications and then they'll fork it and create something with a slightly different name
which is proprietary especially for android so even a chromebook isn't necessarily free software
even although it's Linux based but one of the questions from doggs at NIRC is how is it for how's
a chromebook for offline stuff now chrome i mean as i say i don't know what i've said in in in audio
or not i'm seriously tempted with the chromebook the acr c70 i've been looking at it a lot
and one of the things that it does is there's an app like there's an add-on for chromeOS it's all
chromeOS basically chrome a web browser that's what chromeOS is everything runs on the web browser
and um create limited to what what the web browser can do now for what my use case that's great
now one of the things that it has as and as an add-on is a g docs offline so that you can actually
get you can actually click and select this folder or this file or whatever it is and everything
inside it as available offline so you can you can work in that offline and then when you go back
online again it syncs it back online again so it can be used offline but it's essentially an
online it's a cloud-based thing i mean that again depends on how reliable your internet connection
is and again it's all google-based so you know that's google services within the chrome browser so if
you wanted to do like own cloud if you want to set up own cloud and do own cloud through chrome
box and do that way you could do i'm just saying it's not necessarily an impediment but it is
something you would have to think about by the way you describe it it sounds like it was a device
specifically designed for vendor lock-in well yeah it is i mean obviously google want you to use
your google your gmail address and whatever that's fine i mean what i what i thought a bit doing
was creating a you creating a separate gmail account that the only thing it does is log
it into chromebook that's all thing it does and everything beyond that the actual documents are
own cloud on my own server and things like that that's what i attempted to do and you can do that
i mean there's nothing to stop you doing that but yeah if you're using google docs there is
actually a chrome add-on that allows you to do it offline so you're not restricted to being
just online if you don't have an online signal you can actually work around that with google docs
that's all i'm saying i don't know how that works with other services but certainly google docs you
can actually do offline if you have the add-on well and if you can slide their server out and put
own cloud in in its place then then it's not as bad as it sounded at first yeah it certainly
appears from my understanding as yes you can as i say my problem was i could not get own
own cloud installed properly but that said if i could it would just be a case of that url you enter
you do it and it's just a case of creating even if it's just a gmail account that doesn't have
anything else attached to it has no e-mail has no you know nothing else attached to it
that you create that just so that you can log in or you know i mean that's all fine that's all
fine you can you can work around that chromebooks are possible to work around that but obviously google
want you to use their own own services so was this a question i'm looking at the notes here i
missed a bit while i was away k5 tux the k5 tux asked if um if there is real danger for people
who don't care to know is that is that the the question well i mean a lot of people don't
don't don't don't care about the i mean you see people this fs f when they go out and campaign
outside an apple store when there's a release of a new apple ipod or whatever they go out
and campaign outside the apple store yeah that's pointless you don't even have to pointless
well i don't know i mean but you don't have to go that far to find someone who doesn't care
i mean my mother-in-law just wants to see her grandchild on a video chat she doesn't care
what computer needs to needs to show up for that to happen doesn't care what software needs to be
installed doesn't care what to do she just wants to turn a computer on and click a button
and see the grand kid and i can totally understand that but i would say there is some
danger i hesitate to use the word danger so somebody's gonna lose a finger to it but
you know she was using Skype to do that for a while and that was the only thing she knew to do
and all of a sudden Skype said no we're not gonna do this for free anymore we want money for
you to see your grand kid and she was locked in because she didn't know another way to do that
and had there not been someone there to help her find a different free way uh she would have
you know been locked into this thing she had to pay for but as far as standing out in front of
the apple store i think they must reach i mean if they reach one person a day then their
goal is probably met i know they're not reaching every person i wouldn't pretend to say that but
i don't know well funnily enough actually on the Skype story the UK government were talking about
um one of the one of the ways that they were talking about saving money in the the health care
system in the UK was encouraging doctors to consult with patients over Skype and because i mean
obviously the government think for Skype's that the major fight thing that people understand
it's the brand name that people understand and all i could think of was Skype equals Microsoft
equals NSA and it's the one that's the line splitter on let's don't forget
yeah it's like that's the one they know that's the brand name they know and all i could think of
as i said was Skype equals Microsoft equals NSA whatever um equals whatever your conversation your
private consultation with your doctor equals being recorded and being sold for whatever you know
but that's what they know so they were trying to encourage that as a kind of web 2.0 Aish version
of the future of saving money that you could wipe call your doctor you know for a consultation
the problem as i see it is that the folks that are here in this this chat tonight
know there are dangers to uh to the things the things that uh proprietary software do
but uh we don't evangelize that that fact well enough letting people know that
it's not safe uh to use some of these products even though you know you got
smiling bill and windows uh it's not all you know grins and giggles it's not very easy to
evangelize the negative points of something that you don't like so i usually wind up just
telling people you know in short it's a trap if you're interested in finding out why we can discuss
it further but here's this other thing that i believe is better in the long run and some people
take my word for it and some people don't yeah i've i wrote a blog post a couple of weeks ago
maybe a week ago now about i wonder if the NSA are actually a secret sort of false evangelists
in the fact that when they quote when they start strong arm Microsoft or Apple or Cisco or whatever
part of the patriotic says you cannot you sorry excuse me you cannot acknowledge this if someone
asks you you must lie that's your job you patriotic job you cannot acknowledge this that you're
working with us and you cannot refuse to work with us either give no choice you've got to work
with us and you've got to lie about it if asked but all of that is hidden behind a binary compilation
of a program if Apple put out or Microsoft put out an update to a binary you've no clue where it's
in it all you've got to go on as a user is what Microsoft at Apple or Cisco or whatever oracle say about
so i wonder i'm kind of wondering if the NSA have been the best evangelist for free software
that there's ever been because you cannot hide something from the source code if something's
free software then people can examine the source code read people like me who have no interest
whatsoever in the source code but however i keep an eye on the technical news and i'm going to
bet your ass i'm going to see if something on tech dot or tech spot or whatever engage it or
whatever once they find out something yeah i'm going to be tweeting about it i'm going to be
talking about it i'm going to know about it and i'm going to choose not to install it if it's been
back doored you know people are going to keep an eye on it um so you know that i wonder if
if the NSA are the best free software advocates there's ever been because i argues against
the value of proprietary and it argues for free software regardless of whether it's gpl or
or MIT or whatever license because you can see the source code i would say no i don't i don't
see a giant movement towards free software right now um though i do believe i saw one when
windows vista first came out so i i would argue that uh microsoft has been the biggest free software
advocate of all time i think she agree with you know i think i trained a lot of people
with the lights for a short time anyway if they at least kind of told about it well see the thing
is even with vista um i mean formally enough there's a future on my episode tonight and i think
that we take a vista anyway um vista or windows a i think a lot of people on windows
they're sort of comfortable with what they know and even if vista or windows a it doesn't quite
you know if they don't quite agree with that they'll say i don't want anything else i don't know
about everything else i'll just wait until the next version of windows in the case of vista
windows seven in the case of windows eight people are saying i don't really like windows eight
but i'll wait until windows nine and hope and hope that they've come to some sort of sense
they don't change to lunics just because they don't like vista or just because they don't like
windows eight and we're glad i don't know what he's 16 and he's very old-fashioned as well
there's nothing about technology um but he was um we know i made him two years ago he was still on
windows he's paying it's a really really odd computer the only time he actually um
thought about upgrading was when he bought a brand new computer and he bought the most expensive
thing he could find windows wise which is windows seven at the time he still hasn't upgraded to
windows eight so that's what people do they don't unless they have to buy or upgrade i don't
think a lot of people don't they get talked into upgrading would amount me so some some people do
jump for that reason sound chaser because it's exactly why i made the jump to linux
well i was still on windows seven but she's only got two gurm and she's actually she has been
paying a passing interest in one doing a little bit um and she um but she's not prepared to change
it i think that's drawing on you just to see if she knows the difference because she Yang does
vice versa you know that's on that that's actually an interesting question what made people in this
conversation in this chat in this mumble chat what made these everyone here switch on to linux
what enticed them on the linux rather than than saying windows or or mac or whatever was good
enough for them i was looking for features for windows seven i think was windows seven or
bister at the time and i was looking for something interesting that i could do on the beach talk
and i discovered a video with someone was doing a virtual box of love beach box yan's cub
and i'm doing a bunch of you know i just downloaded by cio and it should get a full install
so i like paying down i think ah yes yeah i didn't come from it or come to it from
a i don't like windows perspective at all i actually started using the first systems i ever used
were unix systems bsd unix backs went back when it was uh proprietary and linux just seemed like
a logical extension of the workflow that i had that i had already established and i came to the
free software concept afterwards but my switch linux had nothing to do with it yan might
might too but i actually discovered osgilly.com and that's where i started to get to know that
a youtuber's quite well because i was standing out about two or three years ago on that channel
it's between twelve i think um and um i i i actually got to know them quite well on the forums
they taught me hates and that's probably why i got really really interested in it
basically. well i mean for me i did mcp years ago um now and one of the guys had to be on my mcp
it was an mct uh teacher who they have to take their uh they have to reset their own exam
the the test that they teach they have to keep resetting that every two or three years to make
sure to qualify to teach it and it happened to be him everything i glanced across at his monitor
i had no idea who he was he was an instructor and everything i glanced across i thought he was
just an old student just like the rest of us and everything i glanced across at his screen i'm
like that's not windows what the hell is that and it turned out to be um like mandrake nine point
one or something like that it was like that's really that's not windows what what is that
uh and i how could i gradually go into that that way is like do um i talk to him sort of caught him
a lunchtime is, you know what is that you're running you see that the biggie's is own rigging
and and the caution is like what is that and that's when he started talking about lunatics and
yeah from that point on i went from and i'm having the knowledge to read to Elf partitions and
things like that. Then on to deciding, right, everything in my hardwood walks I can get
online, and I can start using Linux full-time and gradually keep me that way.
I think it's a long enough pause in the conversation that I feel free to sway the topic a little
bit. Something I forgot to mention earlier when you guys are saying what's your free
software favorite or free software preference instead of proprietary. I forgot to mention
my very favorite at the moment, and for the past year or so, is OpenStreetMap.org.
I really, really like, and I know that's not a specific software product, but I really
like the whole project, and I use several mobile applications that rely on OpenStreetMap,
but I think it's just fantastic. And Osmond is a program that I use on my phone, and
it's a navigation software, and it's approaching, and in some cases, occasionally it's better,
than my standalone GPS device.
All right, so since I've got up in the conversation now, where do we think the major achievements
are going to be in free software? I'm not, I'm not even going to count my OpenStreetMap
or whatever, because that, that's it, and now's it down. But where are the major achievements
going to be in free software in general in 2014 then?
Which is, I reckon, and even it's like the good watches of glasses, I think.
Well, there's a few hardware manufacturers that are bringing out like smartphones with watches
and things like that to go along with them like Samsung or like the Pebble. That's one,
I guess. For me, the Steam Box is going to be huge. I'm not that much of a gamer, I've
got a PS3, I've got that later in the game. But, yeah, I think the Steam Box is going
to be pretty big as well, but beyond the Steam Box and beyond possible whether the phones
or the watches are even encodin' that, because a lot of those things are proprietary in nature,
but use free software from to some degree. Where does free software go in 2014?
I would like to see more ROM images for some more like cheaper entry-level phones. I think
a lot of people are kind of stuck with their stock Android or other things because they're
just isn't something available, but tons of people have cheap, like, sub-hundred-dollar
phones that are perfectly capable of running something like Siannage and Mod if there were
a ROM available that had, although, the specific requirements.
Yeah, that's one thing, actually, that you don't see very much. And Linux, you can go
and download an ISO and it's your choice is either 32 bit or 64 bit and that's your choice,
depending on what your hardware is, as long as you know what your hardware is you're looking for,
that's the ISO you're looking for. With phones that's completely different, it's all down to
whether you're on a, you know, a T-mobile phone from the UK and it's this model and it's this
this image that came with it and or whether it's an AT&T with such and such and it's all
just crazy finding the right ROM image to get it working with the right hardware, it's insane.
You've got it. You've got a really good point there. Somebody says to you, oh man, I've got this
really old low-spec computer. What can I do with it? I'd like to do something with it. Do you
say, well, well, there are Linux on there, but if somebody said to you, I've got this, you know,
kind of low-spec phone, what can I do with it? Well, not much, you know, you might be able to put
the original ROM back on there and get it back to sort of factory fresh, but not much else you can do
with it. Yeah, totally. I mean, it's a case of looking for the right ROM image and hoping that
the link that it takes you to, the only link that people seem to point you to, isn't out of day
and isn't on one of those file locker systems that the delete is after six months because it
hasn't been done loaded. You know, it's one of those things where as what Linux, you can point it
and say, oh, it's a 32 bit, right? Okay, this is the link. This is always going to work, or this
is a 64 bit, it's always going to work and it does. So there is that, there is that definite issue
and the idea that when you buy an Android phone, the only thing you, I mean, I've been to touch
aside, the only thing you can install on it is Android. You cannot install iOS, you cannot install
simb and you can install anything else. You buy an Android phone, you're stuck with a version of
Android that's done with those particular drivers, an image for that particular model of handset,
it's just, it's just crazy, really, it's not anywhere close to, or this is a device, you know,
you can put Linux on it, whatever, it's just, it would be lovely if that was the idea, where you could
go to Samsung mod and say, you know, a download image and it will work and it'll automatically detect,
oh, this is your making, this is your model and this is the, the drivers that I need to download
and install for the microphone and the speakers and, and what about at the install thing,
that would be lovely, but until then, you know, it just doesn't work like that, just yet.
I wonder if a Boontool have any effect on that.
Nope, no, they're going to go real model specific.
No, no, no, no, you know, the problem with phones, as I say, it is that phones, unlike PCs,
or, you know, desktop computers, laptops, including the Apple machines, a PC works with,
a myriad of, let's say, Windows or Linux works on a myriad of PC boards.
Telephones are totally different because, yeah, it is all Android, but one has a processor
that is slightly different than another and I think that's where the problem is, I don't know
for sure, but that's as I see it. Yeah, but you can perk a processor slightly so in a phone
and now all of a sudden it doesn't work with the ROM, but you can perk a processor slightly so
in a desktop and it does work and I don't know why that is. I don't know if it's because,
you know, maybe phone ROMs don't come with all the drivers and everything, maybe it's, maybe it's
not, what do you call it, not a micro-carnel, like a big kernel all the drivers, modular.
I don't know, I wonder if there's a way to put together a ROM that just has all the drivers
for all the phones and it configures itself just the way any Linux distro does.
Well, I think it's fundamentally different the way that the processors work in the phones
over the way the processors work in a regular, a quote, regular computer. I think that's part of it.
I wish somebody that knew a little bit more about ARM was on that might clear, clear up why
the ROMs are so much different on Android. Well, I do know that ARM has several different
generations and whatever generation it is, it has to be recompiled for, your software has to be
recompiled for. It's not like x86 where it was the same basic architecture with a couple of functions
added every generation or two. I guess it is, as I understand it, and I could be wrong, but as
I understand it, I guess it is different each generation or different enough. And I believe
somebody can correct me if I'm wrong, that ARM is also a risk architecture, so it's a reduced
instruction set. Well, we ruined that, didn't we?
It's only a interrupt. I'm a bit afraid to speak. No, I agree. I think I'm going to see
where Linux goes in T14. Finish with a desktop rather than fine.
Yeah, I was just looking at risk computing. I know it's a reduced instruction set, and I know that
that's in some way for efficiency, so I was just looking it up to see if I could find some more
some more about it. Is it? Yeah, I did ask Poppy about the dock they're going to have the
Ubuntu phone. It's going to turn it into a desktop and I'm on it. He said it's going to come out
in 2014 if anyone's wondering, wasn't he? How much do you reckon, I reckon if they come up with a
cheap phone that's open, that's a free open source phone. I'm not afraid to phone, but you know,
free operating system on that network. I think that that could work. A channel with
phones, they tend to be quite expensive most of the time. Well, in the majority of the cell phone
market, the real difference in phones, I think, is just that they're like a system on a chip,
putting, you know, designs specifically for the case that they're in, and they have to make
their money back in quantity. It's not like a desktop computer where, okay, the motherboard's
going to fit because it's ATX or micro ATX or et cetera, et cetera. I mean, you've got to specifically
design this thing from the ground up and you have to sell enough of them to make your design phase,
your prototyping phase, your testing phase, all your profits have to cover that. So for someone to
contract out a low end phone so that they can sell it with a free software ROM that works,
the market just isn't big enough to make that money back or at least nobody thinks it is,
nobody with any investment capital thinks it is. You know, most people who buy a cell phone,
you know, I'm sad to say, you know, buy it so they can do the Facebook on the go and do their,
I don't even know what the Snapchat or whatever the other apps are that they're using now,
just to do those things on the run. They're not buying it because it is a computing device and they
can do their computing on it and they would like to do so with free software. It's just not enough
of those people to make such a proposition profitable. There's enough of us who use, you know,
like cyanogen mod, it seems there's enough of us who do that to keep those things going, but
as far as a low end phone, I don't know, I don't think saturating the market and then developing
that low end phone is where it's going to start from. And it's, you know, phones are full of
already hardware too, so. Yeah, that's true. Back in time for another time thing.
Oh yeah, right on. See when you're talking about that. Hold on, hold on, this away. Before you move on,
we got Cape Verde. We got some parts of Greenland. Oh boy, I can't even pronounce that per,
I don't know. I'm going to skip it. Punta del Delgata in the Azores. Holy smokes, really guys.
Choucou is in a row. It took our two mid. Thank you. The azure is, I'm probably thinking the azure
is going to be on. The azores in Portugal, yeah. Yeah, so happy new year to those folks and that part,
those parts of the world. Yeah, path he needs to do is moving up behind the UK.
Yeah, so the thing I was thinking of is when you're trying to convince, if you're trying to
convince a retailer to say, right, stock, give a Windows option instead of, sorry, give a Linux
option alongside a Windows option when you're buying a computer, laptop or desktop or whatever.
The point is about the all the added extras that they can put onto Windows. I mean, for my mind,
Windows is made for the consumer. The problem is the consumer is not you. The consumer is
McCurvy. The consumer is Microsoft Office. The consumer is all these trialware products
that they put onto the machine. That's what Windows is built for. It's not built for you, the end
user. Linux is built for you, the end user. So if you say, right, if you buy a Windows machine,
that if you want a full office suite, you have to pay an extra $30 or whatever it happens to be
for Microsoft Office or you buy a Linux machine, then you take, you type in this command,
sudo, get install, open office or whatever it is, and you get pretty much the same thing for
the vast majority of people. You get essentially the same thing for $0. There's no incentive
whatsoever for the retailer to offer Linux because there's no add-on, because there's no add-on
value with Windows or add-on value. We don't need to agree. We've got tole off. At least
still a week, a few stores last year, and no, that wouldn't be a smith channel that's in all
open office or liberal office when people just they'd like, well, the biggest sellers was
Microsoft Office for 200 bucks a pop, or whatever it is here. It's not going to make a way to
monitor. We have the next new years to do here. We just didn't hear it, so. We did it just before
the end of the years, but yeah. Yeah, I just sound chaser. I slightly disagree with the argument.
I don't think Microsoft is made for consumers. I think Microsoft is made to lure consumers in.
It looks shiny on the shelf. It looks like it's got a bunch of stuff for you. Once you have it,
it's really not for you anymore. It's certainly made for vendors. Vendors can once a consumer has
the computer. There's all kinds of stuff pre-built in for the vendors to put in front of the consumers,
but I don't think it's made for consumers as much as it's made as a lure for consumers. That might
be Linux's problem is that we don't seem to have a lot of trappings for consumers. Linux truly
is made for consumers. If you think about it, it just doesn't have those trappings. It doesn't
have the glitz on the shelf. That wasn't me. You disagreed with that was thistle web. You disagreed
with. Yeah. Did I say sound chaser? I'm sorry. The example I give is the case of I used to use
when I came from the Windows background, I used to use Yahoo Messenger. When I came to Linux,
I thought I need a Yahoo Messenger. I need to be able to find to communicate and personal
messages and PMs in Yahoo Messenger. I found the only Yahoo Messenger. This was 2006-2007
roundabout. I mean, the first Linux that really worked for me was PC Linux 2007. That shows my age.
PC Linux, OS, you mean that? Yeah, PC Linux OS 2007. That was the first Linux I used full-time,
with KDE 3. Whatever it was. But anyway, so when I looked at that and I thought I need a Yahoo Messenger
that works with Yahoo Messenger. At the time, I was looking at the official Yahoo client was
like it was discontinued at like Red Hat 9 or whatever. This is before even Fedora Core arrived
in the scene. That's just really old and really discontinued. Then you have like...
Finally, Fedora Core was... Fedora Core is back to like 2000 and full. I mean, that's why
that worked. Yeah, exactly. So it was ancient. That's the point as Yahoo sort of almost kind of
recognized Linux for a little while and made like a kind of Dell-like
appreciation of Linux. But we'll give you a little sort of a nod. But we don't really care
about you essentially. That's what Yahoo did. And I was looking at something and I found like
Pigeon. Pigeon doesn't do anywhere near as much as Yahoo Messenger does. In terms of the Yahoo
Messenger chat experience, it doesn't have voice chat. It's a major one I had. But it does
major all the things. The point is, I mean, I'm comparing, if you're looking at just personal messages,
comparing... Pigeon is built for users. It's very simple. There's nothing fancy to it. There's
no built-in adverts. There's no built-in anything. Compared to the Yahoo equivalent to that,
is it's built-in adverts on the the body list, flash met, flash adverts on the body list,
built-in things for their partners that shout-cast and whatever, also on tabs on the body
list that you cannot remove. When you install it, you get their, you know, their browser tool,
but things like that. All these things, it's built for a different audience,
where Pigeon is built for the user, for the people who actually use the product and need the
core functions, where as the proprietary or the other version, the competitive version is built
for a different audience, it's built for the retailer, it's built for the advertiser. That's my
point. I mean, I was about a long-winded there. Yeah, well, that's the point I was trying to make,
that those things aren't built for the end user. They're built to get you to use them,
but they're not the product. The end user is the product, and the end user is sold to advertisers,
so the product is really for advertisers. It's and you're the product. The software isn't for you.
The software is just to draw you in and capture your eyes. Yeah, I'm not so exactly. That's the
difference between that I see it. That's the difference between Linux and between Windows,
and when you put that great for the user's point of view, but when you put that in terms of
the retailers point of view, they're like, where can we benefit from that? Where can we upsell?
There's nothing we can do with Linux. We can make money from Windows, but what can we do
from Linux? There's nothing we can go from there. The retailer couldn't make just as much,
because they're just selling a hardware, a piece of hardware, and making their small markup on that,
and they're trying to sell what do you call it there, the warranty, the extended warranty,
and if they're lucky, they can sell you some box software. Other than losing the sales on the box
software, they really wouldn't lose all that much by selling Linux, where their real
losses, if they were to put Linux computers in the shelf, would be in retraining their staff,
and trying to get their staff to get those things right. I think that's where their real cost is,
and their profit, just not enough to justify it.
Well, yeah, that is that, but then again, if you say, I want to use this computer, if you're
thinking about it from a non-techy perspective, but I want to use this computer for accessing
Facebook and now and again, writing a letter to my local newspaper or whatever, then you know,
you can see what app get installed, LibreOffice, and that's you've got office, or even if LibreOffice
isn't already pre-installed. You've already got that, you don't have the office upsell,
you don't have the Photoshop upsell, you don't have a lot of things upsell. Not only that is,
you have the Linux gets more out of the hardware you already have, so therefore you don't have,
and it's also better with the file system in terms of you're not finding in a couple of years
that actually the computer slows molasses, you know, it's like all the computers get enrolled,
you're better going buy a new computer, you don't have any of that particular X, so there's all
of these things counting against the retailer that's actually a disincentive for the retailer to
offer Linux, rather than that is for the offer to offer Linux because Windows because not on
their interest. Well, financially it's not in their interest. All those companies that put the little
little tasterware when you buy a new computer, they're paying the manufacturer money to put it
on there. If you just bought a brand new say Dell laptop with Linux on it, it would cost more
money than one with Windows on it and all the little teaserware because all the little teaserware
is given the manufacturer dollars here, $20 dollars there to include it in the product and that's
where Linux is never going to get a foothold unless we can start paying the manufacturers to stick
Linux on the machines and it just goes against what free software is all about.
I'd like to jump in with that. Didn't Dell actually put out some laptops and there were a couple
actually where there was a price difference. It was the same identical system but with Ubuntu,
it was like maybe $10, $20 cheaper, not as much as a Windows license outright, but it was cheaper
even with all the crapware thrown on it. I thought it was the same and I thought it was good
true, but they actually, their profit on that was lower than on the same exact hardware with
Windows and all the bloatware but to get people to buy it as an option, they made less money off
of it if I remember what I read about it. I think when they first did it,
in like $98.99 they put Red Hat and Michael Dell came out and said, we're losing money on every
machine we sell with Red Hat on it even though Red Hat was free. First of all, I like to interject
two things. The first thing is free software is not against making money selling free software,
they're not against, they're not opposed to making money off free software. Second of all,
these manufacturers, they're too short-sighted to think of something new. They're stuck in the 80s
and 90s mindset where, oh, there's no software to people, Red Hat gives away free software and
has services around it. They're a billion dollar company, they're doing it right. Dell was too
short-sighted in the late 90s to be like, well, we can't sell this extra crapware software on
our computers. Maybe we should design some services around our computers to make some money
on top of the software we're giving away. No one thinks of that. Why doesn't Best Buy come up with
their own backup system or off-site backup system to put on Ubuntu or whatever. New Linux,
they put on it to keep the customers in, charge them 10 bucks a month and now they're making their
extra money every month on the customers. Now they're tied into the customers, they have a long
relationship with the customers. The customers are more likely to come back and buy another computer
if that's a good experience. It's just these companies are too short-sighted. They can't think
out of the box and try something different. Well, I'd like to add to that, to be honest with you,
the big thing of why Best Buy doesn't do that is because the pure profit of the, quote,
protection plan is much more economically viable, especially when they can find a lot of ways to
weasel out of it. The other thing is that Dell is now a private company. It is no longer public.
It used to be that Dell is a public company and so they could say, oh, wow, wow,
our shareholders. Well, first of all, Red Hat is publicly traded, so what Dell is now private,
and I'd like to see if maybe that changes their tune a little bit. Now they don't have as many
people to answer to. Yeah, hopefully that could be the case. I was just referencing back in the
late 90s that someone said where they were complaining they were losing money. Then it's when
they should have took the opportunity to build some services around their products, but they chose
not to do that. Well, okay, but the thing about that with Dell is you have to realize in the
Windows market they get subsidized to put Windows and put other crap we're on these machines.
Exactly. So when they switch to Linux space, they don't get any subsidizing. That's why
it's built extra services. Well, make up for the subsidization. Well, if you're giving away
services, you're not going to be necessarily get anything out of it. No, no, no, you invest
time to build new services and put them and build them into the OS and put them on the machines.
That's actually a really big cost. That's not small. No, don't give away the services. You
charge for the services. The problem is not that it's a problem is not that it's a cost. The problem
is that it's a risk in big companies like that are very risk averse. Well, I think it's more of
these more of this big companies are they're they're out to make a buck. That's what Dell
is still in business to do is to sell computers. They can make a $100 off of this server with
with a Windows product or $100 on the same product with Red Hat. They're going to sell them.
But the problem is Windows and all the bloat that it comes with especially on a desktop
is subsidizing and lowering the price. That's why equal equal laptop from system 76 and actually
cost a little more than another brand of laptop with equal processor, equal memory, equal graphics
cards that comes with Windows because of the supplements. Well, yeah, but the problem with the
problem with the sorry sound chaser, but there's one other problem with that. Dell is buying 100 times
more computer parts than system 76s. So they're getting a much cheaper price on the parts. Never mind
with any subsidies. So that's why system 76 can't keep up with Dell and HP. They're buying 100
times more than system 76. They're getting a better break on the pricing. Let me get my point
and here real quick. I want to go back to address this the idea of building and adding services to
this. You have to understand with this. Okay, even if you go ahead and build and add those things,
you're talking literally hundreds of thousands to half a million dollars and that invested in
terms of getting all the people in and spending all the time to design and develop and do all this
stuff and Dell's not that kind of shop. They're not a development shop. So they're they that we
a whole new retooling for them and basically bringing in a whole new management chain and a
major major major investment in an operating system that they haven't proven yet. But then on top
of it, they actually be able to put it out there and be able to convince the consumer to actually
buy additional services, which again, they don't have a track record of actually doing. So that's,
I mean, that's a huge huge risk that you, I mean, to put out a small line of laptops or
dust tops that have a different OS on them, I don't know that you're really going to take that
kind of a risk. That's a monstrous. Yeah, that was exactly my point. If it were very little risk,
if they were, you know, if it were nearly a guarantee that they'd make money, they get a good
return on their investment, they would spend the money. They would make the gigantic investment
if they were going to get a good return on it. It's the risk that the first two, not the investment.
Well, I mean, that's part of being in business. You got to take risk. I mean, Sony lost. No,
you don't. Well, Sony, Sony lost money for five years on the PlayStation three before they made
any money. Yeah, Sony is a huge, huge company that has actually so. Yeah, but that by comparison,
no, not compared to Sony. Sony actually has their whole music business. They're,
their media enterprises. They're not completely separate. No, they're under the same roof. Yeah,
they're under the same umbrella. So you gotta realize, yes, they're separate entities within a
massive multinational corporation. So one, one division taking a loss is actually offset by all
the other divisions making a profit. So that's got only one business and they actually have to
basically say, yeah, it's hard wear branch takes a gigantic risk. They're betting the farm on it.
If Sony's hardware branch takes a risk, they're, it's still a huge bet. Don't get me wrong,
but it's only a fifth of the company. It's not all of the company. I would say with a
temporary 10% it most. Yeah, I think when it comes to retailers offering either windows or
Linux, I think it comes to the up sale. You can upsell on windows. That's what it's built to do.
You can upsell on selling a photoshop package, an office package of whatever it is package and a virus
not in McAfee, whatever. You can upsell on that. When it comes to Linux, you can't really do that
when when a customer buys the machine that it's got a boom to or for door or whatever it is on it.
Do you want it by McAfee on that? McAfee doesn't work on that. You know, a Microsoft office
doesn't work on that. There's a whole, there's a whole thing that's cut off there that they
cannot upsell on. So it does not make up for the fact that they can't, yeah, it's, I don't know,
I'm most of the world's. They cannot upsell basically, they're limited on the upsell when
they offer Linux. That's the point. Yeah, you know something though, and you just made me think of
this and I'll just kind of clicked into place as you were saying that. If they're trying to upsell
software in the store and that's why they're selling windows and every person in this room,
please raise your hand if you disagree. I think every person in this room would say,
you would have to be stupid to buy your software at the store that you're buying your computer
at the time you buy your computer. So they're selling software essentially to stupid people,
and it's long been said that no one has ever gone broke overestimating the stupidity of the public.
I would disagree with the term stupid. I would say that the general uninformed and unknowledgeable
person, yes, but I wouldn't necessarily, quote, quote, name those people as stupid. They're just not
technical and they, they don't necessarily understand how the industry works. If you're uninformed and
unknowledgeable and ignorant on something and you go down and plunk a shitload of money down on it,
I would call that stupid. That's a stupid move. There are lots of people who do the same thing with
cars with, you know, all sorts of things. Appliances, big, big home appliances, small home appliances,
and computers are viewed in the same way for people. Yes, it's a bad idea on those things and
everybody knows that everybody's too lazy to make the right decision. That is that's a stupid
thing to do. I've done it myself. I've been stupid myself as a consumer. It's still a stupid thing.
But you're in such a culture that that's the mindset of 90% of the people out there.
We are in a group here, an audience that is more detailed oriented and more willing to go and
do an investigation and actually try to understand things that the average person just won't do.
I mean, they can't even, in some respects, can't do it because they just are not
in that mindset to actually be able to grok all of that stuff. Oh, no, they can do it. It's all
there. And just because 90% of the people do it doesn't mean it's not a stupid thing to do.
Even the fact that 90% of the normals, as I would like to call them, not the ticket oriented,
the normals among the general public, that's the vast majority. Even the fact that they do that,
that's where the bread and butter comes from from from Dell from HP from your best buy. Whatever,
that's the people that come into their stores. That's the people who are going to be tempted to
go an extra $100 for Microsoft Office. Oh, that sounds like a good deal. That's the people
who are not going to be, if you say, right, here's this one, here's this Ubuntu machine.
Of course, it's exactly the same, but you don't have to pay for antivirus and you don't have to pay
for Microsoft Office and whatever. You just, it's all pre-installed and you don't have to do that.
They're not going to offer that because they're not going to get any benefit from that. They're
going to be offered the choice of a machine that has the, oh, do you want this? It costs extra.
Therefore, the Microsoft Office, like the McAfee, or the Norton, or whatever. And that's what it is.
It's the normals. It's not the the techie interested people. That's exactly what I said. It's
exactly what I meant. And again, no one ever went and broke by overestimating the stupidity of
the public. It's like when you go to a clothing store, you know, a big retail clothing store.
And everything in the store is magically on sale, right? And you get to the counter and they ring
you up and the girl behind the counter goes, you saved $70 with us today. And like, and we believe
that, not because it's true, not because we even think it's true. We believe it because we want to
believe it. But you really have to be stupid to believe it, don't you? You mean I didn't save that
$70? I'm sorry, Jonathan. He didn't. Oh, man. It's, in fact, it cost you 120 to save that 70. So
really, it cost you 120. He didn't save anything. Man, that works is if you're buying the stuff
already and it's completely inelastic to you, so you're just really trying to get the price.
Well, your demand is inelastic, as in you would have bought it anyway. Well, in which case,
the sale makes no difference because their sale prices aren't really sale prices. The prices
are inflated so that they can put a sale tag on them and make it look like they're on sale. So
again, you still didn't save anything. Yeah, this might be a bit of a tangent. Yeah, that's quite
often. I'm noticing that more and more these days by three dealers where they increase the price
just before a sale and then they immediately drop it and they draw attention to it as being in the
sale. And it's like, if you're savvy, if you're aware of that, you're like, how are you going to
remember that? That was the same price as it was before. That's not a fucking sale price. I'm
sorry, that is not a sale price. You know, and it's all attention to try and tempt you and
to spend your money. You know what? It's just this BS. You said you're just noticing that now.
I wonder if it's a sales tactic or technique that's just reaching you over there because that's
been going on here in the States for, I mean, geez, at least 15 years. It's been common knowledge.
And it's, you know, it's a favorite thing for people to know. No, no, no, no. Something has been going
on longer than that, Poke. Yeah. Especially. It's especially a technique used for time-sensitive
things like you have to buy something for Christmas. Well, everyone knows that all these Christmas
sales, that's not your best pricing. That's actually in most cases, actually, you're worse pricing
because they're pricing it based on a demand for a time basis. You wait till after Christmas,
prices drop to a lot of times lower than the pre-Christmas sales prices. Oh, yeah. It was a
few years ago. Well, not probably four or five years ago. We got my son a leapser and we got,
I can't remember what we got him, but he ended up breaking so we brought it back to Toys of Ross
and we were like, well, do you want a new one of these? Or do you want to see what else is around?
He's like, oh, let's just see what's around. And they had the leapser games. It was like,
buy one, get one free, like the day after Christmas. Everything was like crazy on sale. And I was like,
man, next year, we're celebrating Christmas the day after. I was like, this is crazy.
Yeah, definitely. And when I say that it, you know, started happening 15 years ago, I guess what I
mean by that is 15 years ago, if you went to 10 stores, maybe three of them would say to you,
you saved this much money today. If you go shopping now and you go to 10 stores,
nine of them will tell you you saved this much money today. And seven of them will have it printed
on the receipt. Oh, yeah, you're exactly right, Pokey. 100% right. Yeah, this time. Yeah, usually,
this time. Yeah, this time. They've all gone down to the idea of, hey, there's a list price.
So whatever we price on them, even though that's not what we're paying for it, hey, yes,
what the consumer seems because they're paying the full list price. Well, that kind of went out
to the window over 20 years ago. You know, the one thing that they hate, I mean, as you say,
it's not something I've recently clocked on to, it's something I've gradually noticed
in increasing that more and more retailers do. Nowadays, you have to really second guess,
every time you look, walk down an aisle and say, something's 50% off, you think, really,
let's compare the prices and you have to actually analyze it. You can never take that 50% off as
sort of a red. That's just my figure of speech. But yeah, I mean, you do have to look around
that all wise to that and they all exploit that to the maximum. No, it's just insane.
Okay. Now, I'm going to use this since we all seem to be in agreement on this pricing thing.
I'm going to use this to try and rebuild the previous point and saying that buying software
from a store at the same time as you buy a computer, and I say it stupid, and I'm going to
reinforce here. So now we already know that in a retail store, the products are overpriced
intentionally. They're above list price. So you could buy it at home online for cheaper. That's
number one. Number two is they're going to sell you that software at the store because you think
you need it. Now, you haven't done the research to know, is there a, you know, I'll go back to
a way earlier point. Is there a GPL piece of software that does the task that I need? And there's
very, very little out there that you can honestly say has functionality and does things that there is
no GPL equivalent to, you know, there, you know, maybe photo processing. If you do specific things
in that, maybe video processing, if you do specific things in that. But I mean, everything else from
disk encryption to defragmentation, everything else. There are GPL pieces of software that work
better than the proprietary ones. So that's the second thing. And if they convince you that that's
the thing you need, do you buy it right then and there without even seeing if there's another
proprietary alternative? So you've got three strikes. And you know, with that said, I'm going to
the rest of my case here that it is stupid and to buy proprietary software in the same transaction
as you buy a new computer. Right. Well, I'll give you an example of that. Years ago, I mean, it was
years ago to be fair, but I don't think they've changed very much. I used to work for an electronics
company in the UK called Comet. Comet have now went bankrupt. But there's, there's all those,
like them, Curry's, PC world, partner, same chain, Dickens, partner, same chain. I used to work
for Comet. And while I was a salesperson, Comet, one of the things that we got told was sell the
extended one. That was the, you got a year's warranty with everything, the occasional TV,
Sony's had two years, a couple of others had two years warranty, but it's sell the extended
warranty. That's hugely profitable to sell those warranties. That's where the profit was.
And that's where we, where our targets was. They didn't care. If you sold 50,000 pounds worth
of product per week, they didn't care what they wanted was a percentage profit and warranty.
Certain percentage amount you want, you sold in an extended warranties. That's the thing,
it's pure profit. For the company involved, it's pure profit because the vast majority of people
don't ever claim on the one that they have. If they buy an extended warrant, if they're a
video rook, well, when I left there, it was 1996 or something, so video recorders were still
the thing. The CD players were still the thing. DVDs haven't even been invented. The SNES and
the Mega Drive or the Genesis was the consoles. So it was a while ago. But even then, if you didn't,
the challenges are you would never claim on that warranty, which means it's pure profit.
And if you did claim on the warranty, the tiny minority that we claim on the warranty,
the actual cost involved in repairing the product involved was minuscule, absolutely minuscule.
That's why it was pure profit. So all it is is a case of selling stuff that's pure profit,
that they don't have to outgo on. And in the case of selling windows on a pre-installed computer,
they know that every 30 years that the machine is eventually going to wear down through
due to windows. And if people with perception is going to be, that's really slow. It's really
it's crashing a lot. It's needing rebooting a lot and whatever. Or the computer is just getting
old. I'm just going to throw it away and get a new computer. And it's really not. It's just
windows. And they go out and buy a new computer. And that's the whole point. It's going to
buy a new computer. And that new computer, chances are it's got a new version of windows on it,
which invariably means a new version of office, which you need to pay for. And a new version of
whatever, because it's not compatible with the old version of windows. And it's all these sort of
cascading things you need to buy on top of the original computer. When you're doing a computer,
there's nothing wrong with it. That's the whole point of the OEMs. That's what they want.
If it's something like Linux, they say, well, okay, it's there and you can install it. There's
no upsell installing open office or lever office. And you can use it to your heart's content. And
the file system's fine. You're not going to be sitting there in four or five years thinking,
oh, it's getting slow. I need to buy a new computer. You're not going to have any of that. There's
not going to be them coming back to get fixed. There's no going to be any upsell. There's nothing
for them that's actually worth them selling windows. They're selling Linux over the windows.
Windows, they can make money on. Linux, they really can't.
The official web, well, kind of related, I think, to discussion, but not computers. But
official web made me think of it when he was talking about these warranties and how
absolutely that would be pure profit and what people were saying as well. So I'm thinking about
trap travel booking and the airplane ticket. I'm sure it's similar to what we're talking about.
Or what we've been talking about. You buy a plane ticket and then it's like, do you want your
travel insurance and top of that? Do you want your cancellation insurance? Do you want lost
baggage? Insurance possibly. Probably enough. We're really going to need these insurance
here. It's daily trying to bump that in and you pay more. I suppose that depends when you go
where you're going to some extent as well. But for a lot of these flights, it's probably
like official web saying it's just profit, isn't it? Those kind of things as well. Is that
I guess anyway? Well, insurance kind of is pure profit from the standpoint of the insurance
company, but any financial advisor will tell you it's wise to be overinsured. So I wonder,
in that regard, is it still wise to buy the extended warranties? Because it is just a form of
insurance. Assuming that the warranty will be honored, remember, they already have your money.
So there's a sort of perverse incentive for them not to follow through on the warranty.
I find that lately, they're better at following, they're better at honoring the warranties and they're
better at maintaining their built-in systems that track you. So like if you buy a computer now and
you buy the extended warranty, all they really need in the old days, you'd need to stack a paperwork
as long as you're on. Now all they really need is the serial number off the machine and your phone
and they keep track of it and they do a fairly good job of keeping track of that.
Hey, Pokey, is Bad Wolf going to go to NELF? I don't know. I don't know if he's going to go
again this year, and I hope he does. Nice. I think I'm going to try to drag my daughter along with me
when we go to see Scott Siggler, though. Nice. And have another stop. I want to make a stop if I
can find one. I want to find like an antique bookstore because I have a 100-year-old dictionary.
And it's like literally it's 11 and a half inches thick. It's huge. So I'd like to see if they
make me an offer on it. Yeah, they might. There's definitely a few around Cambridge, so I'm sure they'll
find something. Just be just before worn that collectibility on those things. They are really
brutal on condition of these books. I mean literally just a small crease or something someplace
not the price in half. So just don't get too high hopes on it. No, no, I'm not expecting much.
I mean it's old and the middle pages are in great shape, but the pages at the end, they're torn
to shit. So I wouldn't be surprised if they offer me just into the double digits. I wouldn't
be surprised at all. I bought the thing off a body of mine for cheap money, and mostly I bought it
on the speculation that there could be some adventure involved in going to see an old bookstore.
It's been then a day with my daughter, not on the money I'd make back on the book.
Oh, that's cool. That's cool. Yeah, the prospect of lugging a 30-pound book on a train,
or lugging it around downtown on a giant backpack. It was appealing to me for some reason.
You are a very strange man.
No, no. This goes into the whole collector's thing and the marketing and understanding
where something comes from and all that. Anyone who's been a collector at any point understands
that one. No, it's not, for me, it's not the collectability. It's just the adventure of the day,
just spending a day out doing something that probably never have another reason or chance to do,
and not try it once. By the end of the day, you'd be like, well, someone please just take this thing
from me. I'm not bringing this home. Can we just leave this behind a trash can?
Oh, we better not embossed in shit. I think Sigler has made around Boston before.
Did you ever go to one of his things before? No, no, I've never met the man in person.
I've never even spoken on my email back and forth with him a few times over minor things,
but never spoken with him. It's surprising to get him on HPR to talk about a pandemic.
I showed up. He's the guy that made pandemic. Yeah, yeah, he's going to be embossed in January
26th. Yeah, he did pandemic. He did the starter series of books. He did. Which we still have to do a
review on that whole series. We have to do some podcasts on that. Speaking of reviews,
are we doing more audiobook clubs at all? We have to. I keep saying we have to. Somebody's
got to come do them with me and set down a time. Well, you never told me. Do me neither.
I bugged him a few times. He's like, yeah, yeah, we should do that. Let me head back from.
All right. Well, hold, let me get a pen and paper and I will write down specifically
who's interested and I'll send out an email next time I think about it. How do you go on? How
do you get a photo showing a mumble? I was holding over somebody and the image was coming up.
I wasn't asked. Yeah, isn't it? Well, I was hovering over somebody on the in the channel. I got
like a photo coming up. It's a comment. Well, under the settings, you can upload like a picture,
I believe. Like you can customize your you're like profile. It's probably me that you were seeing
because I have a little button. No, look at peg walls. Yeah, peg what peg well. Siggler is also
going to be in Philadelphia. If that's the farthest south, I think he's getting. That's in the far from him.
Yeah, if you go to scott sigler.net, I think you can see that he is going to Philly and it's after
the Boston date and it's close to the Boston date if I remember right. So it's like late January.
It could be like, you know, anywhere from the 27th to the 31st, obviously, but I don't think it's in
February. So if you are interested, I would check it out sooner than later if you plan on doing it.
I'll be carrying a bunch of books to have him, you know, autograph him and dedicate him to because
when I ordered him on the website, I ordered three just recently, one to complete my collection and
then two more to start my library's collection of the starter. Yeah, starter books. And I've ordered
books from him before and after you, you know, you you check out there's a like a text field to fill in
if you want him to dedicate the book to you. Oh, okay. Yeah. That text field that box was missing.
And I emailed him and said, Hey, man, this is missing. He emailed me back and said, you're right.
I just went through this. It's missing. I'll get back to you. And he didn't get back to me before
the books got to me. So I'll go carry him to him and have him sign him. I get to jump on what's
the next one's the champion? I get to get in on that. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's cool. I've got all the
hard covers so far in the in the starter series. And I intend to have all of them. But don't listen
if anybody wants in on the book club, do me a favor, please, and post your email in the the
mumble chat right now because like Jonathan, I know you've got like 18 different email add. Yeah,
you'll find me one way or another. Well, just paste in the one you want me to use. I can't use the
chat. I'll just email you later. Oh, okay. Well, would you want me to use at what? Accessible freedom.
Okay. I know that one. I've got that one. I'll paste mine in the chat. I guess they should
probably at some point look into fixing that so that that mumble chat works with Orca. I mean,
you can probably hear the stuff, right? You just can't. Yeah, I can hear it. It sort of works
issue. It's like hit or miss kind of side. I just don't bother because I could either post it
into the room or put it to just one person. So it's it's I can hear everything coming in. I just
have a heart. I can hear everything coming in, but I can't get to where it is. So if someone
posts a link, I can hear the link, but I can't get to it to click on it. Gotcha. I think that's
probably because of the way mumble does their how it's it's a side effect of how mumble allows a
how you send the message to somebody you can click a graphical element. Yeah, you can't access
the text area. No, but like I said, I think if I right click on the HPR room, I could send a message
into it, but that's all I could do. I like I I'd have a hard time like going back with
it someone. I think it's because they which is fine. They use a live notify, which like pigeon uses
and everything else uses. So like, you know, Orca gives me messages through that. The problem with
that is is I can't get to where that message pops up. So that's why I can't click on like mumble
links and stuff. It's kind of like once it goes by, that's it. I missed it. But if I use pigeon,
like if I'm in IRC or whatever, and I'm using pigeon, I can scroll up, you know, through the IRC
chat using pigeon, but in mumble, I can't do that. So one thing I'm thinking about is as the change
moves over from like analog books like print and ink novels onto E ink and like kindles and
is that any conceivable reason why paper still wins out. I honestly don't understand it.
For my point of view, I read with reading glasses. Now for me, I like to have, if I'm reading in bed,
I like to zoom the print in so that it's big print. It's not a huge print, but it's big print.
I like to be able to increase the font size on the print so that I'm not straining my eyes when
I'm reading. I don't like the hassle of the sort of fingering the edge of the spine so that the
page that flicks out at the other side and it sort of angles wrong and whatever. I'm struggling
to find anything that E ink doesn't win over traditional paper and ink. I really don't understand
the appeal of paper and ink in the world of ink. I just don't understand that. What is the appeal
of traditional ink and paper over the ink now? Yeah, I always want to say two things. The last one
of them. Chat thing, just miss much there anyway, I don't think. As for the ink thing, I think
I've been talking about e-book readers and so on, so yeah, I mean magazines, books,
well obviously books have been around for centuries, but in general, I'd like paper. I don't get
like ink, they're all this paper, this and that. Obviously within the e-book reader, you can then
adjust your ink or I don't have one myself, but you can obviously adjust, you have more control
of how you read the book, so it gets my Manchester is there, whereas with paper you obviously
stuck with what you get and that's it, isn't it? I like paper over E ink for collectability
and that's the only reason that I can think of is so that I have a collectible physical object
as a piece of memorabilia, but there's a caveat to that. There's not a whole lot of E ink out
there, a lot of people have abandoned those things for tablets and I do not like reading on a
backlit tablet, I wouldn't mind if the E ink was backlit, but I don't like reading on like a
you know a Nexus 7 as compared to a Kindle, I much prefer the Kindle over a tablet and I think
I still even prefer the Kindle over paper. It's kind of like, so E ink, is that, are you
going to any tablet here when you say E ink? What do you think about that? There are some tablets
for E? No, No. No, no, no. E ink is not a tablet, don't mistake that. E ink is not a tablet because
you mean how you read how he's looking? No, No, no, no, no, no. E ink is a totally different type of
thing, E ink is a completely different thing about tablet, a tablet is not E ink, a tablet is basically
a PC screen or a laptop screen in a small form factor.
E-ank is completely different, there is no refresh, there is no risk and there is nothing
about when you change, it's not refreshing every second to display the same image of
the text, it's the same thing, the only time E-ank actually takes energy is when you change
pages, that's why things like a Kindle lasts for weeks and weeks and weeks without recharging,
that's why it's because it's E-ank.
Right, well I consider a tablet with an E-ank screen, aka an ebook reader, it to be a tablet
because it's technically a tablet, it's just you can't do like tablet things on it because
E-ank doesn't have a very fast refresh rate, but yes you are correct.
Now there's one thing in between an E-ank and a tablet and it's called a transflective
screen and the only thing you could really get except for like I think they were selling
it for a couple of Netflix is the old OLPC laptops had the screen that was in a transflective
mode and if you've ever seen mine because I've showed it to a lot of people I've met
in person, you can take that thing out, drop the backlight down to nothing which is the way
you normally get the transflective screen to turn on but it doesn't have to be that way.
You can take it out in the sun, put the sun right on it and holy crap it's E-ank except
for the fact that it is actually refreshing and you can use it, you can use it like a computer
in sunlight which is really neat.
That's cool.
Which version of the OLPC do you have?
I have the 1.0 C1 I think is the board revision so it's basically the give one get one.
Okay.
So E-ank looks like paper.
That was the one thing that you don't essentially, yes it looks like paper, it's not as bright
white, it's not as crisp but it's pretty damn close.
You don't rock that.
When users watch that on YouTube and you watch reviews of different devices, reviews
of the Kindle reviews of whatever ebook either you don't understand, YouTube does not convey
that at all in this lightest.
You have to see it with your own naked eye, you have to see it with your eye looking directly
at the screen and you're like holy, that is like paper and ink, that is nothing, that
is proper paper and ink, that's what E-ank is.
You got to take it a step further because just seeing it with your eye, you don't really
understand the full advantage but you hold the Kindle reader in your hand for 10 or 15
minutes while you're reading and your arm doesn't, like you'll wonder why your arm isn't
beginning to cramp up and why it's so comfortable to hold and yet this thing still looks as good
as a piece of paper.
As far as how good it looks, every time I see an E-ank, I don't think I see them anymore
but in the past years, every time I have seen an E-ank reader on display in a store, I thought
it was a display model, I didn't think it was a functioning model because you know how
like on any tablet, they'll put like an image of the screen but it's not a functioning
model, it's a photograph and these things I thought was just a non-functioning model
with a photograph of paper on the screen and you go and push the button and the screen
changes and it blows you away the first time you see that and most people are pretty
used to it now but if you haven't seen it, definitely get your hands on one because
it's pretty stunning even if you're ready for it.
Then you go pick up your Kindle the next day and you can't find your book, wait, it's
been deleted?
How?
There's that too.
There's that too.
There's that too.
Yeah, you can say for the Kindle, but that aside, yeah totally right, I mean the thing
is, when people, when they look at the, before I got mine, I had a Sony e-book reader
before that and even before that, I looked at that and thought, oh, it's a great idea but
is it really worth it that much?
No, I don't know and then when I first saw it, when I've seen umpteen reviews on YouTube
and video reviews and it does not do justice, YouTube seriously, if you're even content,
the way I look at it is, if you are a reader for entertainment, if you read for fun, if
you read for entertainment, an e-book reader as a serious, serious consideration.
It's a must have, it's been a serious consideration for the price of the thing alone and I was,
um, you know, Jonathan said he made the joke about, you know, your, your data could be
deleted from the thing, that in and of itself is not reason enough to stop you, in my opinion,
that's not reason enough to stop me from purchasing the device, because you can put the device
in airplane mode to where they can't take anything off it, that's, it's reason enough not to
purchase content from them, um, but you can get content elsewhere and you can put it on the
device with USB and you can build a thing in airplane mode and never lose any of your content.
Yeah, even that, I mean, the thing is like the 1984 thing, that was actually content was
deleted out of your Amazon account from the Amazon website, if you actually had it on your device,
even if you bought it and put it on your device, it would not be deleted from your device,
it would just be deleted from your online backup version of your account.
So if you had a copy externally, you could easily sideload it back on, it is an issue, I mean,
don't, don't, don't get me wrong, it is an issue, um, but the advantages of Eank is you,
you cannot look at that on, um, just on YouTube or something, on, on a visual and, and think
that's what Eank is because yet it does not do justice. You have to see it with your naked eyes,
and when you do the penny drops, like, oh, that's what it is. And that's at the point where you
realize if you read for entertainment, then an e-book with a like a kindle or like a nook is all
of a sudden it becomes a priority. Hey, you can't, you can't deny that. It's like, it's like, once
you've been infected with something, you can't, you can't just shake it. That's what it is. You've
seen it, you can't unsee it. Anyway, I'm all for ebook readers. They make me wish I was more of a
reader. I don't know. I've grabbed my wife's old nook color. I'm sure she should jump in at some point,
but honestly, I like paper. I like holding in my hand. It is such a pain in the butt, especially when
I'm looking through a book for reference. It's like, oh, I want to go to this page and it's like,
I just want to flip through stuff or have a notebook and that have to remember page numbers and
things like that. It's just such a pain in the butt where it's like, oh, well, I found this place.
I know it's a couple of pages back or I can do this thing where I hold, I can hold this page with
this finger, this page with this finger and this page with that finger and jump between parts of
the book really quickly instead of having to type in a bunch of page numbers or stuff, a bunch of book
marks. But I think there's different things here. You're talking about the difference between
fiction books and factual reference books. I think reference books on my experience are hopeless,
absolutely hopeless on the Kindle. They're pathetic on the Kindle. I try to do like a PDF or whatever
that is just so bad that there's nothing to compare to a paper and ink book when it comes to
reference stuff, where you need the book, where you can flip back and forth between different chapters
and different sections and that. There's nothing better than paper and ink. I'm completely
bowed down to that. But when you're reading something sequential, it was just going to say this
is an issue of random access versus sequential access. Yeah, I totally disagree when it comes to,
I work in the industry I work in, the equipment I work in have manuals that are two to three thousand
pages at times. I have them digitally on my work laptop and I'd much rather type in a search for
what I'm looking to try and do than to go through some of those books that weigh 10 or 12 pounds of
piece. Yeah, yeah, on a laptop. He's saying versus an e-reader where you've got like a scroll down
and click on a link type of interface. I have put some of the manuals on on my tablet and it,
yeah, it's much easier on the laptop than on the tablet. Even the tablet is still better than
an e-reader because you've got the touch screen. Next time. I'm still going to say I'm actually for
the tablet or at least in the case of like the nook because one of the things I can do is I can put
50 reference manuals on there or 100 reference manuals and have it on one tablet that I can carry with
me. You know how hard that would have been before especially in my kind of job where I have to go
into like a server area, try to carry books with me out into a server room. Next
so possible. Well, I mean you can you can't say Lord a Kindle. I've got a Kindle, one of the
cheaper entry model touch, sorry, non-touch entry level Kindles from last year. Broly, you can say
Lord anything you want. The problem you've got as you say is with PDFs, we're designed for a
specific page size. PDF is a print format. It's designed for a specific page size and if you're
restricting that down to like a seven inch screen, if something is supposed to be printed out at
12 inches, then your print size, you're looking at that and print size but I can't even read that.
And you have to zoom in and smooth squids from side to side. Well, that would suck.
That's a problem. Here's the thing. What you do with something like that, you go to portrait.
You turn your tablet around so you get the wide side and then you can actually scale the text to
actually read it pretty well and it's generally not that bad. Plus the other thing is you also have
the search function. So when you're searching for whatever, you can actually search and actually
find whatever page you want much quicker than you can with a manual a lot of the times.
So I still see the advantage of actually having the tablet with your reference manuals in that
on it. I actually got to the point for a while where I actually kept my notebook at my desk.
So I could actually pick it up at my desk in my office and actually look up stuff.
I'm on a site and you say, I don't know if that was a mess word there. You said,
having my tablet with me. A tablet is not an e-reader. It's two different things. An e-reader
is not a tablet. So the Jimmy tablet or the Jimmy Nee reader. Well, okay. How do you qualify a
nook color? Is it a teller as an e-reader? The Barnes Knowles was an e-reader. So and that's
the primary function paper. It's not an e-paper device, but it is designed for viewing books and
printed materials. That's what I normally use. Stock firmware makes it basically a glorified e-reader.
However, if you subverted it's basically a tablet. Okay. I will re-narrow my definition and say
that e-paper, and I'll give the example of the Kindle, for example, e-paper is the best way
that I have found for recreational reading. Now, you're right. It doesn't work so great in
reference manuals. It doesn't apparently work so great in PDFs. But if you think about it,
the Kindle's great or e-paper excuse me is great for recreational reading.
And a laptop or a computer is great for reference material. And the tablet is a compromise
between the two. And I don't like compromised items because a compromised item is a thing that
does two things suboptimally. Way to go, Pokey. Someone's, yes. Seven-inch tablet screen can be
a bit small to read PDFs, but I'm just thinking I'm on that book at the moment. It's 10-inch,
and I've loaded up PDFs on here occasionally for various things. I could sit there and read
through a book on this screen and be okay. And we've got a time zone coming up probably soon.
And we also need to stop and start our recordings.
Well, let's do the time zone thing first, and then we'll do the recordings if you don't mind.
Yeah, no, that's why we've been doing it. I just was tossing it in there.
Okay, so happy new year to Brazil, Uruguay, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Brazil,
Montevideo, and all the other areas, all the other places in that area. Happy New Year.
Happy New Year. Happy New Year. Happy New Year. Happy New Year.
Yeah, happy New Year. I thought Brazil was where I was behind UK, though, and this has more of it.
And given Brazil, I happen to year in particular to people who have made the headlines last year,
Glenn Greenwald in his partner, who are based in Brazil, so I happen to year them.
As far as thinking that Brazil's three hours behind UK, it may be on the other side of the
daylight saving time issue. Don't forget there on the southern hemisphere, they spread one way,
and we spread the other. So those things, it's a two-hour change, which reminds us of another reason
to hate daylight saving time. All right, yeah, it could be. When it's daylight saving,
we'll sweat some time here. Yeah, that would have made sense.
Okay, shall we think our recordings now?
You? Ah, bro, we beat you. Yeah, bro, we didn't even try that time.
Sorry, I work on it some more. And we should mention once again that this year we are doing this show,
and we are wanting to make certain that people go ahead and check out the Orca Fund Razor
from the Accessible Computing Foundation. They are in serious need of raising funds to
extend the Orca software and actually get it better integrated into the Linux operating system
and make accessibility available to just about everybody on the planet for low cost or free.
So please check out the Accessible Computing Foundation's website and check out their fundraiser
on Indiegogo. And it can be found at igg.me slash at slash orca.
In regards to both accessibility and e-readers, I have to say I still, still to this day, I'm
furious every time I think about what is the author's guild forcing Amazon's hand in
disabling the text-to-speech engine in the Kindle. Yeah, it's quite ridiculous.
It makes me furious beyond logical. It doesn't make any sense that I should be this mad,
and yet I still am every single time I think about it. And I listen to that show, that weight-weight,
don't tell me show, an NPR, and that guy, Peter Segal? No, no, no, no, one of the panelists,
he's a panelist all the time. Oh, okay. Oh, shit. No, is it more mooraka or? No, the older fellow.
Oh, I can't think of his name. Yeah, anyway, that guy is the president of the author's guild or
the chairman of the author's guild or whatever. Every time I hear that guy's name, I just, I want
to spit in his eye for what they did. Yeah, it is ridiculous. I was thinking of recording
sort of like a spoof video or something with fly and rich and like post it on my YouTube channel.
We were going to set up a scenario where we were going to do like a hangout or something,
and I was going to be like, oh, hey, did you get that book I sent you? And he was going to be like,
oh, yeah. And we're going to, we still need to think of like some title. We want to make this book
seem like it has this like great value to it. Like it's, you know, the, you know, the mystery to
life or something like that is in this book, right? And, and he'll be like, oh, yeah, I got this
great. And he'll be like, oh, but, you know, but it's in Braille. How am I supposed to read that?
And I'm like, oh, what? You can't, you can't access Braille. Well, you know, oh, that sucks, man.
Oh, that would be cool. That's a nice reversal. You're not, you're not going to be able to use it.
Sorry, dude. You know, and we're going to kind of go into it. But I mean, you know,
we have this Braille the speech engine. Can you use that? No, I'm sorry. Roy Blunt Jr. disabled it.
Exactly. Exactly. Because I mean, just, you know, you guys are mentioning like reference manuals
and like, think of all like, you know, not just, you know, reading for pleasure or whatever,
you know, for entertainment. But just think of all the books that you can read to like learn
things from or like history books or you know, these reference manuals, all this stuff you guys
can gain this knowledge from, but blind people don't have access to it because people are worried
about, you know, considering a text to speech engine, a public, whatever you call it, public
performance of their work. So they want that to be disabled. Like, so you want to not give access
because you're worried about someone not buying the audio book. Like, that's what it comes down to.
It's completely insane. You know, and I can say here, Jonathan, honestly, thanks to you,
I do think of that. I think of that all the time. And I never did before I met you. And thanks
to your friendship. I do think of that now all the time. Even in the EU, there's this, I can't
remember the exact details, but they were trying to push non DRM and electronic, you know, books like
PDF books or whatever. And that's crazy talk. Yeah. Yeah. And they turned it down because they're
worried about blind people copying the books and handing them out amongst each other that they,
so they denied it, which all in turn also denied, you know, accessibility to these books.
Because they're worried about blind people pirating and sharing it with everyone.
I know you can't see it because you're blind, but the rest of us with eyes, we see it all the time
dude. Blind people are thieves. It's just, it's just, it's still there is to it. Watch your guys are
horrible. Like watch your pockets around you. I was just going to say watch your pockets when you
come to know. You're bad people. Well, the worst part is it like I gave you 12 bucks and like you
weren't even sure it was 12 bucks. I was like, you know, man, I could be losing at 20s here.
Here's three ones, dude. You know, I'll let you in on a little secret, Jonathan. There are in fact
perfectly cited people out there. They have 2020 vision and we just don't trust them. We call
them legally blind. But you know, and I even mentioned earlier how Sony and there was another company,
you know, complaining to the SCC like, oh, we don't want to make our ebooks, our ebook readers
accessible. You know, the battery's going to drain. You know, we have to, you know, put special
software on there. No one's going to, you know, it's going to get in the way of our regular users.
They won't know why it's talking. It's just going to confuse our youth. And like they're
pleading with the FCC to loosen the restrictions because they were, you know, they could have cared
less. Really, they're just more concerned about the battery and, you know, stuff like that was like,
wow, you know, thanks guys. And they're right, man, don't you go messing with us regulars.
You know, you know, the strange thing is I like audio books. The thing is audio books is a performance
of the story. There's someone reading this, reading the novel in a performance manner. It's not
just lame reading it. It's them reading it in character. It's them getting in their head. What
does that character sound like? And it's a performance. It's nothing like just just a bot
reading the text. Exactly. So I do not get where the competition comes from. Where, when I
bought a bot reads out text as it comes out for blind people who read and hear the text as it comes
out through a robot pronouncing it. I do not, I seriously do not grok where they get where audio
books have innocently feared at all. Other than the voice, the vocal performance, filming a bit
pissed, thinking hang on a minute. We're putting all this effort in and we're just being undermined
by some computer reading it out. I really do not understand where the problem is.
Yeah, I honestly don't. Kindle could have handled it a better way. And at least in the United States,
there's like an agency in every state, but they're named differently for whatever reason. But
there's blind agencies or whatever in every state. And if you move to a new state, you contact
the blind agency and they meet with you or whatever. You get assigned someone that works with you
if you need any help or whatever. But when you have that first meeting, they give you what they
call a certificate of blindness. It's just like a little piece of paper. And all Amazon had to do
a set. Okay, no, that's what they gave you. That's what I am. I believe that.
But all Amazon had to do is set up a program where, okay, fine, blind people can use text to
speech on everything, send us your proof of blindness piece of paper and you'll be good to go. Your
account will be flagged that you're blind. And then you'll have text to speech on everything we
have to offer. Like it could have been worked on to just, you know, we already know you're not
trustworthy. Jonathan, you would have just shared your credentials with all the other people who
wanted to pirate free robot audio books. I would have found a way to manufacture kindles myself
and hand them out. And Jonathan, we know how well you do a shooting video anyways.
You can't fool us. Yeah.
Yeah, actually, I thought of something just just now when that whole thing went on when Amazon
made the decision to disable the text to speech engine,
audible has always been the biggest provider of audio books. But did Amazon own audible at that
time? I don't think they did. And I think they did. Or it was, it was, it was, it was in the process
of happening. Yeah. I don't think they own them out. I wonder if the topic can be reexamined now
that they own them. Yeah, I think they did. I think it was just the case of the, the individual
publishers deciding we don't want to potentially risk, I mean, it's completely clueless, to be
honest. But from their point of view, it's like we don't want to risk our potential income from
audio books being undercut by people buying the ebook or the mobile version of a book and then
having it playing back through the speech, the text to speech thing, which is completely pointless.
I mean, if you have listened to the comparison between the two, it's night and day. It really is
night and day. It's unbelievable. Wait, we're all getting this wrong. I just remember this isn't
what happened. They didn't disable the text to speech engine. They allowed each individual author
to flag on the book to disable it book by book. So I'm sorry. Adobe has it. This book can't be read
aloud. And it was like some public domain book too. Alice in one land. I mean, man. Yeah, yes,
it's not it's not all books. I forgot to mention that I didn't know if we couldn't remember
if we had that or not. But it's it's up to each individual publisher whether or not they want to
allow it. Okay, we're speaking of evil book publishers. I work and I'm a network administrator at a
K through 12 school system. And we all of our students from K through 12 have iPads. That wasn't
my idea. So I'm sorry. But any teachers. Did you have to sacrifice for that?
Well, is it not believe they're not this these iPads were all paid by state grants?
No, no, I believe it one son because we have the same issue in the UK. It seems I was I mentioned
this earlier briefly. I think basically they yeah, they keep on giving out all these iPads to like
those people now and do teachers have them school and stuff. And they it's just you know, why
an iPad? Well, my face is better than windows, but why an iPad? Can I finish my story? Part to
expand on your issue of the question of why iPads it's because Android is so scattered that no one
company got in front of Apple apples in front of management system on managing mass devices
on an enterprise while school system wide we can manage all the iPads through a centralized server.
And Google or Android or whatever you want to call it just really dropped a ball by not getting
out in front and getting a common device that can be used in the enterprise or mass a mass roll
out like a school system. So that's why school systems are adopting iPads for one thing.
Now to get back to the publisher issue we're finding that textbooks the the publishers have
electronic versions of their textbooks but they're forcing us the school system taxpayers to still
pay full price and you still have to buy the paper copy to get the electronic version.
Yeah, that's what they do to me at university. So you have to pay twice to get the electronic version?
No, no, no, you have to buy the book brand new and then you show like for me when I was going to
college I could get on my books electronically but like K switcher is saying I'd have to go to the
bookstore by you know by a blind guy had to go to the bookstore buy all these books brand new
then I had to go to the disability service office showing the receipt that I bought the books
then they hit up the company and then I got all the electronic copies of the book
and you paid full price but only once. Yes, yeah, that's what we're finding but the whole
you know one of the big pushes for one to one devices in the school system was to reduce book feed
cost which we're finding is not happening then plus apples strong arming the prices of apps
if there's paid apps that we have to use it's a big racket. I mean you sell me a hardcover book
or a book a hard copy of a book at full price and give me an electronic copy at no additional
price I'm selling the hard copy that book on Amazon and keeping the electronic version so that
is a break. I would do that but some books are hit or miss I mean sometimes these books would cost
like 180 bucks and depending on if it was like the latest one just released you know the 10th
edition or whatever sometimes the Amazon will literally give you literally give you like 10 bucks
but other times you get pretty close to half it depended on you know where where the publisher was
and what if it was the latest edition or not and that doesn't work for the K through 12 school
system because the students don't get to keep the book you're not actually paying to keep the
book you're just paying a rental fee to the school system and now what we're trying to do is
encourage the teachers to write their own textbooks and iBook format and so that we can completely
bypass the publishers. I like that idea. I like that idea. I like that idea. I like that idea.
These teachers write the books you're paying like 200 bucks a book for each university
pay for you do and then it's sort of selecting like six months and you can't sell it because they
upgrade to the next edition. Exactly. Kevin do you encouraging them to release them under creative
commons or are they retaining the copyright and selling them to the school system? Well so far we
haven't had that happen yet but that's what we're trying to push is getting the teachers to do
their own textbook. Now I don't know what type of licensing that they'll be released under.
It would be nice if you know this was a nationwide push where school systems band together and
said hey we're our teachers and senior algebra are writing their own textbook here. We'll trade you
for your senior English textbook that you guys are working on so it's kind of like a collaborative
effort to where there's a but I don't think Apple's going to allow that myself. There is a project
like that I heard about a few years ago. I can do a quick search for it. There is a project for
creative commons textbooks. But I want to say real quick my my mother's husband was a teacher
to college for many years and he wrote his own textbook and the way you know if you encourage
teachers to write textbooks and the teachers are familiar with the students devices of getting
around paying full price for new book they'll just do like he did and when you buy the book it comes
in a plastic wrapper and there is the textbook and a workbook included in that plastic wrapper
and all of your homework is in that workbook and you tear the page out and hand it in so there's
no way to buy the course material used. Let's say well to get around even reducing paper cost
we're forcing, well forcing is a harsh word but we're encouraging. We're using a paid service
called E backpack where students teachers can hand out their assignments electronically students
logging on to the C backpack service. They get to download their homework in electronic format
and they submit it in electronic format so there is no paper we're trying to reduce paper cost
that way also. Use Moodle. Moodle is yes I agree but it's it's what and another that just
brings up another hot topic in me. Since we've had these iPads and even before that our students
are not receiving formalized computer training that's something else that just aggravates me to
death where they are super intended thanks that the iPad is the savior of everything. Oh boy
and what else is new from my my daughter my daughter is she's a senior in college right now
she had an iPad at college and ended up selling it because it was a useless device in the education
and that's what in the background at work teachers under the breath to me
complain religiously about the tablets in the classroom how it's a distraction
it's harder to get the work done students aren't you know they're busy playing games instead of
paying attention it's it's really kind of backfiring on us I think it's my thought. I can counterpoint
this and and I hate to do it in this way but we send my daughter to a private school and they
are more than welcome to buy electronic copies of their books and keep them on tablets.
They don't have Wi-Fi at the school so if the tablet doesn't have a cellular connection it's
just stuck with whatever's on there and if the kid doesn't get the work done the consequences
the kid doesn't get a good grade and you're paying for that grade and the kid knows it so I hate
to say it but the cost you know they're being a financial cost to education is is the way to to
beat the problem of the kid not getting the work done or being distracted. Why have no iPad?
I can never get took of that one out. Why are schools moving to iPads? You know iPads are
obsolete until a year and they have to read by another one. Why not enjoy it? Well my kid
wants to specify a specific tablet. They say if you can get an electronic copy go for it.
Well like I said earlier Android somebody some company did not get out in front of Apple and make
a standardized tablet that could be used in education and develop the mass management system
like Apple has that is the problem with with one-to-one devices is maybe having a management system
a backend server that we're weak in block we can take away kids app stores we can take away their
games if they're having discipline problems and there's nothing like that for Android right now
that's where that we're Google or whoever you want to blame just drop the ball they did not get
out into the to where they have a mass management system for tablets in the enterprise or school
systems and it's funny now that you mentioned it that that doesn't exist because the like the next
of seven for instance is a standard and I standardized enough device in its low cost enough that
it could be done with the next seven I have heard that yes you know that it's just now starting to
come into existence to where there is a solution for Android but they're they're three years behind
right now but I'm gonna nip in here and say I'm happy new year to all and all time zones of all
kids and and what of life and I'm gonna call it a night at this point it's now 20 past two and I'm
struggling to see where I'm typing I'm making loads of typos for it and I received
I've left yet I'm gonna call a night um so happy new year to all and I shall bid you a
happy to you as a left happy new year happy new year man it's good to see you again later man
I'm gonna say hello Mr. John called welcome to my dear
my dear American personal man that was like oh let's get up on him get up get the call
hey uh in fact yes we can hear you John Culp and you're one of my favorite people to hear
can you just for once for posterity say you're funny you're funny thank you
is it funny the way I say that or something no I just I loved that episode of HPR and you said
it so many times in that episode it's it's burned into my hard drive I don't remember
with the episode that was probably a funny episode 12 12 72 oh yeah good old 12 72
but who was I talking to was it you were talking to your computer did that episode air I never
heard it are you kidding me I mean I heard it when I was editing it and making it but I don't I didn't
know that it actually aired Jonathan already knows as he caught on I just made up 12 72 I don't
know what episode number it was but yeah that that one aired is the other one we're talking about
yeah I think it was the one where that wasn't a solo though were you one with
um he's talking with Jesra and why Bill oh Jesra right okay you said with Jesra oh yeah I think
I know I think that was the one where in why Bill and I were sitting in my in-laws house in
New York I met in why Bill face-to-face but I don't know I was kind of screw you Jonathan
hey hey I'm blind oh yeah there you go hiding behind your disability again
yeah but you're herring it's better than ours yeah don't you have super hearing what
uh yeah I knew that and why but yeah you're sitting with NY Bill and you were trying to get it
to say a specific thing so you kept saying you're funny you're funny and I just I love that
yeah I have fun with the uh scripting of bladder to do fun things like that why not why not Jesra
did another show with Jesra and in that show I did not talk to the computer we just talked to
each other about it yeah I think I think speaking of this John I'd love for you to just talk about
bladder a little bit because at the ACF we are definitely going to be implementing it hopefully
soon with later and hopefully uh bringing a little more uh easier use to for normal people to
you know add whatever they wish to it but you're a little more of an expert while you're a lot
more of an expert on it than I am because I still have yet to actually do anything with it because
I'm a slacker but uh yeah John if you could talk about bladder it's awesome and take it away
yeah first though I'd like to jump back in about the textbook thing I was listening but not
in the um chat room during that time um I actually wrote my own I've had this problem with workbooks
before I teach a counterpoint class and the students for the longest time we're using a workbook
that cost maybe 60 bucks and we would only use maybe half of it during the semester and about four
years ago I decided simply to write my own and it's a creative common folk and I just give it to
them and um as a PDF and they print it out and do their homework and hand it in that's awesome
yeah it's they it works fine you know they're learning the material just as well it's not like
rocket science making a a workbook full of music exercises um but for the textbook uh it the
newest edition is like 14 years old but they still ask $120 for it from the publisher so I just let
the students buy whatever older edition they can find and normally they can find them for between
three and eight bucks or something what's the name of that one I think I think we might have
used the same one in my like music theory classes do you know the name of it um it's yeah it's
called counterpoint like Ken oh yeah I think yeah I think we're using that same one you're right there's
like 120 my music teachers are the same thing it's like yeah if you could find a used one go ahead
he's like they haven't really updated this thing in like 10 years so you know there's no rescinding
gotten by the newest one do you have only to the one you give to your students I do it's on my
website at jonathanculp.org um I think it's slash rathas.e. you know I could do you mind if we
post that link in the show notes or were that kill your bandwidth if people start looking at it
and downloading it that much uh sorry I wasn't pushing my button I'm not used to the push to talk
thing I got plenty of bandwidth um there's no worries there um but anyway I also have a a textbook
loan program that I do I've bought like eight copies of the textbook myself and students who
want to may simply borrow the book from me all semester for a deposit like uh ten dollars and then
at the end of the semester if they give me the book back they get the ten bucks back if they don't
give it back I just buy another copy of the book with that money nice so yeah it works out really
well as far as the electronic devices in that like public school like my kids in the public schools
I don't necessarily want them to have iPads but I would certainly like to have some kind of
electronic solution just to reduce the weight of the backpack yes god I've got a nine-year-old girl
and her backpack weighs up to 20 pounds sometimes pokey you're not concerned about the weight of
the backpack you want to carry a 40 pound book around Boston all day one day my friend not that's
because he can't be well carrying in Boston yeah one day not 12 academic years and I'm a 245
pound man my daughter is weighs but she weighs probably I you know 80 pounds 85 pounds
my daughter is close to 60 pounds and sometimes her backpack weighs like a quarter of her body weight
man John can you repeat the name of your website so I can have a look at that or type it in either
either way is fine let me see if I can piece it into the um panel here hang on while I switch
over to my browser I'm on my phone doing this well just just yeah okay I'm sorry I didn't mean to
cut you off it rather here you talk it was Jonathan Colt not org and I don't remember the slash
so my daughter is here in who's in first grade and she has an iPad in her class and she doesn't
want to say something real quick and thank you thank you for coming on with us happy
yeah she just saw the mumble windows like what's that I'm like I'm talking to people from all
around the world yeah where's Peter 60 phase we need to drive that point home isn't that one for
me I think so people from all around the country and just outside of it I don't know I'm in a deep
south I think I'm in a different country sometimes but hey you want to hear this is something very
interesting there is Jonathan Nadu Jonathan Colt and my name is Jonathan I haven't seen that
many Jonathan's in one room in quite a while well don't forget we also have Jonathan for the
wind also John do yeah John do that's true I just noticed that very interesting we're being
overrun by Jonathan's yeah and just for you guys I'm going to take a break and run to the John
but don't do much information it's hard to like me some days I know I'm sorry see you get back
do you guys still want to hear about bladder oh yes definitely yeah I got side tracked a little
bit there talking about textbook the textbook is an issue that concerns me greatly so I like
talking about it no I think that's awesome I I'd really think more teachers should take the
initiative that you take and I think a lot could actually happen if you know I mean most teachers
kind of you know getting their groove and after a few years there you know I'm kind of this is
a broad brush or whatever but they generally teach kind of the same classes so I mean they know
what kind of material they need and I think who would be better than the teacher actually teaching
the class to create you know the book yeah and it takes a lot of work depending on the topic
and the scope of the material to be created it it wasn't that hard for me to create a workbook
but I would not want to have to create the textbook and that's why I just allow them to buy the
cheap old copies of it well I believe I am going to read your textbook on music theory because
I don't even know what music theory is and I've been curious for a long time so I think I'm
going to have a look at that I'm downloading now that's cool it's it's written using entirely free
tools I use a combination of latte and lily pond using yeah it's the the most accessible
kind of music notation software absolutely my it's saved my skin the last music theory class I
took because we had to start we had to start you know writing sheet music and stuff and I was
like I don't even know how I'm going to do this and at right at the same time you hit me up on
identical for whatever reason you might have heard me I might have been saying something on the
podcast or whatever and you're like hey check out lily pond and I did and I was like man this is
amazing like it's it's brilliant the way they set it up it's genius yeah it's the it might be the
only music notation software that is accessible for blind users because the the input is all plain
text yeah it's awesome it's it's I mean it's I wouldn't go as far to say it's like programming but
it has its own little syntax and once you get the syntax down and you save the text file it pushes it
out as like a dot lily pad or kind of a PDF format and when it does that it then translates your
text file into actual sheet music right it's a compiling yeah it's a compiler kind of like a lot
text is a compiler lily pond is also and it uses what ghost script and various other things and
generates just gorgeous sheet music yeah it's definitely a very cool very impressive stuff
so you did you actually talk about blather no no no we're just blathering on about other things
right now we keep to track them that's okay blather is something that's really saved me I've had
repetitive strain injury problems and had for a long time had to boot into windows to do any kind
of stuff that required a lot of text to be generated so that I could use dragon naturally speaking
or the built-in windows be recognition both of which are very good but are also really serious
resource hogs and also not at all configurable and so when jesra created blather which by default
does nothing you you have to configure everything in it but once I started getting going with it
I was amazed at how much I could do with it with my long knowledge of scripting and you can
basically tailor to do exactly what you need it to do in a lot of certain now jesra all he wanted
to do was to be able to tell it to play black Sabbath and it would automatically play a black
Sabbath tune but for me it was about accessibility and it's it's really tremendous I hope that
you guys at the ACF can get it in you find a way to make it easier to install and configure because
it really is powerful yeah I definitely do see that happening you know once the worker campaigns
over and we start trudging along with the work of stuff blather is right behind that I that's
sort of I mean pretty much as all types of other assistive technology and free software the
voice recognition is kind of the missing link and I'd really you know I really want to fine tune it
and I I really think that I can get a lot done because Boston has the largest Python user group
there's like 1500 people in the Python user group every time there's a meetup there's like a
few hundred people that show up so I'm hoping in the next few months I'm going to go down there talk
to some of them be like hey this is a you know this project here you know be great if we can you
know I might need a little bit of talking with you John to kind of get down the stick with telling
them how it works and how it's currently configured but once I can speak with them there's got to be a
way where we can make this easy you know editable kind of box where you know and one portion of the
box you can you know do the command you're looking to do and then in the other box put in what the
you know the voice command will be to do that thing there's got to be a way to make it like that
easy to you know configure it to exactly how you want to do it okay I think it probably is
speaking as the idiot in the room isn't there a way to do like like if you set up a bunch of
you know pre-configured options for it at that point can't you run it through like a compiler like
iron python isn't that a way to to compile pythons so that it runs natively and it's all pre-configured
and everything well the problem is all the bits are there it's just not easy like john said it's
very configurable but the problem is is you need to have some knowledge of like bash and in another
thing so it's there's a hurdle to me to like to configure like john has a really great it all
already set up really great but if you wanted to expand outside of that that's where it could be
difficult for like a new user that doesn't really know bash scripting and stuff like that so that's
why we want to take it to the next level to where like I was saying just for an example to have a
box and in one part of the box put you know I want to build I want Firefox open and do this and
that the other thing and then the other box you'll say you know that you you would put in the command
like I want to say Firefox open or something and then it'll tie Firefox open to that command
and then so you'll be able to set up all different types of configurations with it much easier
so you need like either a gooey or a or a orca interface to it to give it more commands exactly
yeah because and I don't know if you want to get into it john like kind of what you currently would
have to do to just you know set up like a new you know option or you know configuration they
want to do something new yeah do either yeah no problem I do this kind of thing all the time
so let's say that I'm like lately I've been learning how to make my
tests my exams for classes in lottex instead of using open office or Libre office and so
there are certain things that I have to do repeatedly that I want to automate and so let's say I
want to set up a new command that will create a certain lottex command when I say the word and
so what I have to do is open up a big file yeah I'm sorry I'm like we're all wicked interested
in this I think your mic is rubbing up against the shirt or something and it's just distracting
enough was there some kind of static going on let's see if that worked I've clipped it on down
lower I don't want it to be too loud so I don't have it really yeah that sounds a lot better okay
yeah sorry about that guys no thank you so the first thing to do is to decide what you want to
and then in the configuration file it's a very simple format you type the command that you
want to say followed by a colon and then the system command that will be run when it hears that
and so let's say to give the example that the john up and was just saying if I want to have one
that says open firebox which in fact I do I type open firebox colon and then it's followed simply
by firebox and I think I might put an ampersand after it but that might not even be necessary
but that's a very very simple one I have some very complex commands that you know save temporary
files and then access them later to insert text at a certain point like I can yeah that's an
awesome hack that you did with the chrome browser oh right well that's the I have one command
that will open up a dictation box as a separate chrome browser app because you can tie into the
Google web speech API using that and so for dictation I'll use that but I've got all kinds of other
commands for text manipulation and correction of common typos and things like that where like
when I say a command it will run a series of bash commands using things like a xdo tool and
what xv kbd and you know traditional copy and paste kinds of things and run things through
said substitutions and lots of stuff that I use in scripting all the time to accomplish things I
want and it's not that hard for me to do this stuff but I'm a pretty experienced bash programmer
so the problem for Jonathan's foundation is to to have this kind of power available to regular
users so it's not that easy to do so when you call bladder to perform a task to all these
tax tasks have to be bash scripted or can it does it take just any old input it can run any command
I mean I could have commands running in Python if I knew how to do Python okay so any text any
command line command any any command that your system can run can be automated this way
so in comparison I have no experience with dragon so I'm assuming dragon works well as long
as you are doing only what it works well with like if you try to go outside of the box forget it
well that's not quite true I by default yes but I actually saw a web demonstration
that a programmer did a guy who had I think he also had RSI problems and he discovered a way to
hack into dragon naturally speaking and did a really really impressive demonstration of how he
can use it in his programming because of course by default DNS doesn't know how to once you start
trying to type in a computer code DNS fails utterly because it doesn't recognize that okay it knows
it knows regular words and sentences but it doesn't understand you know computer code but he came
up with a way by I think it was for using Python he came up with a way to customize DNS and I
was really impressive but bladder can do all of that and it's actually much easier to configure now
is that don't like you don't have to break it is that due to like the database that dragon has
compared to the Sphinx database is it more robust I really don't know okay I don't know how I
don't know how DNS works really I think DNS is so bloated because it has to account for so many
possibilities out of the box whereas bladder is very efficient and lean and it can't take
dictation for you but whatever you decide to program it'll do okay I mean and you I don't know if
you mentioned it on the podcast you didn't HPR I know you mentioned it to me and I was blown away by
it like because you used to dual boot to just use dragon and you no longer have the dual boot is
that right that's right I don't even have windows on my computer anymore man I don't need it so I'm
assuming go ahead I'll go you go ahead if John just gonna say I run crunch bang Linux now in only
and I use bladder constantly to get my work done I'm not sure if you know the answer this in
that but once I can get some guys on this I'm assuming we would be able to get dictation into bladder
and not have to use your Chrome hack at some point do you think that's capable like the
the capabilities there it's just not implemented I don't know about that okay I don't know if
that working out either I don't know if Jezero would know the answer to either but I bet the people
at the what is it the case is a case Western that has the sphinx engine I forget who
I thought it might be Carnegie Mellon that has it okay that's right you're right about that they
the people who who write the engine might be able to answer that question better or there might
even be a way because I know the reason why you use like the Chrome part for the dictation is
because the Google API there might even be a way to just you know tap into the API without having
to open up Chrome also but the problem with that the problem with that would be the only problem
would be the computer would have to be connected to the internet because it's accessing the you
know the Google stuff over the internet to do the dictation that's the only kind of catch I guess
yeah there's that and also I suppose people who are concerned about privacy might worry about
your voice being recorded on Google servers that's true not deleted properly you know yeah that's
true I'm personally I'm willing to live with that just because I need it so much right no I hear
yeah so I've got a different topic if we're pretty much done covering leather yeah I'm not I'm sorry
okay go ahead Pokey sorry sound chaser so what if there were and this is just a what if and
and I almost got kicked out of several math classes especially in grade school for asking
what if questions but what if there were a person maintaining the config file of blather who
a package could be released that worked and did what it did and when the person downloaded the
package to the end user configuration looked like click on this particular function and then say
the words that you're supposed to say to make the function work what if there were a maintainer
of the extensions and creating new things and then as people said oh I need this function that
maintainer could add it because this sounds exactly I don't know maybe it's a pipe dream but this
sounds exactly to me like what the fundraiser is forced to to pay somebody to to implement this
kind of functionality on a day-to-day basis that would be these things could you get done in a day
that would work at first but I could definitely see that not scaling at least with one person
doing it like you know it'll work if you have one C2Z people doing it but what happens when you
have 30,000 people doing it and you get 3000 requests a day or something like it won't scale in
the long run it would work at first definitely but I think the end goal would make a way so the end
user themselves could easily just kind of do like do the command they would want to do and then
click a box and say the command and then it would just tie that command to what was just done on the
screen I think that would be easier in the long I mean like I said your idea would definitely work
at first poke but it just wouldn't scale I don't think unless you started you know hiring 10-20
people or whatever well what if what if instead of trying to scale it you know as the as the lump
came in of all the requests you just hire a minimum wage grunt to dedupe the list I mean I don't
that yeah that's possible too I mean there could be definitely a lot of sort of duplication sure yeah
yeah it's definitely worth considering at first that's yeah that's that's for sure because like I
mean I hate to not get it in sonar sooner than later just because I mean it's obviously working
if John can just ditch dragon totally and use this now like it just shows that it's the functionalities
there so better yet an intern to dedupe the list yeah there you go yeah I mean it's I would I would
definitely consider that and there's got to be a way to you know to put basically like make a
GitHub you know getorious repo or something and just push updates to that and then get pushed
down to the users John cult can you see something along those lines working it could the thing about
bladder I guess the thing I would worry about a little bit is the the initial configuration
I don't know I mean there there are certain things that almost everyone is going to need and that
could certainly be part of the initial configuration you know basic window management tasks like
switch to this open that right close this but then once you start seeing what people actually need
to do to get their work done every day it varies widely from one person to another and so they
really need to be able to make their own commands pretty easily no I get that and that's what
bladder is for but say we made it a derivative just for visually impaired people and and you
know blind bladder I don't know you will have to give it some clever Linux type name but if
there were a derivative of it that had a lot of the configuration done and had some type of
interface to like the initial setup of of you know whatever basic commands came with it could
you see something like that working or am I just pipe dreaming and barking up the wrong tree I think
it could work I mean it already works when I hand off my configuration file to someone else for
them to see examples of how it's done if not just use it right out of the box at the very least they
could take the commands that I've already set up and change the words that they have to say to execute
those commands and that level of customizability is a huge thing because in one of the things I
really hated about DNS was I had to say exactly what they told me to say or else it wouldn't work
and I really like being able to make up my own commands yeah that's that's another cool thing
about bladder like you're saying John and they can fig file you you type in what you're going to
say so you you have the choice like I don't want to say you know Firefox go I want to say Firefox
open or whatever like you you can you can say exactly what you want to say what just makes more
sense to you but the problem with that is that's too much choice for most people even that's too much
choice for me well no no I mean obviously there'd be documentation saying like oh you want to open
up Firefox do this you know say this you want to you know open up Libre office say this but you know
later further down the documentation you could say hey by the way if you don't want to say X to
open up Firefox go here you'll see this line and edit this part right here and put in whatever you
want to say and like so you can let the user know hey you can change it if you want but this is
what you got to say fight to fall yeah replace documentation with wizard and I think we've got
something there you go yeah the wizard is probably good idea called pegwall you could call blind
blather blither or we could just call it peg wall you could call blame that works too you could
call blind blather hey peg wall looks good or just call it LTM where you could just call it hey
peg wall never shuts up it's the first time you've spoken in three hours what's LTM lemon
oh okay gotcha and didn't have to go any further sorry I've been drinking I think I need to start
okay sorry you were going to mention something well I was gonna ask John um John have you been
at all engaged or following any of the muse open project I have not I mean I'm I'm aware of
them a little bit I the recordings that I've listened to that are on the project of I don't know
I they don't interest me a great deal um they're not as high a quality as I'm used to hearing in
general I mean there's some good one I'm more interested in things like the open
book sorry you broke up right on the end of that you open one open gold bird variations
yeah yeah I forget who it was that got the money together but somebody did a crowd
sourcing and raised a bunch of money to hire a really fine professional player to record box
gold bird variations with the understanding they would be released under a cc license and
available freely that's awesome yeah it was uh well they got Camico Ishazaka to record them
and it's actually the same people right it's it's the same guy who actually uh put that project
together who started muse open okay maybe I'd have been away from it for too long I should revisit
the site air air and done was the person behind I think both projects I remember correctly
sound chaser's muse open yet another like audio recording tool what it what I've heard it but I
don't know what it is no muse open is a project to take a lot of the classical music that is being
really locked away by this insane publishing and performance system and literally I mean we're
talking music that is in the public domain because it's hundreds of years old but you can't get
performance rights without getting a score they have to go through a publisher and they literally
charge out the wazoo for these full concert scores of you know Beethoven symphonies raw so
so they're basically trying to get a lot of these scores out into the public domain and I was
wondering if if john had been aware of that or heard anything about that because I've looked at
looked at the project and I see some of the stuff they've been compiling in that and I see some
of the scores they've actually produced but they don't seem to have gotten all the way through
and I'm wondering what john thinks the overall potential of that is in terms of kind of breaking
that that cycle of that publishing industry and whether he thinks it's a good thing or not
I love the idea of the project now a lot of the old really classic repertoire like the Beethoven
symphonies you can get performance copies of those without spending too much money it's the I mean
most orchestral libraries will have their own copies of these now a lot of newer stuff is only
available by rental from publishers and that does cost quite a lot of money and you don't get to
keep the score and I'm certainly would support anybody putting together recordings of these this
music and releasing it under free license and you know whenever it's good enough I will add it to
the listening lists for my classes right now what I use for my music history classes for
when I want the students to listen to something I've started just using Spotify
because they have everything and the students already use it and I can create playlists
that they don't have to pay for because the alternative is requiring students to buy CDs or
encouraging them or you know just kind of tacitly understanding that they will pirate the music
and they don't really want to do that now I don't know enough about this space but couldn't
like say with this locked up publisher that's you know keeping a lot of stuff and they're making it
you know extremely expensive to get the score couldn't one here uh the performance and couldn't
they just rewrite the performance in their own way their own interpretation can't they couldn't
they do that uh not really no okay yeah it's not that easy you take a whole orchestra piece and
you know you take an orchestral piece and it's the arrangements are pretty um huge you know it's
far and complex and then on top of it if you do duplicate it and you manage to duplicate it well
you're probably going to run into one of these publishers that have actually given a specific
arrangement out and they can actually tell it's basically a copy of their arrangement and they
might actually sue okay they would be much more trouble than it's worth and you would have
possible legal issues I say so I was curious because I mean that to me as far as like the creative
commons and that goes I'm a huge advocate of that and I see a project like this and say this is
moving the right direction to try to basically get stuff out under a cc zero license but you know
I'm wondering if that's going to actually break this cycle because one of the other things that
I think that especially in this country our orchestras are hurting they are hurting big time but
and they're pretty much stuck to actually performing just core repertoire because they can't
actually get scores for the less common pieces because they actually these publishers actually
charge a whole lot of extra money for things that aren't just the the standard core repertoire
no they're hurting because they refuse to learn to play at 120 beats per minute
I concur we have a new year's eve coming up we want to wish a happy new year's to
parts of Brazil to Argentina Buenos Aires which is in Argentina I believe
yes all right Santiago Argentina Buenos Aires Big Apple
to a Sunacan Paramaribo and probably a whole bunch of others that aren't even on our little list
happy new year happy new years happy new year happy new year I actually have I have a number of
friends in Buenos Aires because I did my doctoral dissertation on an Argentine composer and
spent some time there doing research I have fun memories of it nice did you drink a lot of what's
that tea they drink there manteye yeah manteye oh I want to try it they did they didn't introduce me to
manteye it was really funny I was there for a what was it there was some national holiday and I was
there to interview this very well-known Argentine classical guitarist he invited me over to his
house and he was having friends over they were passing the manteye thing around and they handed it to
me and I wasn't really sure what to do with it and so they said yeah just sip it out of a little
straw and so they were all watching me and kind of looking eagerly and I took my first drink and I was
and they all laughed and laughed because it's very very strong tea and it almost made me choke but yeah
yeah it was good time you might as well be the one to discover manteye tea you'll never
know screw it too many of either references I'm sorry I grew up with that album my mother played it
day after day after day and it's still stuck in my head and I actually even like it now my my
father got to meet Juan and Avita at the Pan American Olympics way back when did like the real
Juan and Avita oh yeah yeah I've got a a certificate that is signed by Juan and Avita Perez my
father's basketball team won the gold medal in basketball whoa Perón Perón I'm sorry I hope so
hey about before we get too far off the the end to his mother topic um mr. Nadoad you want to give a
quick plug for the Orca project again oh sure um some of you may or may not know I may blind
a new Linux user free software advocate the the executive director of the accessible computing foundation
located at the acf.co and I'm currently running an indigo campaign which can be found at igg.me slash
at slash orca and what I'm trying to do with this campaign is raise a hundred thousand dollars
to either hire two developers part-time or two developers full-time depending on where they are
located and what I'm trying to do is get a better functionality not necessarily within orca
but better functionality for orca throughout the operating system to work better with say
Libre office or audacity um you know with Firefox Chromium to get Orca to just work better
throughout other uh programs um so there are roughly 360 million vision impaired people in the
United States 90% of them live in developing countries 80% of people that live in the United States
other vision impaired are unemployed so there is screen reading technology that is available
except it's proprietary and extremely expensive so that means the majority of these vision
impaired users uh don't have access to a computer and I think this is quite ridiculous and
that you know we're creeping up on 2014 here some of you are already in 2014 and yet there are still
you know 330 million people that can't use computer because uh you know of companies charging
high prices for proprietary software and it's kind of uh you know outrageous because you know
we've had computers in our home since like the late 70s or so uh you know blind people have been
around since the late 70s it's not like we didn't know blind people existed and yet computers
still are not accessible so I find that outrageous and my goal is to bring assistive technology to
these 360 million vision impaired users because I myself like I said I'm blind I understand
how important accessibility is I understand I probably wouldn't do 90% or more of what I can do
if it weren't for accessibility this is what has given me the chance to be the possibility to be
successful and there's a lot of people out there that don't even have that opportunity and
you know who knows who what person is going to develop the next great web application operating
system mobile operating system who's going to write the next best play novel screenplay um you know
there's a lot of people out there that have a lot of stuff you know in them that they can't get out
and I want to bring them access to a computer and give them that opportunity um once they gain
access to a computer you know their entrepreneurship will be encouraged you know that how many
developers we can we get out of 360 million people probably quite a bit and since it's free software
you know we have control over the screen reader we can get 500 000 more developers working on
Orca and making it the best screen reader by far and again that's the goal is to make Orca 10
times better than anything else there that's offered so that's what the goal for the 100 000
dollars that's going to to make to bring Orca to that next level and to just make it the de facto
screen reader and my goal is for anyone that depends on assistive technology to be using free software
because we would then have the control over the software that gives us access to the to the computer
and then not only that but we'll have access control over the actual operating system that Orca
runs on which is going to your Linux so we'll have complete control over our computing needs
and we'll be able to shape the direction of our assistive technology through free software
and breathe yeah I kind of have that problem you did get a good there that was like wow
I wasn't sure because it was sounded like you know I think he's just speaking passionately but it could
have been rehearsed no it doesn't not rehearse well I was I wouldn't say he was reading off a script but
well I think he probably can do circular breathing yeah exactly yeah he must but yeah I mean you
know once you guys wind me up on I just can't stop it like it's definitely a passion of mine I have
you know very huge goals with what I want to do like with the ACF and free software and accessibility
and I just you know I need everyone's help I'm only one person I don't have the answers
to everything I love being able to talk to you guys and you guys and everyone else that supports
me you know with pledging and you know giving me the opportunity to even do these things and you know
what you know what would happen if there's a billion more people that can use the computer
accessing the internet you know becoming developers you know just I think so much could happen
and I really think a lot could change for a lot of people it's just getting the free software
in their hands and and making sure you know it's not only equivalent but just better than proprietary
software and I did I really think a lot could happen and that's just my passion my goal and really
I think you know one of the things I live for hey that's good I have one question for you Jonathan
have any more pledges come in uh one came in earlier today it was for I don't want to say who
were and how much you could probably see if you looked on the campaign I don't I don't remember if
it was like a anonymous one or not so I don't want to say but we did get one pledge after after
uh sound chaser and brome pledged today and I think one other person and then another person so
there's been four today but I don't want to say anyone else because I can't remember if they were
anonymous or not hey Jonathan ever occasionally tried orca and uh found it difficult and one of
the things that you and uh hookah talked about I think briefly it was the voice yes you you mentioned
that you had an alternate voice that you either were using or had figured out how to use could
you talk about that a little bit yeah sure um what we did with uh the last indiegogo campaign is
if you before this if you fired up orca and started using it it uses this uh speech synthesizer called
e-speak and it's very uh dated sounding you know sounds against from the 80s basically it works uh
it's it's very it has many languages which is good it has like I don't like 30 or something like
that which is really good but it's it's a hurdle for new users if they're coming from proprietary
operating systems because the voices on those are much better sounding they're you know proprietary
voices that are licensed licensed out and they just sound like a real people so I I equate this
problem to you know let's say if you're you're used to seeing like you know KDE 4.12 or whatever
it's just you know which bright shiny thing with whizz bang features it looks awesome but then this
guy your friend comes over says oh man I have the best operating system in the world you got to try
it and he puts it in and it looks like you know windows 95 and you'd be like I'm not using this
garbage like look it looks like crap like you know I'm not in so if you tell a blind person oh man
use this it works so much better and they hear it and like ugh this sounds terrible like you
know they it's just a hurdle for some users so what we did is we uh developed a new speech server
which is called speech hub and that replaces the current speech dispatcher now the reason why
we replaced it with speech hub will get into it in a second but speech hub works with Mary open
open Mary TTS and which is free software and it uh you can basically record you know people
talking into a microphone and then using that audio for the voices with open Mary so now orca
does have much more uh you know better sounding voices than you know good old e-speak um sure
go ahead pokey hey to interrupt but no one's ask it is open Mary is this something that's in the
standard repositories for most Linux distributions I don't know off the top of my head because
it's we have it packaged with speech hub already so I don't know if it's like an app to get away
or if it's in you know Pac-Man or whatever I don't know off the top of my head right now so you
packaged it yes and what about speech hub is that some new package as well yes right now we're
working on get it in the AUR repository because sonar is moving over to manjaro which that could be
no story but in the current sonar 1310 based off of a bunch to 1310 speech hub is already installed
we don't have it packaged yet as a Debian package for like Ubuntu or Debian we're working on
that also that could be a painstakingly long but well for Debian anyways um but with sonar 13 uh
10 speech hub is already there it's not set by default as having issues with thinking it default
but once you install sonar or even if you're using the live disk you can switch over to it once the
live disk is running and so you open up the orca preferences and you can see where to choose speech
hub move it over to that and then right below that you can tell it's open Mary TTS and then click
okay and then boom it switches the speech engine over so it's on the live disk but it's not in any
repositories right yeah no no yeah it's yeah like I had the developer really rush it and and get
it ready just so I can get it in sonar like it was a really rushed job I I want to ship it with
it in there because I knew it worked but I knew getting it properly packaged and in the repositories
that would take a whole nother release so I just said you know what we'll get in the repose at
some point but I want to ship sonar with it so we did we just you know installed it through a
shell script and you know got it going that way so now so shouldn't we do like a shout out right
now for packages if anybody's a package or could you please attempt to package this software for
whatever yeah there's any devian packages yeah if there's any devian packages that would be
the best way because then it would just trickle down to yeah it would just trickle down to a bunch
I'm pretty sure I could get on red hat I just have reached out to them yet I'm I've interviewed
Tom Callaway a few times he's kind of the lead oh yeah oh now you got to know yes come on
packages come find this please we need this in the repose once it's in the repose once people
start using it and seeing it then the bug reports come in and start getting developed then it
becomes stable and we can really push this thing out this is I mean calling for for packages right
now this is when the what year or two year cycle begins yeah getting this thing stable and in
their replacing what we've got as a standard and like him following saying earlier it's it's super
easy to get your own voice and so we're really good to encourage that to get you know because right
now I think there's only like I said earlier between 10 to 15 languages so we're really good
encourage you know other languages to you know get find someone and I think I think if you roughly
read about a thousand sentences that's all you need to get the database going to you know have a
good pronunciation for all the words and what what kind of voice is preferable is it like a
bassy voice like we were talking about I you might not have been here we were talking about earlier
where a bassy voice comes across a cheap microphone better than a tinny voice but maybe a tinny
voice is better for the synthesis later on what what kind of a voice are you looking for I couldn't
say yet by but I could say any voice is better than e-speak you you heard a pokey when we did that
installation just e-speak all the time with bladder I love it yeah I mean me myself I we
not because I need to disqualify my ex-wife here oh yeah but me myself I I don't mind e-speak
but it's like I said earlier it's more than new users that are just like ah this this isn't good
you know I like I personally I'm fine with e-speak myself um but we we were able to overcome
that hurdle for a new a new user so do you have the advantage of being uh e-speak is very fast
it's very responsive compare that's why I like it what what's the other voice that I've been
you it's like Arctic voice festival yeah festival festival is kind of a nice sounding voice but
it seems to be very slow to respond it is and it's like non-tree uh no it's free but it's it's
it's a little bit better than e-speak it's still like robotic-ish sounding with a slight hint of
realness to it so it's I mean it's slightly better than e-speak but in my opinion like John was
saying it's not worth it because you lose the performance you know with e-speak I have I have
Orca talking at 350 words a minute so you wouldn't get festival doing that festival that was
never heard festival is not crisp it's woolly and the more you speed it up the less crisp it becomes
yeah yeah a lot of mispronunciations of words too and I find that happens less with e-speak
yeah you have to really with festival you really have to push it phonetically to actually get it to
speak words correctly I must around it for a while and it was like wow how many things I had to
actually like space and punctuate weird and then spell or actually misspell yeah actually get
things to work correctly it was pretty wild and that's just hacking and that's not the right way
to make a standardized utility there's a there's a guide right now lined from this project but he
as is like it as is hobby what he's done is he's worked on some sort of program where basically
it will say what people are saying on rc and everyone will get a voice and then it says what
they're saying on rc and he's and yeah it's all kind of a experimental program but it seems
to work for him quite well yeah I think pigeon had a plug I don't know if they still do but they
had a plug-in that would use festival and read all the IRC stuff coming in also I don't know if
it's still in by default or not but pigeon had a plug-in that would do something like that
yeah no no not pigeon it's um but yeah I mean it's a general thing and he had to it can be
before any I see I think and he has luck in the sample on his side well yeah it's an interesting
thing I what little experience I have with speech synthesis come oddly enough comes through a
navigation thing that I mentioned earlier osman and in that in the config files if you look at
they basically have a bunch of like redirects so if you see mt period it redirects to mountain
or if you see mt without a period it redirects to mountain or if you see mn t it redirects to
mountain or mn t yet and there's just like pages and pages and pages and pages and pages of what
you know to you and I would seem like a redundant list of these redirects to different words which
probably with a with a text-to-speech engine would equate to different pronunciations do you
do you have a lot of that with um I don't know with festival with e speak with this other one
whose name isn't fresh in my brain do you have a lot of that well with with orca there's a dictionary
in it so like say if you're like wow it didn't say that word well at all you can go into the
dictionary and kind of edit that word so it sounds a little bit better so you can actually
set up kind of what you're saying with the dictionary to orca so because by default if orca saw
mt period it would just say it would either say mt or try to say like you know but yeah in the dictionary
you could say hey when you see mt I want you to say this and then you could type in mountain
so you could really customize orca to how you want it to be but by default it doesn't do things
like that okay so kevin was asking about having john then talk about moving to manjaro okay
so sonar currently has been based off of ubuntu for a while I have a couple of debing builds which I
just did as kind of um experimental I never considered them like actual releases but I made them
available for people to download um but we are moving over to manjaro for a number of reasons um
one it's you know based off of arch it has the latest packages which is awesome currently ubuntu
in the past has been known for you know having pretty much you know latest ish packages for every
release well for 1404 they're going to be shipping with gnome 38 which is what they shipped with
currently and so they've been behind for like a year now so when 1404 comes out gnome 312 is
going to be out and they're going to be shipping with 38 so they're just way behind and so there's
a lot of accessibility stuff that's advanced since gnome 38 so we're switching over to manjaro which
is you know tying into arch now the reason why we're using manjaro is a few the first is the lead
developer it has been fantastic he's been working with us on lots of stuff he practically re-wrote
the ubiquity installer so we could use it in sonar to have an accessible installer um he's worked
on a few packages with us to get them into the manjaro repos because some of them were an AUR
and we need them to be in the manjaro community repos he moved those over um the build system
for manjaro is awesome and he practically rewrote it for us to remove all the manjaro references
and things like that and put in everything saying sonar and and things like that so he practically
rewrote that we have the sonar build system on getorious if anyone ever wanted to make you know
you could totally un-sonarize sonar and make your own you know manjaro has been basically if you go
to getorious.org slash sonar ISO that's our build system you can clone it and uh start going
away it it currently does work it would build a working ISO and uh you can customize it to
your heart's content um so that's another reason the build system is awesome we could
we'll be able to make out you know make sonar different sonar versions like very quickly
so we'll be able to make a canome version an xfce version a fluxbox version we're going to make
a command line only version for you know blind you blind low vision users that could care less
about graphical environment we'll be able to do all that very quickly which is awesome um another
really cool thing that manjaro did is they put a patch in the pack man so what manjaro has is three
separate repos they have unstable testing and stable now with unstable it's practically like
running arch people complain that oh manjaro's not like real arch because um you know they have
their own repos well the unstable repo is everything the arch has the next day so if you run the
unstable repo you're basically running arch Linux because manjaro has this system that the
lead developer made called I think he calls it like get box or something and he basically clones
the arch repos once a day and then pushes it over to manjaro so there's the unstable branch
then there's the testing branch which after a few days things trickle down into testing then
after a few more days everything trickles down to stable so if you if you run the stable branch
you're basically getting seven day old packages roughly which is still awesome and the packages
are a little more vetted so there's you know a less likely or a chance of the of the system
breaking which is important with you know blind and low vision users and and people you know with
certain types of disabilities so um I've been running manjaro unstable and stable on two my
computers and I've had zero problems with either one of them um you can switch to unstable on the
fly so in Pac-Man you can switch to the unstable branch update the entire system it goes it goes
flawlessly then if you decide uh you know what I want to go back to stable you can literally
downgrade everything back down to stable and it does that flawlessly too I've done it numerous times
to see if it would break and it had never broken for me so there's a number of reasons why we're
moving to manjaro uh we have a lot more control over it so getting newer packages like you know
with that's why I said we're gonna get speech hub and manjaro first because it's just way easier
we get an AUR which takes like 10 minutes and then we ask Phil hey this package is an AUR
can you put in the community for us he'll put it in community boom it'll be in sonar manjaro so
that's another reason why we're liking moving over to manjaro slash arch because we can just
way easier get packages in the distro much quicker um so that's another reason why we're moving over
if no one's ever checked out manjaro I highly recommend it he he does an awesome job at it
it works great and if you've ever wanted to you can literally get manjaro installed like in a
bunch to install it's it literally takes like you know 10 15 minutes and you're done it's like well
that's really good news Jonathan um one thing I'll add to the good reasons to make this switch
is that it was a whole lot easier to get bladder working on arch than it was on devian oh really
okay that's good news okay perfect because I meant to email you soon about that because you gave me
the instructions with a bunch you know it's like in manjaro this could be even harder on arch but
that's that's good news it's easier on arch because when you do something like install g streamer
it installs all the dev packages as well whereas on devian you have to go track those libraries
down um so it's actually easier on arch awesome that's good news there might there might even be
an AUR package build thing for bladder I'm not really sure it seems like Jesra would have done
that because he's an arch user himself okay well if there isn't there will be so awesome
Kate Wischer just made a comment in IRC says say what save on the fees from canonical for using
their repose oh yeah that too I uh I don't know how I feel about that scenario I mean technically
they can do it so it's kind of like what you know what what can you say I mean you know I it'd be
sad to see him do it but technically it could be done so I I don't know I don't hopefully it was
just kind of a backhanded comment or something that was taken out of context maybe and it really
won't come to that but who knows here's a here's a question actually to do um to do with arch
and run here yeah I mean getting by the internet and I see there's a lot a lot of essay or experience
than as usual people used to run to a lot of them were going to arch but um I mean why why is that
really why people going and running to arch but everyone quite a few it seems it's a little more
advanced is you know if you want to keep progressing and learning quicker and it's also much newer
software so either of those things isn't usually to push someone there but both doesn't like to get
not just other burning police distrages as well and so I mean there's loads of distrages like
that gets good to go for but it's like arch arch arch arch well another reason kind of back to like
the problem with me with Ubuntu like for me the the pack the not the versions of packages are all
over the place like they had gnome 38 but they had orca 310 they had gnome control center 3 6
that not list not list 3 6 so it's like this is a mess especially for accessibility because
you know using orca 3 10 on not list 3 6 can introduce bugs that weren't intended to be there
because they're assuming it with orca 3 10 you're running not list 3 10 you know so it's just
it's messy that's because of unity as well and I know um no not yet so the way land stuff I believe
well it's that's why it's going to be 3.8 it gets back to what I was saying before Ubuntu is kind
of a multi-function tool kind of a compromise so if arch is the absolute cutting edge and anything
less than arch is a compromise on the freshness of your software and slackware or devian is stable
in anything else as a compromise on stability then Ubuntu is right there with the rest of them it's
a compromise of both so it does neither of those things very well does neither freshness nor stability
as as well as either of those other two ends of the spectrum think about this this is something we
would not have said about Ubuntu just three years ago yeah Ubuntu was the darling well not only that
but I mean they were actually pushing out newer versions of packages than what we're in devian
at the time yeah yeah they're based on devian but they were still getting newer packages and
pushing them out there I doesn't seem to even be the case anymore no I mean no but
for a while it's still newer than devian three three years ago we still would have said it
stable it was only Fedora pushing out newer stuff than Ubuntu yeah well for a couple of releases
Ubuntu is very close to Fedora but you know Fedora just kept being Fedora and kind of ran away with
it now as far as newer packages but you know I I don't fault Ubuntu I mean look it's free software
they could do it they're doing they're you know they're making a bet on you know trying to do
something out of the box and I mean they could do it and then you choose just not to use it I
mean that's kind of what it just comes down to really I don't fault them either I was I was kind
of making an extreme example of a particular point I don't fault them at all for for that
but your example kind of pinpoints where a compromise isn't working is where you know they've got
different versions of packages that are expecting similar versions of each other yeah and they're
even as a 1404 they've now forked Nome Control Center because I guess the reason why they're
keeping back to Nome 36 for the control center was they're doing some you know voodoo or whatever
with it to have it do things they wanted to do and finally they got sick of maintaining it so
they just said forget it and now they're forking it so you know I read the reason they they fork
the Nome Control Center actually is because I've actually it was because the Nome remix that's
supposed to be you know upstream Nome and I think even that's fine but the point is because
the GNOME Control Center and Unity Unity needed webber from the control center and then if they
forked instead they could ship the upstream version of voodoo GNOME remix I think that was the idea
from an article I read yeah and then you know the issue I have to what I have to see when 1404
comes out is you know now is the control center they're implementing is that going to be accessible
or is it going to be useless like so it's like things like that were you know like hey it wouldn't
do is doing their own thing which is fine but do you want to bank what you're doing on where they're
trying to go you know so it's like that's why we had to move over to you know arch it's just vanilla
they're not trying to mess with anything they're getting to give you the latest stuff you know I was
running GNOME 310 two days after it came out you know like you don't have to wait and everything
just upgraded smoothly no problems and it was just a great experience and yeah well I was not
sure it gives you you get the later this and that quick and yeah perhaps canonical really needs to
run everything they do through kajari's computer before it makes it into the next okay so you've
explained why an arch based distro but could Jonathan could you explain why a GNOME based distro
or specifically why a GNOME 3 based distro well right now GNOME is especially you know I I guess
I'll preface it with this when GNOME 3 3.2 3.4 maybe 3.4 I was definitely a GNOME shell hater I did not
see the use for it I thought it was useless and stupid as far as accessibility because you know
it required 3d acceleration blind people don't care about 3d acceleration we just want a fast
responsive computer and GNOME shell was not that even on newer a hardware GNOME 3 it came out and
I was like hmm this actually kind of works now GNOME 310 came out and I'm definitely a GNOME fan now
but I still do have issues with it because it still does require 3d acceleration but what they
did is they're using the LVM pipe which offloads 3d acceleration to the processor now the problem
with that is is if your video card doesn't handle three yeah if you don't have a video card that
throws that does 3d acceleration your processor probably is in good shape and you're going to
bring that thing to a crawl so that I still have an issue with that well I'll what about the
non-3d acceleration mode there isn't one anymore they it's no longer packaged they took the
fallback out yes they're playing to keep it yeah LVM pipe was because of the whole
the video graphics card drivers issues and for five terry driver and then and the hardware
3d acceleration needed for GNOME shell and then I think then the idea was basically that with
as of GNOME 3.8 they basically upstream GNOME busy for right we don't really need this
the old fallback mode because we're not going to rely on fallback as much 3d acceleration at least
is my understanding and so they've dropped the old fallback mode which really was a fallback
mode for old hardware when LVM pipe was good enough for the new fallback well the problem with
the you know the corner quote GNOME classic it's still using the shell with just you know extensions
they made to give it the old GNOME look and feel so it's still requiring the 3d acceleration
everything it really didn't help it just made it look like the old GNOME instead of functioning like
it's like a clone 2 mode it's not really a fallback mode like everything was can I
distract us for a quick moment with a shiny thing oh yeah yeah okay um graveyard is like
everybody's favorite curmudgeon on the internet ever but I don't think anyone's ever heard his
voice before just now can you say something else graveyard well I've talked to some of you
I've talked I've met Jonathan before yeah yeah so did I cool so what do you think what do you
think of that pokie it's yet another reason to wish I was itself especially that year um
but yeah so we are uh I'm excited with again the mandaro build system because I am able to make
xfce accessible with a couple of workarounds which really isn't a deal breaker but it's not the
ideal situation yet I'm still putting pressure on the xfce developer to the problem that xfce
right now is the the panel isn't accessible I can get to the menu where all the applications are
that's fine but everything inside the panel like you know wireless and you know volume all the
all the little bits and stuff you see there I can't get to any of that so what I'm doing what
what I'm going to do with the uh orca bill um sonar build of mandaro using xfce is replacing network
manager with wicked because that is accessible you can get to wicked from the internet option under
the menu and you can also use wicked curses to uh you know set up your internet connection so with
the combination of that um and through nr is not an accessible file manager so replacing through
nr um I'm thinking we're thinking of using nimo over nautilus because nimo actually doesn't pull in
any extra dependencies and nautilus pulls in a bunch of stuff so we're going to probably use
nimo which is the forked version of nautilus that Linux mint did use that file manager with uh
wicked gtk and we will then have a fully accessible xfce uh version
jeez we've got to break in here we miss a time zone for the new years uh
you know new years uh greeting greetings to new foundland and lebrador slash canada st johns
conception bay south conception bay south okay corner broke gander and okay
and then we also of course want to continue our discussion of the orca fundraiser and
continue to that happy new year happy new year hi guys good to be back
yeah nice um yeah so i need to ask what about mate my day uh that's totally inaccessible like they
didn't implement the accessibility stack at all so that's that's that's worse off than xfce or
even lxd what really yeah it's 2013 there are two things you have to implement as developer
and that is you don't support not for me yet it you implement accessibility and you implement
unicorn support well not on me is it i mean it that support was there it used to be there it's
just copy paste it's not like it didn't get pulled over apparently oh man it is you know and it
oh sorry go ahead and pick it just that we can install to to make orca run with mate i've tried
and i i can't get it to work i have no idea exactly what is i didn't dig i didn't dig deep enough
into it i just installed what need to be there and i just didn't work i tried fiddling around with
it couldn't get to work and i was like site you know i'm not gonna i'm not gonna go after every
desktop environment you know so i was like you know i'll do it later maybe but right now i was
like it might because you know here's enough because i think like the linux mint guys are they
sort of under the the matte or mate development are they sort of in charge of that they're the
ones that do it yeah okay no no i think actually wait no wait sorry um yeah yeah wasn't mate is
from arch i think actually in cinnamon has been i think i'm not sure i know it has been part of um
of uh mint both matte and cinnamon have been part of mint but you were yeah they're in mint but one
was started by arch i think not not mint that's why i'm in well because i here's the problem
they were bolstered by mint but i could be wrong sorry yeah me too and then here's the problem
the here's the sort of the reason why i don't bother with mate or whatever is because i reached
out to claim probably a year and a half ago or so i emailed them and i just said hey you know
this is who i am and you know back in linux mint five used to include orca ever since linux mint five
you take it out it's not even in there i was like it'd be great if you could include orca and possibly
you know make a way for mint to be accessible the blind users and so i pointed to some articles
like that i helped out triskel and stuff and so emailed back to me he's like yeah i'm not gonna do
that he's like having the accessibility stuff is too confusing my users won't know why it's
there um if you want to make a mint remix you know knock yourself out and i'll you know i'll put
something up on the community page and you know you can do something that way but like he wouldn't
even never mind you know making it more accessible he didn't even want to include orca in in the default
iso he was like yeah that's not gonna happen okay so mate was founded by perberos who is
he's a packageer for arch linux lead developers are stifano carapatus or stefanok who's
also a packageer for debi in an Ubuntu uh steve zetch who's a manus who's a packaging developer for
a Ubuntu and clement uh lephabra uh clement he's from yeah that's lex mint you who is from
management and he's he's uh listed here as project management and development from matay so
these are the four and i got this from matay dash desktop dot org slash team these are these are
the four names on the uh official page so i was gonna what it says um you said to him
if i ain't nemo instead of the tulis and um my what's based on what blind users i would
i would default nearly any file manager would be good enough but what what your reasons go with
nemo instead of the tulis exactly well first of all through and are isn't accessible so if you go
to the home folder it just it doesn't read anything so yeah yeah that's yeah so yeah so with the
reason for nemo is since we're using xfce the reason we want to use nemo is not because it's
necessarily better than nautilus or whatever but uh by installing nemo it doesn't pull in any
extra dependencies you can install nemo on its own if you install nautilus it pulls in a ton of
genome dependencies like it actually pulls in like evolution jett it uh a few other packages
you know so that's what that's why we are we default we're gonna use nemo instead of nautilus
well there's no way to break that dependency pulling in surely surely it must be somewhere i mean
is it really required evolution and someone's been sold as well probably not really
it's probably how are the dependencies are set up you know through pacman there probably is
kind of a way to tell it hey don't install these dependencies but i'm definitely new to pacman
it's a a whole different animal so i don't even i don't know how to do that yet i can imagine
it's possible but i don't know how to do it and i'm not sure if our build system would necessarily
allow the way our build system is set up i don't think we're able to say hey install this package
but ignore the dependencies i don't think we can do that with our build system
okay hey Jonathan i've got a accessibility question for you sure so lately an issue that i've
been uh working with for preparing exams and so forth is um making them friendly for dyslexic
students and um i found that i can use the open dyslexic font i'm i'm just wondering how much
this really helped do you have any idea how much it helps and if but let me preface this you're
asking a blind guy how fonts help but i'll do the best i can but you're you're the accessibility
zero right now here's here's from my understanding of dyslexia and obviously you know this can vary
from person to person but generally speaking a dyslexic person when they're like you know reading
text their mind will start to turn the letters like up and down sideways backwards upside you
know upside down so what happens with the open dyslexic font and john since you've seen it you'll
probably pick up on what i'm saying if you look at towards the bottom of all all the letters apparently
they're like they call it they look heavier like they're a little wider or maybe so what that's
doing to the person so what that's doing to the person's mind it's it's anchoring the letters saying
do not move this letter this is how it's supposed to be don't let your brain move it so that's
essentially what it's supposed to do now i'm actually mildly dyslexic but my form is a little
bit different part of what happens for me is that normally what's supposed to happen is your
right eye is supposed to move across a document but your left eye actually is actually regulating the
pace what happens to me is my right eye moves independent of my left eye oh okay yeah
yeah well that actually ends up slowing me down reading wise because since my eyes are moving
at different speeds i actually have to pull my right eye back so i actually will misread things
sometimes have you ever tried like using like a texas speech kind of stuff sound chaser when
you're reading things that does that help at all have you tried i've tried that i can listen to
stuff you know like a book on tape type thing but like speech recognition i can listen to it
but half the times i'll i'll actually get lost during it you know okay it's just a little too
artificial for me so i i normally don't actually use that and i i actually tried the the other
one i tried last year after actually talked about it on this very show uh was the speeding up
the podcast and that and seeing if i can still understand them i can get to a certain point with
it but then i just couldn't hold my concentration on it yeah we tried this open dyslexic
font and if so has it helped it all i you know i just heard about that with like last day or two i
hadn't heard of it before so i was wondering whether or not i should should install it and try it
there's actually an extension there's an extension you can put on chrome browser that will turn
everything you look at into that font oh really that's i didn't know that i'll implement that
i'm assuming that's on chromium too yeah i i tried it on chromium and i you know for someone who's
not dyslexic it's it's it's not very great to look at yeah but it totally works i mean it turned
my website into um completely open dyslexic font when i looked at it immediately i didn't even
ever restart the browser oh wow no search for it now it get joined with like an extension like
that can you can you and like install it but deactivate it and keep it there or is it basically installed
or not installed it's installed i think i still have it installed but i disabled it okay um
and but once you enable it every website you go to uses that font that's cool all right good
the no i wonder firefox has that or not i'd be surprised if they don't i didn't i didn't see it
in firefox what i've done is like i've been converting my exams from using open office into
lottex and so i've got a toggle option at the top of the preamble that i can choose whether to
output a dyslexic friendly format or just a normal one and i've even got a toggle option for the
for a braille printer also i found out last year when i had a blind student that the braille printer
requires a certain format that i was not using and so now i've got that option as well but if i
if i say dyslexic is true then it'll use that font and it'll instead of doing the answers out
to the side it'll stack them all up vertically that'll you don't be less confusing to
oh wow so if that's that's in librae officer or did you say open office which are kind of same
i'm using lottex oh lottex okay that's cool yeah how like how many like in your the time that
you've been a professor at the school like how many kids do you see that have you know learning
disabilities or disabilities like because i don't have a grasp of like the number of kids in like
in the school system i mean do you have a kind of a rough idea of what that number could possibly be
well i've had um i think i've had two totally blind students since i've been here i've been here
12 years and i have at least once a semester i've got somebody who's dyslexic or has some other
issue of that sword okay so i teach classes that are anywhere from 25 to 105 students
and so in any given semester i'll have maybe up to five students who've got some sort of
issue like this okay so if i can if i can help them by just printing their test in a font that
helps them read it more accurately it's an easy enough thing to do yeah because i mean again even
in the school systems you know there's only so much budget and they can only buy so much proprietary
stuff and then you know some of the other kids are you know like oh you know well they try and find
maybe another organization to help them out or you know they try and find like a grant system to
where they can purchase what they need and it's like this no there should be no need for this like
you know we can fall in mentioned earlier about like his you know i was like we were talking about
like the sonar iso and the build system i was like look you know your school system could take
the build system and totally build you know xyz education you know distro and have all the assistive
technology you need for any you know the students that have you know any type of you know just
a good they should embrace all this open source stuff all this you know it's free stuff i
listen now we know that but there's a whole politics and all people are knowing about this
and that yeah it's as simple as that yeah i know you're right you're right okay so i so i
went ahead and styled the open dyslexic font and irony is in looking at our etherpad right now
all of the controls and the like menus and stuff are in the the open dyslexic font but the
main text area is not so so really didn't have the main text area but and i don't know if i can get
used this or not i want to have to try it for a while what it looks like to me when i'm looking at
you know other areas and other pages in that is it it looks like the text was printed with an old
typewriter it where the ribbon was going bad on it yeah it's thicker at the bottom and thinner at
the top it looks kind of like the fonts that they might use on a halloween poster or something
yeah okay i don't know i don't know if i'm gonna be able to get used to that in my case i mean my
case is a real mild dyslexia i mean let me put this way i got all the way into high school without
it being detected so it it's really really a mild case so this may not be the way for for
someone like me to go i just went to the open dyslexic web page here and oddly enough i had to
enable some JavaScript to make it work and i i'm also mildly dyslexic and once i enabled it i
just read this web page faster than i've ever read anything in my life really yeah i'm kind of
surprised by that i'm a little stunned and it's the ugliest font i've ever seen but i really
just ripped through this quicker than i could have otherwise yeah and that may be the case
of me too it may just take me you know like a day or something to get used to and then be able to
whip through a whole bunch of text what was the uh what was the firefox plugin please
no we don't know there is one yeah it's a chrome extension or chromium either one and it's called
open dyslexic and you can install it and download the font and until firefox that that's your default
yeah imagine you could do that i know probably can it's in the it's in the repos for like a bunch
to endeavour and i think it's like open dyslexic dash font and you can actually make it system wide
also and i used it in librae office you know you can choose that from your list of fonts just
like you can choose times new roman or career or whatever as ugly as this thing is i'm going to
give this a try i was planning once the semester starts up again to visit my colleagues over in the
office of disability services and see what kind of numbers they might have about how many students
we have who are dyslexic dyslexic and if they know about these fonts and you know how much
it might help yeah for using them i bet they don't yeah there's a woman that uh i i spoke with
probably two or three months ago i'm gonna talk to her i think in a few days she uh as a fellow at
the berkman center at harvard and she was a law professor at harvard for a while and she had a blind
student and she hopped on the million list asking about like screen reader technology and stuff
and a friend of mine at berkman afforded me the email and said hey you should get a hold of
her and talk with her so i spoke with her we had an awesome conversation like about kind of like
the school system and you know she she kind of knew what you know free software was but not really
and so i started talking about sonar and all kinds of stuff and so she really wants to kind of
you know help me or guide me to kind of maneuver like school systems and even one of the things
she's really getting into is the whole uh i forgot the acronym they're using for but like the
whole online education thing the moogs or moogs or whatever they're calling it yeah massive online
open course yeah so she's getting it way into that and she wants you know to like work with me
making sure these types of things are accessible also so i'm i'm really excited about about that so
i'm hoping i'll be doing educational stuff in the near future also awesome man hey guys i'm
gonna have to take off i think i'm getting tired all right john have a good one yep you two great
talking everybody happy new year yeah thank you happy new year you too yeah happy new year thank you so
much for coming on it was a real treat exploring what's in that brain years yeah great being here
see you guys later bye so Jonathan you get to stop sending me selfies of of you never
hey you're the one that sent me some like christmas card thing with pictures the other one to talk
yeah but i i captioned it so somebody could tell you what was in it hey i got a newbie question
guys where's where do you typically uh install new fonts to because it isn't a package in mint
as far as i can tell at least not the version i'm using what what version of mint are you using
i have no idea if it changed the desktop wallpaper to figure that out just can you do like uh well
you i mean you looked in the package manager obviously right then uh the package installer thingy
oh yeah but i just shut it hold on i'll find out well as i guess if you go to the terminal and
just do an app cache search and just put in open dyslexic it should pull it up no i did i did exactly
that and it didn't pull up anything for open dyslexic or dyslexic oh okay normally if you just
click on the font the like a thing will come up saying hey do you want to install this and it'll
just install okay see what i can do well on the on the web page uh for open dyslexic it doesn't
list uh Ubuntu but it does list Debian said yeah it isn't it isn't a Ubuntu 1304 yeah 1304 and 1310
definitely i don't know farther back though you're right about there being an install font
in in ment here if i just double click on it okay there you go about five minutes the next one
did i just do something to kill mumble or is there just this much dead air now i think we're all
looking at other stuff and didn't have another topic to go to dead air dead air dead air dead
sorry i think there's i think there's a topic lacking i mean it's like well yeah i've since i've been on
this this time round there's one topic that's been lacking completely lacking for a reason deal
what that is is this year the Linux desktop not that one no not that one we just remember before
we launched a new topic we got like four minutes to go before our next new year we can do it we
can do a next topic after the whatever the internet we had it we had a little bit last time but
this time it's gonna be completely lacking it seems no one top-camping enough if we had a lot of
it last time we at least joked about it this time i think there was a mention of it but that's
somehow as far as i ever got but sounds like you just started out man how about talking about
curious and listen thing i think in the food topic but yeah there's new foundations that uh
thing yeah there's other topics as well let's not get into the red holding with the the food topic
again well where's dude man he's got to be on for that oh my goodness he was interesting last year
he's popped in and out a few times uh but i oh did he yeah he never said anything
yeah i think he lives in the check so he's he's pretty far into the night now
that's no excuse i'm pretty far into this big bottle of wine and i haven't shut up
i don't know how much i can tell you about it good oh yeah cracking here
what what do you what do you drink in sunny bud light platinum yeah my wife got me a um bourbon
um stout very delicious goose goose island oh yeah i just i just i just i just i make it bourbon
they aged the beer and bourbon cask does that make it sour it tastes like you can taste the like
the bourbon they don't put bourbon in it i'm assuming what happens is when the beer is in you know
in the um thing that the bourbon that's in the wood kind of seeps into the beer i'm assuming
but it's you can definitely taste the burt like one beer is 14% alcohol holy shit
that's pretty stout and it doesn't like a lot of bourbons are you know come from like sour
mash whiskey does it give it as a as a sour taste to it at all uh i would not say it sour
and but that's in my opinion i don't i don't think it's sour at all
they may come from a sour mash but to me at least they don't taste sour usually do they taste sour to you
some of them do like a gym beam is it's pretty sour or or other most of them that are sour will
say sour mash whiskey on them sorry but yeah i didn't read the label no problem i didn't think
you're drinking gym beam either mostly goose payoff offerings are a little on the hoppy side
oh yeah it wasn't cheap that it was the christmas present
but no that you know you go off to goose pay that quality beer i have to say that i mean my preference
is is more on the multi end rather than the hobbit uh it it's hard to go go wrong with the
goose payoff rates okay so it looks like now that i've got the um dyslexic font enabled it looks
in firefox anyway it looks like it's only implemented wherever there's no specific font
suggested or that that kind of sense yeah i think so yeah and the only just a bunch of pages
of open tabs i'm flipping through the only place where i'm seeing that something's not
uh you know specified already is is the top part of accessible freedom dot org where that's in
to me now it's in the open dyslexic font yeah and but there's not a lot of text there
right down below it it looks like you switch to a monotype font and then an italic font maybe
even a monotype italic so those are not in the dyslexic font so i wonder if there's a way i could
switch that somehow like make it if yeah if that kind of thing okay let's uh for it should
be possible with the user's style sheet oh happy new years yes we got to do the happy new years for
some regions of canada it says in 26 more and let's lepaz san one center domingo hell effects
so happy new year oh canada okay and the other thing is we need to do a quick break to uh
happy new year you have been listening to heger public radio at heger public radio does our
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