hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr2835.txt

Episode: 2835
Title: HPR2835: 2018-2019 New Years Eve show part 2
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2835/hpr2835.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 17:44:38

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This is HBR episode 2008-135 entitled HBRNY Show 2018-2019 Part 2.
It is hosted by Honki Magu and is about 151 minutes long and Karina Cleanflag.
The summer is, the HBR community comes together to say happy new year and chat.
This episode of HBR is brought to you by an Honesthost.com.
At 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HBR15, that's HBR15.
Better web hosting that's Honest and Fair at An Honesthost.com.
I was about to say hello to the audience, but I guess you moved out.
Yeah, I got to step away for a bit because I got to go do this work.
So it was a good time for you guys, hopefully I'll see you in a little bit.
Okay, take it easy. I'm going to be on and off through the day, probably.
Yeah, me too. I'd stepped away and then you guys started talking about Brexit.
I thought I would jump in on that, but I still need to do breakfast and whatever.
He's going to be on and I'm going to be on right now.
Well, Dan could tell you that Claudio's back around 12 noon or Eastern Standard time.
All the tilts guys were going to jump in.
A little Claudio.
Claudio may be having problems setting it up like I did.
Go for it.
Hey, everybody can hear me?
Claudio.
Not blowing anyone's ears out.
No, not all.
Everybody had me move mine to 100%, so which usually is way too much new provider.
So I guess I was low all along.
Well, I have it at 70%.
I figured let me just turn it down just in case because I remember the first time I tried this.
And all boy that I blow everyone's ears out, but I had a much different phone right now.
Well, last year I had my Nexus 4, which did okay.
And this year, I'm ending it off with a OnePlus 6T.
It's always an experiment to get the sweet spot.
Yeah, I know.
So that's why I figured let me start low.
If my voice is too low, at least it's better that way than blowing everyone's ears out.
Yeah, well, it looks like it's working out for you.
Sweet, sweet.
So how's the weather over where you all are?
Well, I guess it's been because I go first.
Kansas has been really mild.
I mean, I'm kind of afraid because you have a mild winner.
And then the week gets ahead of itself and that gets froze out in the spring.
Well, I don't only think about that freeze and stuff.
I'm in South Texas and it doesn't really much freeze here.
Right now it's drizzly rain and I've been doing that for a couple of days,
which is normal winter.
And it's, oh my goodness, it's 48 degrees, it's actually quite cold.
Yeah, I'm here in Miami.
So it does a nice breeze blowing.
It's like a partly cloudy day, I guess.
I'm sitting outside.
Let's just say it's really nice to sit out here and you know,
having a nice cup of coffee, which I should be making right now,
but I figured I just found out I was on master.
Well, I'm on master down now, but who was a Coke with two had mentioned
that the stream was already on.
This was maybe about 15, 20 minutes ago.
And I was like, oh, I better jump on quick.
I think it's been on for about four hours.
Oh, for some reason I thought I was going to be later.
I don't know.
This whole, especially at this hour, just getting up a little bit ago.
Trying to convert UTC and all that.
I'm not in the mood.
I know it's only five hour difference, but still.
Well, the thing is, they started up when it becomes New Year's Day
on the international date line, which is like out in the middle of the Pacific
somewhere around, I don't know, by Corniesia or Easter Island or something.
And then heads west around the world.
So that's not that far from us in that direction.
So that's a long ways from GMT or where they call it.
Well, so far I've been on since almost the beginning.
And yeah, we've had a discussion going the whole time so far.
I'm not going to say it's going to, you know, this is the first time in a couple of years
that it has been on a day.
I'm not going to say there won't be any, you know, silences or whatever,
but a few was jumped in early and kept going pretty good.
That's good to hear.
And I was up until maybe about two in the morning.
I was just messing around with a net BSD VM that I had.
I hadn't touched in a while.
So I figured that fired up just to kind of play around with that before getting some Shreddye.
But yeah, I woke up about 20 minutes ago.
So right now it's my stomachs to ask me for coffee.
But it's going to have to wait just a little bit.
Yeah, and I figured it is a work day.
So we're talking to Monday here.
So a lot of people surely aren't work.
Like you said, it's going to be a lot of science.
So maybe it won't be as long, I mean, I'm sure it'll be long.
But maybe it won't be as long as the last last year.
I think a lot of people probably work short days on New Year's Eve.
A lot of people take off New Year's Eve, especially New Year's Day being Tuesday.
They're going to get off tomorrow.
So they'll just blow off Monday.
The company doesn't give it to them.
They'll take a vacation day or something.
My watch said it almost no way it'll be at her job.
So she may take off around noon, one o'clock.
Oh, absolutely.
Yeah, I wouldn't doubt that at all.
Right now it's barely here any traffic right now.
Because where I'm at, it's right near Main Street here.
So I barely hear cars going by.
Usually it's a lot of rumbling noise of cars just driving back and forth.
Well, I'm too old to work.
I'm at home.
I've been at home for the past week.
We've had since I worked for our school district here.
We have a winter recess.
So it's pretty much two weeks off.
So I start back on Monday.
Do you get all the school holidays?
Well, I'm a full time roughly 12 month employee.
So yeah, well, we don't do the summers because that's really when we do most of our stuff.
Since I work for the IT department.
That's when we do most of our big projects.
I've got a friend that does, does that for a college and does IT for a college?
Or he did.
I think he's doing it for, he's changed what he does.
He does it at a level that doesn't involve students.
But when he was doing the student thing, it was always cycling.
And he was full time employee.
But it was the rush to get everything ready and blow away a couple hundred lab machines and rebuild them.
And make sure everything was cleaned up into the semester, getting rid of old camps and stuff like that.
So a lot of work to do on a specific cycle.
And then keep everything working during this sessions.
Correct.
Yeah, for us it's usually the summer break.
That's when we got tons of projects going on and internal projects for us at the schools that we maintain,
along with district projects that we have for district devices.
And it gets pretty busy.
And on top of that, doing all that with custodians cleaning and everything,
which is an issue that we have, where the custodians have to disconnect the equipment in order to clean properly.
So like towards the last few weeks, we're usually just plugging everything back in.
And to be honest, that's the easiest part of everything.
Unless you get someone that actually unplugs absolutely everything, like even the mono cables and everything,
that's where it gets a little problematic.
But so far, there's been few in-farm between.
But once we have those last two weeks, it's pretty much that.
But before that, it's all redoing all the district machines, redoing all the inside school,
best tops and laptops if they have any.
So it's quite busy.
So we have tools that we use for that, obviously, as I'm sure he does.
But it is our most busiest time, is the summertime, when everybody's gone.
And yeah, during the main school year, we're just maintaining everything,
and just making sure everything's good for any kind of compute-based testing.
Yeah, I always had the same problem when I worked for school districts,
as you would come back in the fall, and every computer would be sitting out in the hallway.
And I'd be like, really, is that actually necessary?
I mean, to some degree, I guess it is, and to some degree, it isn't.
But I understand they've got deadlines they got to meet,
and they have things they got to do just like we do.
So I work with them, they work with me.
So we got a good relationship going, and we try and coordinate things together,
so we got everything good to go before the school year starts.
The one thing was, you know, every teacher wanted to pick out her corner of the classroom,
and there were corners of the classroom that were wired up for Ethernet,
and for power, and whatever, and the teacher in Verglow would say,
yeah, I want to do that obstacle.
Oh, don't get me started on that.
Oh, my goodness.
The minute you mentioned that, my reaction was, I almost flipped the table out here.
Oh, no, I've had just to give you an example.
I actually had one teacher want to put her computer in almost the center of the room.
I'm like, well, you're like doing that because there's no way we're going to be running any cable across the room that way.
So you're going to have to pick the corner that has all the drops.
You're just got cold heart.
No, it's just a user experience, I guess.
Yeah, I guess so.
The user experience has kind of hardened my heart a bit.
It's just calling me a bastard operator from hell, I guess.
That teacher like the theater in the round scenario.
Well, I do have to say, as much as they drive me crazy, you know, they're all good.
But I love them.
It's kind of like a, you know, apparently their kids, they'll drive you crazy, but you still love them.
Yeah, we had a whole bunch of those rubber covers.
You're in a cross room and put a power cable beneath that cable window.
Yeah, it had 50.
Are you cracking up for me? Are you cracking up for everybody?
Everybody.
Yeah, I'm here and I'm cracking up too.
Oh, sorry about that.
No, it was fine.
You're wrong.
But you're right.
You must have heard you praising them and decided to lure you.
But there's something.
Is that Ken Fallon?
It is indeed.
You know, back from shopping.
How are you, Claudio?
I'm good.
I'm good.
Enjoying, well, what looked like a nice day and all of a sudden got really cloudy.
So it might look like some rain here.
Just come back from doing some shopping.
Yes.
Nice.
Yeah, I just woke up about half an hour ago.
I was talking to the fellas here.
So I found out from corporate too that the recording was already on.
And we're telling me that, yeah, it's been all for a while.
Yeah, fellas.com is telling me to stay fit.com tells me I'm being 3.2 million.
Enough bumble.
Yeah, something's going on because you were jumbled there.
Sorry about that.
I got a little too comfortable and walked away a little too far from the Wi-Fi signal.
Let me stop my download and rejoin.
See if that does any good.
Can you hear me?
Yeah, no problem.
Excellent.
So what have you been up to this year?
Me just trying to keep my head together.
And that's just kind of messed around with different little mini projects.
And I guess kind of getting things ready for next year when we all get prepared
for computer-based testing at work.
You are the kids.
Well, kind of both because I got to make sure everything's ready to go and the kids
because they need to take it.
But yeah, it's pretty much that.
I guess that, that's why they gave us the two weeks off.
So because I'm on research right now so I started back up.
I've been off last week and I start up on Monday.
Yeah, okay.
My wife's in teaching now so it's handy to have the time off
but then you're kind of stuck with the school holidays.
Yeah.
The nice thing about us is that we kind of follow along with that,
except for the summers, which I was explaining earlier,
that usually that's when we do most of our work.
Cool.
I might consider working if I could work just just in the summers.
That might be a possibility.
It might be a cemented looking around or probably like a part-time kind of assistance
even during the year.
Just kidding, I'm not going to work.
Oh, all right.
I quit and rejoined.
Is that any better at all?
Yeah, pretty cool.
Yeah, you sound good.
After I remember to do that every few hours.
50, what kind of connection are you using?
I'm actually on a brand new ISP called BlazingHog.com.
They give you better speeds than before because I know that was an issue for you and your area.
It's slightly better, but they promise there's to be like three megabits down.
So I think it's on a 4G network or cellular connection.
So my neighbors, they got on and they had invest in better antennas for Amazon.
So it looks like that's what I'm going to have to do.
Yeah, usually, I mean, was it like a hotspot, correct?
Exactly.
But, you know, I was hoping since I know that I have a wireless tower less than mile south of me.
I figured I was hoping I wouldn't have to have any augmentation.
Yeah, well, I figured maybe there's some environmental issues causing that as well.
I figured this, you know, the whatever effects isn't that much different from wireless LAN connection.
There's always environmental issues that cause interference.
Yeah, no doubt.
But I have to say for the most part, because I have, like for my phone, I haven't limited and I'll usually set it as a hotspot.
And it haven't gotten throttled or anything.
So I'm paying the actual actual limited.
And I've connected my laptop a couple of times before I actually got Comcast here.
And I have to say I was pretty impressed.
I mean, obviously, I wasn't going to expect Comcast speeds or, you know, actual like, you know, home ISP speeds, but it's not too bad.
It actually does the job.
Well, this is supposed to be AT&D unlimited.
Gotcha.
Well, again, it could be just environmental issues that may be an intentable, you know, we'll resolve most of them.
Yeah, I'm keeping my fingers crossed.
That's one of the tasks for today is calm up and say, okay, yeah, that's not it's not doing what you promised, Oak.
What do I need to buy?
Right, right.
Well, good morning, Kay Wisher.
I see that you are greeting us all through the chat room.
Hey, Kevin.
And you're a economy.
All right, well, fellas, I'm going to drop off for a bitch.
I can get some breakfast.
Nice to chat.
See you next year.
Well, I'll be back before then, unless it's next year for some other time zone.
Probably be off to them, family stuff.
All right.
Well, if I don't catch any, you have a happy, happy new year.
So do you.
Well, hang it out.
I'm already having a happy new year.
So you will ask me, you know, why you going lines to hang it on parties?
Well, not getting invited to many parties, but even so.
Yeah, I'm hanging out where my friends are.
Yeah, exactly.
That's why I like the new year show.
I'm having a lot of chat with people.
Well, less and less.
You know, if you talk to people or not text, you know, and they understand.
Yeah, a lot of people are my friends.
I've not actually met in physical life.
Yeah.
And that's a feeling.
Yeah.
And possibly may never meet the two of them being on the other side of the planet.
Exactly.
I mean, you were talking about earlier, you know, going to historical sites.
And it's like, yeah, on your side of the planet, there's a lot more history to go.
And, uh, you know, I do follow some people on YouTube who will go to.
A lot of places in the U.S., but one guy who has met someone who has seduced.
Yeah, a couple of times a year.
You know, come over to Europe and look at stuff.
But, you know, I am completely waiting for beaming technology work.
I just walk through and be over there.
Yeah, that would be handy, wouldn't it?
It's a social change that that would bring just being able to do something like that.
Well, that's, uh, brings up the thing.
If you have a problem with the, the, uh, Star Trek idea where it creates a new you at the other part.
You can kill someone in the, in the, uh, uh, the transporter on your, the, the starting end.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
It's very scary if you, uh, think about it too much.
I don't know why I never thought about that.
Oh, wait, I'm not a philosopher.
That's the reason I never thought about that when I was a kid watching those, uh, Star Trek things.
But now people talk about those things.
I say, man, that's creepy.
Exactly.
I can't take it somewhere.
It's asthma, but there was exactly like that was what kind of video game thing that did kill the duplicates.
Is I love it?
Unless it is good.
Go ahead.
You probably know what it is.
No, you're silent.
I mean, yeah.
Sorry.
No.
Just saying.
Stop torrenty.
I'm not running anything.
The mumble right now.
I have no idea what it is.
It was fine.
No morning.
Did your neighbors start waking up or something?
It would be.
Let me go off and restart again.
I can't.
I was thinking that, um, since, uh, you're on all the time and you have all these, like, uh, he's saying, friends everywhere in the world that you've never met.
Uh, when you do travel, if you announce it ahead of time, you probably don't buy beer at all when you go somewhere, do you?
Um, I'm not that famous.
Yes, I buy my own beer.
No, I haven't been, uh, I haven't been to the States since I kind of got into podcasting.
So, uh, I used to be over very regularly every three months for a few weeks and now not so much.
What did you come over here for back then?
I was an infrastructure manager for managing the IT for multinational, uh, all across Europe.
And then when, uh, we had basically the same size of teams in the US and then Ireland.
So we used to go over and coordinate every few months.
That's, um, that's pretty cool because it get you work.
Somebody else pays for your international travel and you get to see, see cool places and, uh, then you meet the people you talk on the phone every day.
Yeah, it's excellent.
It was excellent.
And the fact was not lost to me at the time either.
I worked for a, uh, a national contractor in, uh, here in Houston and, uh, travel to Florida on a regular, but basis.
So, I mean, that was the extent of my, uh, company, uh, financed, uh, travel, except for maybe occasional class or something.
That was always nice.
And then I used to do, uh, probably every month, a trip around Europe, go to each of the offices and turn from, you know, UK up to Helsinki to, uh,
North Sea and Paris are outside, uh, in France, playing to Paris and then drove over to North Sea and then down to light Milan.
And, uh, yeah, you can go to South Africa once.
Nice.
My car was built in South Africa for some reason.
Cool.
I said my car was built in South Africa.
Yeah, it's small world, isn't it?
Very nice country.
It's definitely a global economy.
Yeah, exactly it is.
Do I sound better now?
Yeah, I think so.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, I'm still recording, but don't like it.
Sorry, I don't know what it is.
Continue on because there's obviously nothing you can do.
It's just your connection.
Oh, don't trust my audio.
You definitely sound better than you did 51.
Offs.
Two minutes ago.
Can you wish your reminded me on IRC to, uh, remind everybody to keep using the, uh, teaser pad.
Show notes.
Yeah.
Good, good point.
I was, uh, filling them up this morning.
As soon as someone says something interesting, I'll do that.
Uh, who do you think we have anything interesting to say, Ken?
Hey, Ken, while you were gone, man, there was a lot of really, really interesting stuff going on.
I look forward to reading this in the show notes.
I'll take down the tone of any conversation.
Don't you worry.
Where do we find the show notes?
Go to the main hp or site.
And then see that there's a link there to the etherpad.
Okay, I'll have a look.
Did anyone get a pine book?
No, it's not got one, but I have to say one in the flesh.
I ordered one.
I ordered one cost me $199, uh, $49 shipping.
And then when it arrived, I had a tax bill of $25 or euros.
Sorry, all this is euros, 25 euros, uh, surcharge fee of 15 euros and five euros tax on the surcharge fee.
So it ended up being more expensive than if I bought a Intel Chromebook kind of netbooky type thing and put Linux on it.
Yeah, if you look at it and you start adding every single option like I did, it runs up pretty fast.
But, uh, and the system I'm on right now was my alternate, uh, if you went out on eBay, you know, what would you get for the same price?
And for less than $100, I got a, uh, you know, a core 2 duo.
Well, I guess it's not because the same D, but the equivalent.
Uh, but that's, you know, 17 inch, that's not in music now.
But I do, I do like the, uh, the pine book.
I wish maybe they told me a year ago, there, there would be internal upgrades to the, uh, the Rockbox processor.
We haven't seen that yet.
How, how do you find the keyboard?
The keyboard is not bad. The, the, the speakers and the, uh, track bar are, are the weak points.
Do you not have that small shift key on the right hand side?
Oh, but I mean, like I said, I haven't had that much trouble with the keyboard, but the, the speakers are not fit for purpose.
The keyboard is definitely not fit for purpose. It is terrible.
Oh, I wouldn't say terrible, but I mean, compared to everything else, the track, the track, the track bed and the speakers, uh, you know, those are not useful.
I mean, I don't like to suck it off because it's nice what they're doing and all, but just left a sour taste in my mouth after I put, you know, again,
you try to give money to an open source project and it ends up just costing you more.
Well, I don't mind to carry around throwing, throwing my suitcase when I'm traveling.
Uh, it's not something I would want to use as my everyday system.
I think that's the problem with a lot of these laptop, um, iterations of single board computers.
You know, you can, you can get a lot more superior power and stuff like that just by buying a, you know, two or three year old laptop from some kind of refurbishing company.
Yeah, I had to jump on when I heard Pine Book. I almost bit the bullet on it.
I was thinking about doing that kind of like a birthday Christmas present.
Then I said to myself, you know, I could probably just save up just a little more and get myself a used think pad and probably get more use out of it.
But it's still the Pine Book intrigues me.
Yeah, I managed to pick up a Z30 to ship a Z30 ultra book, really ridiculously cheap price.
It's also very to any of the Raspberry Pi or Pine 64 based laptops.
If I'm not mistaken, doesn't it have issues with playing video like on a web browser?
Doesn't have hard work celebrated video or something like that?
There's pretty much issues with everything to be honest.
Do we know it? Okay.
Ken, have you ever played with the pie top?
No, no, I haven't.
Yeah, we've got a couple of them that we use at the local Raspberry Jam.
Nice little kits.
The desktop versions are a lot more economic than the laptop version.
The laptop version works out to about 300 quid.
But the desktop one you can get for just over 100?
Yeah, I had a look at that, but then you ended up with a, again, because it's not economical with all in favor of supporting free and open source projects.
Man, it's not good value for money in my opinion, especially the laptop because you're, yeah, you're going to buy a keyboard mouse and then you're spending significantly more than you can go and buy a Chromebook for.
Yeah, you know, a door has, you know, same Pine Book I have, and I know he, you know, he originally was a big backer of the pie top, but then, you know, after a while, couldn't get anything for it.
And I make it in the days probably more favor of the Pine Book as far as value, but, you know, comparing the two and seeing what I have, I would definitely go for the Pine Book first.
Okay, I think the key is if these laptops are upgradable with the latest version of whatever board it is.
So it's the pine 64 at the moment.
If they'll, you know, make it so that you can swap out that and put the new board in when that eventually arrives, then maybe it makes sense once you've got the actual Pine Book.
Same with the pie top, because you can swap out the original, you know, you can use all the iterations of the pie in them.
So you know, I'm to buy a new one every time a new pie comes out.
No, I think it's great value for money, except I've had to, now it isn't great value for money because it cost me double in taxes and shipping and all the rest.
And the keyboard is literally unusable for me because I use the shift key the whole time and the delete key is an on off where the key would normally be.
It's an on off button.
Something as simple as the double quotes are on a function key is just why that keyboard has been put on is boggles the mind.
Maybe you can remap it.
No, physically they're tiny. They have shift the medic keyboard so that it's more or less scrunched over to the right.
And then we have all these keys left over and instead of putting in full size keys, they're half size keys.
It is unusable as a keyboard.
Yeah, I saw someone mentioned that online that it looked like they started great and they ran out of space.
When little kids start riding on a banner and then they kind of scrunch everything at the end.
Yeah, kind of like that.
I don't see why because I mean, there's the standard keyboards and I'm sure you can get them, you know, and it lost the mind boggles why they went for a custom keyboard.
I've never seen a keyboard like this anywhere ever, at all, ever.
I've only ever played with the pie top and the keyboard on that's quite reasonable, so I can't really talk about the pine.
Well, having had the EPC 901 with those tiny keys, that probably would, that keyboard probably wouldn't bother me,
though at this point I'm just speaking in theory.
I actually pulled out the 901 from storage some time ago and I just looked at it and I said to myself, how did I ever use this keyboard?
I have it right here and I'll actually compare the keys.
I have an originally PC here and I'm going to pull it down and compare it to be able to give you a comparison.
I think because I know the 701 had a smaller screen, but I don't know if it was even smaller in design.
That might be even smaller, maybe it was just a screen size.
Yeah, I think it was just the screen size when the up to a 9, I think there was less of a bezel on it.
Yeah, I've got a wonder, listen, you can, if there was a different keyboard on the European version because it's small,
but I never had any of those problems, all with the toggle gear, whatever.
Can you just dig in something out of the shell?
I'm actually taking a note now.
The keyboard, the shift key, is literally 10 millimeters wide, which corresponds to something like two, four, one, two and so on.
It is about creates of an inch.
The size has not been the problem for me because I've always wanted an affordable GPD and there's one supposedly coming out in February that's like 300 bucks.
I can't find where I put the EPC now, but comparing it to a Chromebook keyboard, I have never seen a key, the actual key that you press, that small.
And it's so much that with everything that I do that I need to go shift something or other because you need to use control keys and whatever.
You know the way you're writing computer code, you're always using extended characters and you find it's right beside the arrow key and then you're moving across one.
It's just really, really, really strange, very bad choice.
Yeah, that might have been the cheapest keyboard they could get to keep the price where it is right now.
I'm sure some of the other ones with better layouts may have crossed a little more, may have jacked up the price on the actual timebook.
Yeah, would be nice to have given you know, had an option to switch it out or to pay an extra little bit more because really it makes the machine completely unusable.
I've got a 32 character password with all sorts of thingies going in and it takes me four times every time to hit my password correctly because none of the keys are in the correct place.
It's supposed to be a quirky keyboard. Yes, the extended characters are somewhere else quotes and single quotes are somewhere else and so then by the time I pick it up in order to do something fast and simple.
Whereas if I picked up one of the other Chromebooks that I have I'd be logged in and job would be done and then shut it up.
It's just now every time I pick up the book that I wanted to be.
Oh, this is great. I'm using a free open source piece of hardware. I'm and you know, and now I'm going.
I don't want to touch it because I'll just get frustrated.
Yeah, once that you got that muscle memory going and you don't have anything that works with it.
It gets frustrating.
I will not be able to get the muscle memory for this because my fingers physically will not be able to hit the key.
I need to physically look at the keyboard to put where my finger is. It's that small. There is no margin for.
I remember Dan or used to complain. I think it was using a max for an editor and he had to have the skate key.
And things like the remax tablet didn't have one.
I mean that I can happily remap keys that's not a problem but when they're physically so strange and in a different place then it's even then I've you know used.
Solaris keyboards and different other keyboards and eventually over time you get used to it.
But with this I don't want to go.
And I really, really, really, really, really, really wanted to like this project.
Yeah, you get disappointed when you buy something and think it's going to be really nice and you're supporting a good project and then you find it and you really disappointed.
And I am the mind boggles as to why they put KD on there. It's the mind absolute boggles.
Who's KDE crew?
Yeah, it's you know something like Alex QT would have been nice and zippy or whatever but it's just everything takes so long.
It's a single task computer and it's run on one big application which is KDE and that's it.
You know everything else is it's just so.
Yeah, I understand why the KDE guys do and I like KDE and I like the guys what they're doing but really it also sets the wrong expectations.
If you say this this machine is capable of driving KDE yes it is but it's not capable of trying anything else.
It's not capable of doing anything on top of that. I don't think.
And I'm comparing it to like a Raspberry Pi and I use the Raspberry Pi's all day every day for stuff.
They're part of my main workflow and if you give them one task they'll do it and stuff so yeah it's a bit disappointing.
But it's okay and I'm talking among friends so you'll keep all this juice up.
I'd never say anything wrong with saying if you don't think something's particularly good anyway.
You know there's been plenty of projects out there that have failed to deliver or delivered a disappointing product in the end.
Yeah but I feel like I'm letting the project down by saying that I think what they have is so good that when I plug in my laptop
and once I get to a console then bam and productive you know but I'd love to be able to change the keyboard is my wish basically.
Send them a message and tell them that the next iteration should have a different keyboard.
Yeah and then I have to pay a double to yeses.
Yeah well get someone to get it as a present if they ever come out with a decent one.
And any of you any tips for scanning in photographic negatives?
I've never scanned negatives. I always have always scanned prints in the past but you can get some nice little negative scanners.
The only problem is they work with pre set formats.
There's very few unless you're going to go into the expensive territory that will do you know the large negatives and things like that.
I'm scanning everything on the flatbed scanner that print offs and I also got a thing from Aldi you know one of those negative scanner jobs.
See what they get.
Is that for 35 mil?
Yeah something like that.
You have to do a show about it.
I think I've already done two or three shows on my scanner and yeah once I start doing this I'll do it.
But right now I'm just going through a shoe large orange crate full of you know those photo folders that you get back from that you used to get back from the chemist that have the photos on the inside pocket and the negatives on the outside pocket.
Oh yes remember them well and then trying to separate them out so that I know what I can have to scan and putting the negatives into a for negative holding sheet.
Problem was back in them days you really had to think about it before you took any photos because of not just the cost of the film but the cost of developing nowadays people just snap away and take three or 400 photos every time.
And that's a good thing.
Yeah you get plenty of memories but then you've got you got sought through them for the ones that you want to maybe print off or hang on the wall or whatever.
And you've got hundreds of not thousands of them to look for it.
That's true but a long time ago I used to take a lot of 35 millimeter and you still even then I would take a roll of film if I got two pictures even worth printing.
I thought I was pretty lucky and yes it was more expensive to do it.
Now you take 50 pictures and if you got two or three this or worth of printing or I guess putting on a computer that's worth a while.
Yeah yeah big revolution in photography really but there's still a I think there's still a market for the old film photography.
I think some of the professionals particularly portrait artists still use film.
And what if they want to buy a couple of cameras that haven't been used in 15 years?
Yeah I have to try go and ebay see what they go for.
I'm sure it's less and less each year.
Yeah until they become collectors items and then you might make mega books out of them.
Yeah I've got resolution of the film still might be slightly better but I think we're catching up.
Yeah I think one of the latest Cummins now is 50 megapixels or something?
My digital camera is still 12 megapixels but I've been looking to I've been looking at newer ones in the 20 or so range.
But I don't take enough pictures and so I've thought okay if I can start taking pictures again and take enough to justify going out there and spending you know five or six seven hundred dollars on camera gear.
Then I would do it but so far I haven't gotten off my button done that.
Yeah I think high end ones tend to be SLRs so they're the ones with the really really high resolutions at the moment.
But as with anything else it tumbles down into the consumer market eventually.
Yeah I bought an SLR here a few months ago and the default lens with it was still you know if you're in a room with people you could take the picture which is not a lot better in my
you know cell phone camera or the non SLR I had before so I did spend money on getting some longer range lenses you know one of them probably take good half a mile or more.
But yeah I wasn't sure what I needed so I got a couple lenses so I'm kind of covered I still don't know what I'm doing.
I'm just looking on the camera site at the moment and one of their ES EOS is the 5D Mark IV that's a 30 meg full frame sensor.
I'm pretty sure I've seen one with a bigger sensor than that.
Well they've certainly gotten quite good I don't know if they're exactly as good as Code of Chrome or not but they're certainly very very good now.
And I need a great mind my compute my camera was I think around $600 gosh I'm not sure whatever they were making 12 megapixel cameras but it's probably time to get a new one.
But I'm still in that same press range it's not at all professional it's it's better than your cell phone is about what you say about these cameras.
Yeah I remember getting my first point in shoot before cameras became ubiquitous on mobile phones and I think it was a two megapixel and I thought it was the bee's name.
Plus the trouble I always had is you know I have a phone camera that the year I want to film again you know a few other big cities and stuff and it's like.
You take a picture and it looks good looks good in your eye and then you then you look at the image and it's like you looks like your 12 miles away.
Yeah a lot of the modern proshima ones they've got super zooms on them and things like that and it's not quite as bad as that nowadays.
I like to have when I was taking a lot of pictures I've got two two bodies I would put one kind of film and one usually color slide film and then black and white print film and the other.
And then I have a bag full of lenses that were all fixed because I don't know if it was true or not but back in the 70s the idea was zoom lenses weren't any good so nobody really used zoom lenses if you were serious so I had a bag full of individual focal length lenses to change out.
And so you're taking a ton of stuff with you but now the lenses are so good you might need to get you know zoom lenses zoom lenses and then you're done you know.
Yeah you might need three if you want a macro.
Yeah I wish I knew more about it because I it's it's up for for macro I had a bellows that I took my 50 millimeter lens and attached to the front and then connected my camera to the back and I could zoom in like that it was a thing with a couple of rails and then you and gear you.
You cranked you cranked it in and out to focus down to really really close and stuff like that and I have no idea what they do for macro these days.
You may still be able to you may still have to do stuff like that if you want to talk about really close stuff.
Sorry I was typing and I missed a lot of what you said monger.
Oh I was talking about how do you use the how you used to do macro in the old days with a and it's either a hard extension or a bellows I had a bellows type extension to put you take your normal lens.
You put your normal lens on the end of a bellows and push it well away away from your your camera body and that's why you do shoot the macro and these days you're right to might be a special macro lens that will do all that for you and but I don't know what that is these days.
Sorry I was just checking to see if text to speech was on but it's not on mine.
It's on mine I couldn't figure out how to turn it off.
Found it under configure. If it's take it's on if it's not take it's off.
Oh it's tick but I couldn't get the untick.
Yeah every guy I was told was breaking up badly and then I can hear everybody perfectly.
It's a little bit bit better 51 but not much.
Well apparently I can be understood so maybe that's what I can do right now.
That's gone a little clearly. Were you speaking closer to the mic then?
Yeah I swung it in a little bit now is that better?
Yeah that's a little better.
How's that? I increased the gain on my volume control.
Not too bad. You definitely not breaking up like you were five minutes ago.
Okay then maybe after what I have to do then.
Audio is a funny thing.
Well like I said I'm dealing with the new ISP so who knows what's going on.
So is your ISP in the States then?
It is blazinghome.com.
Can they have some good names?
Yeah that's not exactly a name I would have picked if I was going to you know sound professional but...
Yeah that did seem the time to be my best option.
Did you at least consider not using them just because of the name?
I think I would like look around to try to find something better.
Yeah I did go out on the on Google and say blazinghog scam blah blah blah.
Hey 50 you're going to have to get one of those desk bells every time you mention their name as a plug.
So it's giving the daying every time you mention their name.
I may have to.
They're not up to the speed they promised so I do know my neighbors they had to get some plug-in antennas to their wireless modem.
So you know we'll see if I can get up to that speed.
Fine I will be their number one fan.
If not you know either way I will do an HPR and say yeah this is my experience.
Go ahead Manga.
As far as getting up to a particular speed that's what kind of what they promise.
They say we'll get to up to 50 megabits and you'll say that means you promise not to go over that.
Actually they are trying to guarantee 23 megabits up.
I'm lucky here in the UK I'm with the only purely cable ISP.
My contract says I'm promised up to 100 meg and I regularly get up to 130.
I'm with my friends virgin media and a fine body of people they are.
Gosh what a wonderful company that is.
I wonder why you saying that Ken.
Absolutely no reason.
Completely impartial.
Of course you are.
Apart from data security they're not too bad.
I've been on some refrain from commenting.
I've been on the same cable for about 20 years and I think it started off at about 0.75.
Megabits and over the years it's just slowly gone up a little of time.
Never an announcement.
Never a letter saying look what we're going to do for you.
But then I went also about over 15 years.
We never are raising the cost.
And even now it's not but a few dollars more than I've originally started with.
And I get typically about 60 megabits down and it's about five or six up.
Yeah I'm getting about five or six up.
But like I say I've got over 100 meg down which is brilliant.
I'm in a rural area so one thing promised 20 30 isn't that bad.
If you get 20 or 23 that sounds perfectly usable for most of most anything.
Well I'm like you know sure but I'm getting right out.
Which is better than what I had because what I had was guaranteed 3 and it might bounce 6 but it wasn't consistent.
I would go on and yeah we can't stream that and then I would have to go and deal.
Rest at the bottom and or their plate and sometimes I have to do it for three times to get.
As a speed to do stream and still not what I was supposedly.
I remember when I thought to make was absolutely fantastic when I first got my cable connection because I'd gone from.
ISP no not ISP and ADSL broadband to half a meg and when I came up here got cable and got to make.
I thought wow speed now now I can download it.
I saw with a bunch of it about ten minutes less than ten minutes.
Oh yeah when I first got on quote broadband it was like maybe 0.5.3.
Is there anybody out there?
Sorry I was just going to look at my phone I got a ding nor is I need to do family stuff now once they finish this chapter of Harry Potter.
It's a Christmas tradition. Well actually it's a holiday tradition when they have holidays my wife reads one of the Harry Potter books.
So you know what you know the movies then back to back?
I haven't watched any of the movies at all.
Okay I actually quite like the movies and I read all the books.
We bought the books when my brother recommended the first book when they come out and then we read that one and the second book could just come out.
So from then on we were like waiting for the next book to come out.
So you were one of those ones that were waiting at the bookstore at midnight waiting to get your hands on the next copy?
Not at all I pre ordered on Amazon.
Someone gave me the whole of Babylon 5 and the related movies is a box set including the Crusade 13 episodes.
So I've got me way to work through them shortly.
I never got into Babylon 5 to be honest.
But it's taken away.
Yeah fantastic show that was.
I think it changed science fiction on TV forever.
Oh I was a huge B5 fan of the day.
I did not do the sequels as much and you know well I think we're taking off if they hadn't done it against sports ball.
The not crusade but the thinking of legend of the Rangers.
The Rangers yes.
Yeah I think that had been a great show.
So I was not a big big fan of crawling to a hole and and punched bad guys.
Yeah it was a really good series Babylon 5 and I enjoyed watching the spin-offs but the whole Babylon 5 experience was really good.
Well 1 to 4 was good.
Season 5 went downhill but that was because they had to they'd already used up the story in seasons 1 to 4 because they thought they weren't going to get recommissioned.
Exactly you know it's like oh yeah we got we got to finish it off in this year.
Now there's the thing that annoys me is series that stop on the cliffhanger and then get cancelled.
Definitely absolutely annoying.
But they want to stop in the Klinghanger so people will write in and say hey we need another season.
That worked for Broncos, Selenium, what do you call us?
Why is my brain not working today?
Old age?
Yeah it could be 150 but I think it's just tiredness.
That's me calling the kettle, pop calling the kettle black, serenity.
Firefly of course, firefly.
But at least firefly had the decency to do the graphic novels and make the movie.
That then finished up the stories for me.
I'm not here to do that one.
Firefly!
Oh my god, it's brilliant.
What was that who produced that?
Josh Wildard.
So is that an American show or a European one?
American one.
Absolutely brilliant.
It won't take you too long to go through it.
I'll have to look out for that.
And there's a thing I ran across the other panel if it's fan made or if it was ever serious.
You know an animated firefly.
There was a firefly TV series.
They only did one series of it.
And it wasn't aired in order but you should watch it in order.
And then you had there were some graphic novels in between and then the serenity of the movie.
Yeah they didn't even wrote, they didn't actually air I think all the episodes.
It was absolutely terrible.
I mean I think Nathan Philly wants to restart series.
Yeah he's wanted to do that for some time but yeah.
I don't know if it'd be possible now so yeah.
No, probably not.
Basically it was a space western.
It's the word.
Absolutely ridiculous but fun piece of stuff.
Well actually it's not, you know if you look at the premise it's not that far off.
I mean you're saying, you know, you're saying that transporting people, you know,
anything across the earth or you know they supposed to be taking place in the same solar system.
Anything across the solar system is really expensive.
So, you know, it is a lot cheaper to transport horse embryos than it is tractors.
And that was the whole premise of the serenity.
Yeah.
And the, you know, the whole western aspect and the whole thing that, yes,
projectile launchers are legal whereas, you know, energy weapons are not.
I'm reluctant to say it even much more a good series.
Am I so cool and have a look at Babylon 5?
See how we go.
Yeah, I just put a link to the, what is it?
The IMDB.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, what are the TV shows do people get into?
Well, at the risk of boring people who have listened to the episode from the beginning,
I have more or less stopped watching TV series and switched to watching YouTube channels.
That's strange you should say that Ken, because that's what I've been doing over Christmas.
I've even put some scripts up there in HPR for your, that will allow you to easily download stuff and put it into folders
like you can sync up with your mobile phone and stuff if you've got a commute.
Well, I have to have a look at that.
Yeah.
I've been watching some YouTube channels.
These are video channels on restoring old die cast metal cars.
You know, the old dinky and corky.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I love them.
Fantastic.
Being an engineer by first profession.
Some of the, some of the work these guys put into them is absolutely amazing.
I thought.
Yeah.
I thought I was only one list to watch those occasionally.
All the old Mattel and Hot Wheels cars.
Yeah.
Watching them as well.
I happened to watch a lot of those car restoration things.
Occasionally you'll see one and you'll think.
Yeah.
But I tend only subscribe to something.
If somebody logic is I keep track of stuff going around the internet on the best of YouTube.
And I have a show on the HPR about that.
And if I see a channel coming up kind of about twice.
I go have a look at the channel and see if it's interesting.
And then if I think it is, I have a script for downloading the entire channel.
And I'll have a quick scan through there.
And then if I think it's good, I'll go back to the beginning and watch all of it.
And then if I think it's really good, I'll subscribe to it at the end.
My trouble with Hot Wheels and the Mattel cars is I will hit these videos and say,
yeah, this is incredibly rare and you should make a lot of money.
And I know I had these in the kid and they all burned up in the fire.
And I'm like, yeah, let me go get a hammer and beat myself in the head.
Yeah.
Well, as for me, I still have a Netflix and Amazon Prime account.
So I actually, you know, I haven't watched much of anything lately.
But last couple of days I sat down and kind of finished up the last season of House of Cards,
which was, well, I won't spoil it for anybody.
But aside from that, if it's anything YouTube, it's usually something on retro computing or retro gaming.
I like watching the LGR, at least a game reviews.
I'm subscribed to that one and a couple other ones, like eight big guys, things like that.
Oh, yeah, he's cool. I'll watch a few of his.
Yeah, we're supposed to series where you could give your recommendations for YouTube channels to follow.
I was just thinking that I've just had a look at my YouTube channel.
And I've got 161 subscribers.
Obviously, some of them are just there.
Yeah, I've just subscribed to some of them just so I can find them again.
But obviously that would make a couple of shows.
Oh, absolutely. Yeah, I'm subscribed to good numbers of things on YouTube.
But some of them are mainly music.
But even those would be good to recommend as episodes.
So I think we've got maybe a good year's worth of episodes there.
Probably because 260 slots just become free.
I've got to reserve some for Bach for Liverpool Make Fest and for Og Camp interviews.
Yeah, do that. You put some of the email into the list and then shouldn't be a problem.
Now, I was just thinking of my personal content.
I was just thinking of my personal content.
You know, saving some of what I'm going to do for this for the HP R site.
Hey, have any of you going back to the whole YouTube thing?
Have any of you seen the videos from, I think it's called a Hoi?
He usually does, he has different, different types of like,
they're almost documentary like.
And he had one, I remember the first one I saw one was of,
the Urban Legend Polybius video game.
And he's got a lot of good ones. They're very well done.
Yeah, you posted those into the IRC one time and I took a look at them.
That was very good. I watched that one more way, actually.
Yeah, I mean, he's got this, he's got this way of keeping you engaged.
It's very well produced.
Basically, it's a PowerPoint presentation post.
It's still very good.
It's pretty much that.
But even I guess the tone of his voice and how he just,
how he speaks and everything.
It just captures you and really kind of immerses you into the whole subject matter.
And you know, since I watched that thing, I've seen,
I've seen so many references to that everywhere in comic strips,
in the back of TV shows.
Once you're watching, once you're aware of it,
you see that that game being played absolutely everywhere.
If there's a computer or an arcade game anywhere on a comic strip,
it's more than likely going to be that one.
The polypious one, yeah.
Yeah, that's one of those urban legends of the internet.
Or even before the internet,
it's like that famous scream in movies that you put in as a nomad.
Well, there's that other one.
What was it, the cicada, something or other?
I forgot what the numbers were.
Yeah, cicada 3301, I believe it is.
I was looking it up.
What was the name of the computer game?
It was an internet puzzled called cicada 3301.
Yeah, but the arcade game was called pause again.
Oh, polypious.
Poly as in polygon, and then B, U, S, I believe it is.
Yeah, I got a little Wikipedia, I'll put it into the show notes.
I don't have a look for his channel as well.
Oh, yeah, that's a gut.
Links in the show notes, my friends.
Nothing, not of the likes of polypious, but still very, very good.
There's also one of the brief history of graphics that I recommended to my eldest son
who was studying video game design.
Thought he'd be interested in that.
I am more and more recommending videos and YouTube and stuff.
Oh, a conversation of work.
And then you go, here's a video.
There are so many explanations for things that people ask questions for now.
We're living in a wonderful time, I believe.
We're in spite of so many other things.
Hey, 15k, where's your house is going?
Hi, Joe.
Hey, Tony.
Can't see you on there.
Hey, a long time, no, Steve.
Right up.
Been less than 12.
No, it's been less than 24 hours.
Yeah.
How's the stream going?
It seems to be going quite smoothly.
I've been awake for a good 30 seconds now.
So you want to listen to the recording yet?
No, no, I haven't.
And I went to a few years eve party a day early last night.
Oh, heads a bit, woolly.
No, just had some really good conversation, you know.
I wasn't completely sober, but I wasn't really falling down drunk either.
That's all right there.
Yeah.
So I didn't mean to break up whatever conversation was going on before I got here.
Well, we're talking about YouTube channels and various things before you got here.
What line of conversation on that conversation?
Well, Ken, just before you, you joined Ken,
was talking about using YouTube as a way to point out how to do.
You know, if someone had asked the question on something,
he'd point them towards a YouTube video.
Why is the sky blue type of thing?
But I was too tired.
It was one that we had a big discussion about our work.
And then I know here's a YouTube video.
Thanks guys, bye.
Well, that's the answer I was explaining for you.
Yeah, well, yeah, it's a good question.
And that one I had seen and deleted and couldn't find it again.
So then I added to my downloader script that downloads the descriptions of the YouTube videos.
So I keep those even if the video has gone.
What do you use for that?
Oh, there will be a show on the HPR feed describing that.
Oh, good, good.
Well, you can go to the upcoming shows and there's a link in there and you can use the script.
Okay, okay.
That's like a lot.
Basically, YouTube DL, and then you can download the raw data of the descriptions.
Yeah, a lot of...
Like me some YouTube DL, I haven't used it for descriptions though.
It is awesome.
And I need to remind myself when I hear this that I should throw them a few quick.
Now, YouTube DL to replace the RSS feed functionality that got taken away a couple of years back.
And oddly enough, I have put a show coming up to use the RSS feed.
Download this and do all that sort of cool stuff with basically a MyRSS read for YouTube.
Oh, okay.
You know, I've seen a program floating around that supposedly converts YouTube videos back into RSS feeds.
And then you can generate your own and then use that.
It's videos.
I heard from Dave Morris.
And there's not a few...
Today, actually, on HPR, let me just go to it.
Yeah, today's show...
Yeah, today's show by Taj is really simple YouTube.
So there's a hidden feature on YouTube subscriptions where you can get an OPML file out.
Okay.
And that contains something like 15 to 20 of the last shows.
And then my script, which will be coming out on the...
Yeah, on the fourth on Friday.
So next Friday, you can go into the download page in the episode 2720.
And that is an RSS script, which will take that OPML file.
And basically uses XML starlet to pick out various different bits and pieces.
That's so much cooler than me using YouTube DL and Cron.
Yeah, well, you can use this and Cron.
So, yeah, it's actually quite fast as well because I was using YouTube DL.
Well, I have an episode already done where I was comparing the last downloaded date.
So a bit like Bashfather used to do.
And then the URL of the channel.
And then an ISO 8601 date of when I downloaded last.
And then you go in and the checks every video and scripts over the ones that it doesn't have.
But that just takes a long time, especially if there's...
Right, right, yeah.
I watched that happen because...
Even if you tell it, you know, not more than six months old, it's still going to check every video in the list.
Even if it's gotten to the point where there are six month olds.
Older.
Yeah, so the compromise here is you download everything once.
And then you can use your subscription manager and you run that every day and you get all the feed.
I will check it out when in the sugar tape.
And then I have another one that's specific to me,
which is... I take those videos and load them on my phone and kind of keep them synced,
which has been a little big pain.
Very, very difficult to do.
A lot more difficult than I thought when I started it.
What do you use to sync to your phone?
It's a script based on our sync.
But the problem is that my connections to the phone will drop because...
Yeah, all of my methods for getting to my phone,
either using a USB connection or an SSH connection or an SFTP connection, are all flaky.
So it needs to check at every point to make sure the connection is there.
And hey.
I make a suggestion.
Yes.
It's the same one I made on the show yesterday.
On midcast yesterday.
ET sync.
Now, resilient sync.
Ah, very good.
I mean, because it's using the BitTorrent Technologies,
every time it connects to a network, it's going...
Well, if you have a setup that way, you can leave mine paused.
Unless I know I've added something that I want on my phone.
I'll move it to the file on my computer and then turn it on on my phone and let it finish.
But even with a partial connection or anything like that,
it's going to get you a part of the data and then it loses connection.
It's going to pause and then it's going to pick it up again right where it left off.
Oh, nice.
Very nice.
Yeah.
What was that call again?
ET sync?
ET sync is the old name for it.
ET sync.
Right.
And now it's resilient sync.
R-E-S-I-L-I-O.
Yeah.
Got a link.
It's in the show notes.
And we heard it on there.
Okay.
Oh.
Oh.
Midcast for on at mintcast.org.
Episode 299.
I've probably mentioned it in the kind of other shows too.
You coming on here shamelessly plugging other podcasts.
T-tot-tot.
I will.
All day long.
And what's wrong with that, Ken?
That's what HBR is for my friends.
It's a surprise when they hear that.
Yes.
We're more than that.
Wait until the results guys show up.
Guns and flight guys.
Guns and planes.
Yeah, they're supposed to be joining on mass at seven o'clock our time,
two o'clock eastern coast time in it.
Yeah.
That's what they told me.
Yeah.
I can only do the same for Linux basement.
Yes.
That's how I like it.
Is the starting point right there?
That's a casual timer.
Hey, Joe.
What are you doing?
Say hi.
Hi.
We're here.
Hi, Joe.
Hi.
Hi.
Hi.
Hi.
He went back to his iPad.
No.
Okay.
Hi.
Yes.
Hold on.
Hold on.
Hold on.
I'm going to have really crappy audio for a second.
All right.
Go ahead, Joe.
Hello.
Hello.
Hello.
Do you know where I am?
Do you know where I am?
Hello.
I mean, the UK.
I mean, the UK.
Okay.
Do you know where that is?
Do you know where that is?
England.
Correct.
Oh, Joe.
Wow.
My dad.
My dad.
No.
My dad.
No.
Dad, you're on my lifeline.
Oh, yeah.
What is your favourite sport?
My favourite sport.
You probably never heard of it.
You probably never heard of it.
Because it is cricket.
It's cricket.
Oh, I heard of it.
And I've actually played cricket, too.
You've played cricket.
You've played cricket.
Yeah.
That's cool.
Wow.
Brilliant.
Wow.
Brilliant.
Yeah.
So, were you back to your Ebola?
Were you back to your Ebola?
We did do both of them.
Right.
Right.
Tell you my favourite sport.
Yeah.
What's your favourite sport?
Hockey.
Ah.
Ice hockey.
Or...
You're a hockey player.
Okay.
Yeah.
Wonder why, Joe?
No.
Because I was raised like that.
Who's your favourite team?
I have two favourite teams.
New York Rangers.
My first favourite team.
And the last biggest night.
What about baseball?
What about baseball?
None.
You're not into baseball at all.
I'm into soccer, but I do it by myself.
The only reason to be in baseball are be into baseball is if you're a closet statistician.
And you need multiple players to play that.
You need multiple players to play hockey.
No, you don't.
Yeah, you do.
Not really.
Yeah, you do.
I play it by myself.
Like two or one player.
Technically, you can play baseball by yourself in the same way.
Yeah, but it doesn't kind of work with that.
It does.
Well, just as much as hockey by yourself does.
Yeah.
You'd have to be thrower and then have to run.
You'd toss the ball straight up in the air.
And then you wait for it to come back down and then you smack it.
And you know, you're still the one that has to go get the ball.
And throw it to space that's ready to get it.
That's how I'm sponsored.
Skip that part.
But okay.
That is a cake.
We used to play tennis on our own.
Is that tennis?
Oh.
Used to hit the ball against the wall.
And it sounds like ball ball.
To use it.
A ball.
But no, both games have a ball.
One just wreck it.
Yeah, wall ball is a fairly popular college pastime.
All right.
Okay.
All right.
Okay.
Good bag.
And your iPad.
Yeah, that was my son.
Hey.
How many do you see?
Okay.
What was our conversation?
I mean, the one we just had all right.
The one we were talking about before your little Joe joined this.
A little before Joe joined just.
I got remembered now.
I mean, even if we were in Florida instead of all us Texas,
I'd introduce you all to my dad.
Also, his name was Joe.
This could get very confusing.
My brother from another mother.
He actually lived with us when I was a kid.
His name is Joe.
I have a cousin.
His name is, what was it?
Joe.
From believers in recycling.
My grandpa.
His name was George.
But he hated it.
And he had everybody calling Joe.
This sounds like an HPR episode in the making.
The Joe clan.
It was not brother Darrell.
Oh, the brother Darrell.
It was actually a bit of a pain in the butt when I joined the military.
When I was 18 because there was already one person with my exact name in the military.
Like, yeah, that's my cousin.
Oh, my dad was in the military too, but we all worked around it.
So which area did you serve in?
I worked with Patriot missile systems.
I was in the military marine back in the day.
All right, everyone.
I'll catch you all later.
You got some things to take care of.
Two clips, Cheerios.
See you tomorrow.
Bye-bye.
Bye.
I'm going to go because sitting in one place for more than an hour or so gets a bit painful.
So I'm going to go and stretch my legs and then I'll rejoin you later.
I hope you feel better.
Thank you.
I'll be leaving shortly as well.
I believe in festivities.
Don't get too drunk.
No.
Hey, Hunky, what's up?
Looks like most of the Linux lug cast is here.
I do try.
Hey, 15.
Hey, Joe.
How's it going?
How you been?
Not bad.
Can't complain.
What you been up to?
Can you talk to you in a little while?
Perfect.
Can you complain about my audio quality?
Oh, who's been complaining about your audio quality?
Me.
Uh-huh.
What are you running for, Mike?
Yeah, I think it was.
It's not as Mike.
It's as, uh, the network is dropping out.
But maybe after everyone's had breakfast over there, then the network will be back.
Yes.
The wire on the left.
It's it.
Yeah.
Uh, I eventually had to give up on my wireless headsets being good enough for podcasting and
work down and spent the massive $30 on a snowball, Mike.
So you reckon it's the wireless headset?
I'm not the network.
Um, the thing about the Bluetooth headsets is they add some kind of compression.
So even if you've got a good Bluetooth headset, for some reason it just doesn't come across well on podcasting.
I do.
You know what?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That sounds like network.
Did I drop off the network?
Nope.
That was 50.
Okay.
I'm using a Bluetooth headset, but a H2 wired mic.
So it's really much more uncompromised.
Yeah.
It sounds good.
Zoom H2.
Zoom H2?
Yeah.
Zoom H2.
It, uh, that's a H hotel too.
Okay.
H2.
Sorry.
Weird accent.
Okay.
I see a Zoom H2 handy portable stereo recorder.
That's the money.
Okay.
You plug it in there and it's a USB mic as well.
Yeah.
That's a different price bracket too.
Well, I've got money's worth out of it.
Okay.
You bring it to shows and stuff as well.
So I've done all my audio recording.
I've tried a couple of more expensive headsets, and that's just added a bit of compression and didn't work well.
I mean, for a long time I was using the LG HBS lines, and that was the 770s,
the 810s and the 780s.
Have you got anything for some of those?
Oh, um, it's just LG HBS.
They're around the neck headphones.
They've been around for a while now.
But, um, I also had a pair of, um, half.
I'm using them for audio right now, a pair of Sennheiser Urbanite XLs.
Oh, wow.
They expensive.
Um, they were when they first came out.
Um, I think dropped in price.
They were in the $300 range.
And, um, now I think they're in the, uh, sub $200 range for headsets.
And they sound great.
They just...
What's a, what's the model number?
Sennheiser, huh?
Urbanite XL.
Yeah, got the link.
Thanks.
We're filling out the show notes on the etherpad, uh, linked on the website.
I'm planning on wants to join along.
Now, but I was using the LG HBSs because I enjoy soldering.
And I'll be able to buy them on eBay in groups of 10 for about $40.
And they'll all be broken.
And I'll take them all and make working headsets.
Oh, wow.
Yeah.
Okay.
Cool.
That was good.
I must say, over the last year, um, the base I've been getting, well,
a lot more than a year, but the last year,
all the effort that I've been putting into getting into electronics and soldering and stuff is starting to pay off.
There've been a few pieces of kit that would have been thrown out, but I have a look at them.
And that's what the e-blog says.
If it's broke, it ain't going to get any broker.
Exactly.
But yeah, there's a couple of good podcasts out there that have, uh,
really gone over how to do, um, soldering if you're looking at it.
I mean, but know how, um, with, um,
ballastaire when he was doing the show, he went over how to do soldering several times.
And I think he did a really good job.
And I know hack five back in the day had a couple of soldering tutorials.
Yeah.
We've even had an audio one on here.
Mr. X did a series on how to solder it through audio.
Okay.
Cool.
I mean, it's not that hard.
The hardest thing is starting.
Right.
Right.
Oh, I've been soldering on and off for a long time.
And when I started out, I was exceptionally crappy at it.
And after years and years of practice, I'm much less crappy at it.
But still fairly crappy.
Yeah.
And the issue is, of course, you're getting older.
I sites.
Right.
How's it getting wobbly every and all the components are getting smaller.
So yeah.
Yeah, I didn't used to get a migraine doing soldering.
And now, you know, I'm sitting so close to the piece and I'm staring at it.
And breathing in the fumes because I'm right freaking there.
So yeah, get off my lawn.
Yeah.
I'm about ready for that.
Sorry.
Just for everybody probably knows who's been listening to the recorded feed.
But I am scanning photos and organizing my fellow laws, photo collection from the last,
what appears like 50 years.
And I'm beginning to see the bottom of an orange box now where you haven't thrown in.
So that's why I'm not able to get to the push to talk button with this.
Although nobody would notice this because there's truncate silence done by the time they've heard it.
But just so you know, I'm not been rude.
Well, in a podcast that lasts more than 24 hours, you expect some silences.
So how long have you been podcasting now?
Two years, I think.
I started on T L L T S about two years ago.
Then I jumped over.
That's you all right.
Yeah, sorry.
And then I jumped over to the Linux lug cast and still doing that with those guys.
And I'm also recently when the old hosts were leaving started doing the mid cast.
Wow.
And you have time for all this?
I tend to make time.
I mean, it's not as time consuming as you might think.
I was going to be doing Linux projects anyways.
So I actually find the live shows easier because yeah, we just we just talk and that's it stuff.
Hey folks, this is CM Hobbs.
I'm just seeing if my mic's working this head.
So it's clearly a bust.
That's working pretty good working fine.
Sounds very good at you.
Very good.
Hey, Ken.
I need episode ideas.
It's been about a year.
I seem to do this about once a year.
And my friend has a fancy new recorder.
Really high quality thing.
So what sorts of episodes are we looking for at the moment?
I've run plum out of ideas.
How is that possible, sir?
I'm not terribly creative.
That's how.
Oh, come on.
I want to hear somebody that's actually been hands on with the old right go.
The last time I think you were asking me about doing an episode on DNS.
And I put together a very short one.
It was all of like, I don't know, maybe five minutes.
Maybe I could expand on that one.
It was a practical guide more than the guts of the naming system.
But maybe maybe something on DNS.
I don't know.
Got a lot of amateur radio stuff I could do.
Yep.
Absolutely.
Other Linuxy things.
I don't know.
Just.
Everything I've got is short.
Well, we did the satellites already.
There's all these crazy radio over IP and digital voice modes.
We could maybe do one of those.
There's.
I do a lot of low power, more code stuff.
That's possible.
I don't know.
I'll see what I can dig up.
The round table for the.
I'm round table.
Are you up for doing that again?
Absolutely.
I really enjoyed that.
I think it just kind of petered out a little bit.
I feel the thing.
That's what happens.
Oh, great.
Well, another thing that's happening is on January 26th.
I know that's a little further down the road, but on January 26th and 27th is Winter Field Day
here in the States.
And I'm going to be operating on the 27th.
I could probably do a sort of a live podcast from there and talk to some of the radio amateurs
that are freezing out on the front lawn of a local lodge.
Yeah.
Can you do that?
The hallway track type of thing.
The feel of it.
What it's like out there.
Even they.
Gosh, it's cold here Bob type stuff.
That's what it's like to be in the hobby or one of those field is that will be absolutely awesome.
I would love that.
Yeah, field days are not a.
I guess they're a common thing in the vacation in the sense that they happen every year.
Or twice a year if you do Winter Field Day, but it would give a good idea of what events are like.
And I believe we'll probably have five or 10 different operating stations up with different modes.
So maybe I could get some people talking about different modes they use that I don't know anything about.
Cool.
And I'm putting off some business cards and just pass them around, you know, even if it's on the sheet of paper cut off with the.
But the HBR logo on that's on the address.
Well, I'm organizing the space itself.
So if there's anything you would like set up, I could put up a.
Not I don't know that I can print a manner, but I could put up a couple of flyers or something like that.
Well, we have the HBR booths kit.
So whoever has that can send it to you. That would be great.
Yeah, please do.
My information on the site is still valid, even though it's been a year since I've posted.
Not a problem, sir.
So whoever has the.
The booth kit is in my basement.
Couple of the needs.
I don't know that if I need a full booth kit, I just would be cool to put up some hacker public radio propaganda at this winter field day.
Well, when I say I have the kit, I have the big banner.
So I'm not sure what else is supposed to be in the kit, but that's the kid I have.
I don't know lots of us get to be else.
Well, that's fine. I'll come up with some kind of banner.
I know there's business cards.
Maybe I can blow one of those up or something like that.
Are the business cards visible on the main side or is there some secret?
Yeah, it's under the track.
No, it's on the media.
And it should be there.
I'm building that if you can ping me an email and I'll get back to you.
Yeah, very good.
We'll give it a shot.
I'll put up some sort of some sort of a HPR propaganda.
And I'll get my buddies fancy recorder and see if I can't get some good audio.
I need to play with it a little bit first and see how the mics work
because it's apparently got multiple modes as far as the directionality of the mics and things are concerned.
Okay, guys, sorry to do this, but I have family time now.
So I'm going to drop off.
I'll probably call in after midnight here and wish everybody a happy new year.
It was cool talking to everybody.
That was good talking to you.
I'll be back calling again in the morning anyway.
So if you're around, you can talk all day.
See you later, guys.
See you later, guys.
I have some computer.
Later again.
Checking to see if the recording is still going.
1, 2, 1, 2.
No, we're not going.
We're still here.
We're on our step to talk about.
Yeah.
Everything was going very chatty with about four or five people going and I got a phone call
and stepped out for about an hour and came back and it was lots of people logged in
and nobody's saying anything.
Yeah, just got quiet for a while.
I think it comes and goes.
Everybody's contemplating the wisdom of the last hour or so.
Well, no, I'm jealous that I missed out on the last hour.
I just tuned in.
I'm reading through the etherpad now.
Hopefully I'll find something.
What if anybody read any good books lately?
I just finished the air gun book from 1982.
83 maybe.
It's actually pretty good.
It's a nonfiction.
It's all about air guns from that era.
So, yeah, though I am looking for some good fiction that I need to argument to my books
with.
I've got a.
What style?
Revolving in the air, which is a radio book.
And then the art of invisibility, but could use the nonfiction.
Oh, I can definitely suggest some nonfiction, but what style of nonfiction are you looking at?
Sci-fi fantasy.
Sorry, I meant to look at some fiction, not some nonfiction.
Yeah, okay.
I like fiction.
Yeah, I like sci-fi quite a lot.
Then I would recommend the Takashi Ko-Batch novel.
And John Stauzi's Old Man's War.
And Damon.
What was the title?
Old Man's War.
Very good.
I'll look that up.
Most of my reading lately has been just nonfiction, so I need to get back some good old science fiction.
Oh, and Damon.
I don't know if you've read Damon or not.
I have not.
Damon and Freedom.
I'll look those up as well, thank you.
They're by the same author.
Let me see if I can bring that up.
Danielle Suarez has some really good sci-fi books.
All right, all that goes to my list.
The last sci-fi I read was some Werner Vinge.
At Children of the Sky, I believe it was.
This is a really good one.
That reminds me, Brandon Sanderson has a new sci-fi book out called Skyward.
Also, that's a good one.
I'd like to go back to where the art of invisibility is nonfiction.
Sir, that hurts.
And you are correct.
I've just been reading it a little bit.
I know most of what's in it already, but I was curious.
It seemed really sensationalized to the front cover, has these bright green letters.
The world's most famous hacker, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Is it a miss next one?
Yeah, it is.
So that's how it was worth reading.
Yeah.
Well, I enjoyed Kevin Mitnik's other work.
What was that ghost in the wire?
Yeah, talking about his exploits.
He's also got the art of deception, which is a book on social engineering.
I didn't learn much from that.
I already knew most of what was there.
But again, it was one of those things like I felt like I had to read it just because it was Mitnik.
Yeah.
I think I've read two of his books, but I didn't read any more because he kind of went over the same things.
Yeah, he does tend to repeat himself.
And I haven't cracked the art of invisibility yet.
I've got it on loan from the library.
I'm currently reading Rebels on the Air, which is a history of broadcast radio.
But I'm going to dig into that one next.
And it appears as if my library has both the Damon series and the Skyward book.
So I'll be-
The audio books are pretty good.
I find I just can't get into audio books.
I don't know.
I have trouble paying attention to them.
Listen to the podcast, just find it.
I lose myself with audio books.
I lose what place in the book we were on.
It takes some practice.
I think maybe the link for-
I ended up-
I ended up-
While I was in college, I worked the night shift out of 7-11 for like five years.
And not much to do there.
So audio books were a life saver.
Yeah, I could definitely see that.
My wife sure enjoys them, but I just prefer-
And reading-
We started listening to audio books back when they had movie rental places that also had a small section for cassette tapes,
where the mostly murder mysteries were a bridge to about four hours.
And we would get them when we were going on a trip.
And that was basically the only time we listened to them.
But it kind of led into something that later became a kind of a thing you did,
because they became more available.
I listened to them.
My wife doesn't, but she'll only listen to stuff on the car.
But I listened to an audio book from time to time.
And then podcasts came up later than that.
That's really cool.
The only audio book I've ever had on cassette was a Bible.
And I had probably 40 cassettes in this giant plastic book thing.
It was a mess.
Yeah, that sounds about right.
Most of the ones we got when we were renting them were four to six, 60 minute tapes.
And they were just about right for most trips.
And I would rent the tapes ahead of time, and then copy them, and then return them.
And then I would have them in my collection.
And I had, I don't know, a couple of dozen tapes.
And we didn't listen to them but once.
But I would have them if it took several days that we'd be going on a trip
and we'd have a couple of three books.
But then later you got, they came on CDs.
And eventually I guess, I'm probably, I don't know if you can get them on DVDs or not.
But they were labor on CDs.
I've never seen them on DVD.
But I do know my local library here does have books on CD.
And my wife will occasionally get those if she's not streaming it to her phone
and she'll listen to them while she's going down the road.
I did try to listen to a couple of books on CD while going down the road.
But again, I found I just lost my place in the book.
I think Joe's right probably just takes a little practice.
Yeah, well, your first couple of audiobooks, trial books that you've read several times.
Yeah, that's good advice.
I use mostly podcasts now because there's plenty of podcasts.
But, you know, a few years back, I would just use audiobooks.
And if I'm working in the garage, raking the yard, washing the car,
doing, you know, carpentry work or something,
I would listen to a book.
And if I realized I've been thinking about something so hard
that I was ignoring my book, I would just rewind my book a little ways
and listen to that section again.
It wasn't that big a deal.
And for most of the things that were available in the early days
were fiction stuff not important.
So it wasn't a big deal.
Yeah, I could see that I definitely use podcasts,
especially HPR when I'm mowing the lawn and doing the dishes.
But, you know, that only takes about an hour.
So I don't know how much of the book I could absorb in that time.
I do commute every day.
So maybe I should try and listen to one on my commute.
Yeah, I got two hours worth of driving five days a week.
So it's helpful then.
But I also do the podcast listening as well.
And mostly it's because I listen to the audiobooks at 3.25x.
And that's slowed down for me,
because I was doing it like 3.8, 3.9.
And I do the podcasts at usually between 2.2 and 2.6x.
Wow.
My ears, my work that fast, my brain doesn't.
I'm ready to have you say.
Well, then to read faster than most people speak, right?
No.
No.
Okay.
I can't make any sense of anything past 1.6x.
Once again, it just takes practice.
I might set it 1.2 and I've never felt like any faster made sense for me.
Yeah, that's going to, I'm the opposite of what most of you guys have said.
My ADD will not let me just like sit down and read text on a page.
And I think part of it is because my brain wants to go faster than I can actually read
to where audiobooks I can just crank up the speed.
And it just goes in the speed that I want to go in.
And I can do it while I'm doing something else,
which I typically don't have time to sit down and just read for pleasure.
So I can do it while I'm, you know, I'm being the floor or something.
But I do the same thing with podcasts.
I just crank it up because it's almost painful to listen to podcasts in real time now,
because I'm just like, oh my god, get to the point.
Yeah, well, stupid question time.
Does increasing the speed increase the pitch?
Do they end up sounding like chipmunks?
No, most players have correction for that built right in.
Well, that's different.
It doesn't sound like the chipmunks.
Well, I'll take you with it a little bit.
I find that I can read really fast.
I can probably read faster than people can talk.
And so, and still absorb everything.
That's from years of just hammering through books.
So maybe I'll try and speed up the speed up a booker or just try a book on my commute and see what happens.
But I like the idea of reading a book or listening to a book that I've read before that way.
So even if you miss a section, you can still pick it up right where you were.
The way I used to do it with a book, I would keep for commuting.
I would have one book in the car.
And my commute was about 30 minutes.
And so I do half an hour in the morning, half an hour in the afternoon.
And then I would have separately in a player.
Back then it was a, my announce my phone back then it was a separate MP3 player.
And whatever I was listening to that I carried around would be a different book.
And the one that went to work would may take longer, but it was the same one every day.
It stopped and then restarted and it worked just fine for me so that you might try that.
Yeah, that's a terrific idea.
I'll have to give all of that a shot.
It's just a world that I've never really jumped into for various reasons, but always interested in trying to.
Yeah, typically what I've begun doing is just buying ebooks of everything.
And typically it's just whoever has what I want.
Amazon, I have to, if I buy something through Amazon, I have to buy it and strip the DRM off of it, which is trivial to do.
And then I use a ebook reader on my phone that does text-to-speech.
And as long as you're okay with text-to-speech voices, that's how I do my audio books.
I'm very rarely.
Right.
The text-to-speech just, there'll be like a word somewhere in the book that gets used repeatedly.
That's completely pronounced wrong, and it'll just drag me nuts.
Oh, I love that.
Because you start to realize like your brain starts translating this pronunciation to the right thing.
It's getting funny.
That's a great idea, though. I do read a lot of ebooks.
I prefer the dead tree versions, but fb reader on my phone will do text-to-speech.
I've got that plug in, so that's something to experiment with, too.
A lot of good stuff here, guys.
Yeah, fb readers, actually, what I use.
You know that listening to bad pronunciation and letting your brain fix that is how German turned into English.
I thought it was German, mispronounced by people who spoke French.
Maybe some of that, too.
My wife's a linguist, and she's told me this story like a hundred times, and I just sort of gloss over at this point.
She sounds very smart. She should listen.
She is. She's brilliant.
Once again, my attention relax after a certain point.
She probably doesn't just doesn't speak fast enough.
That's going to be my excuse, or I'll just tell her that I'm just charmed by her beauty and can't pay attention to what she's saying.
That'll get me out of it.
Oh, that's way better.
And it might be true.
Yeah, yeah, for the most part, that's the story I'm telling.
The reason I thought about that is because I'm listening to a podcast right now, the history of the English language, and it's just very good.
I mean, it's a really interesting story.
I just, I don't know.
It's one of those things that English is so just a mess.
It just sort of makes me want to throw away the language to start over with something else.
Because it's trying to work with kids who don't speak English and try to teach them English.
You just realize how ridiculous English is.
Have you ever listened to hardcore history?
I have a little bit.
I listen to, I don't know, four or five of them.
I have not, but it's been recommended to me like a million times.
I just haven't got around to it.
I've listened to some of almost everything, at least to give it a try.
Right now, I'm doing an astronomy course.
I do things I have to do with the science of different sorts.
Philosophy from time to time, although not this right now, and then always geeky technical stuff.
Now, I tend to listen to the tech podcasts, but then my books tend to all be science fiction and fantasy.
Big fan of Jim Butcher and Brandon Sanderson.
Oh, a couple of years back, I did a bunch of Jim Butcher stuff.
Cool.
So, Codexelera and Dresden files?
Dresden files.
Okay.
Well, I enjoyed Codexelera as well, and then he's got another series that he's only done one book on so far,
The Cinder Spire Nobles.
It's not a series, then, is it?
Well, it's supposed to be a series.
He's just only done the first one so far.
I'm waiting for peace talks to come out.
I did science fiction and stuff when I was a teenager, that in Westerns.
And over the years, I've gotten to, I don't know, Stephen King and other kinds of fiction.
And then now I do more nonfiction, and when I read a science fiction, I go back and do something like an Asimov that I read four times.
Right, right.
Asimov was okay.
Okay.
Okay, that's about the best I can give it.
You know he wrote Star Wars.
Asimov was okay.
The Foundation series was a bit long-winded.
And it's one of the few things I've read that's of any size that's more than, mostly I don't read anything twice,
and I've read the Foundation series.
When it was just three books, I had read it twice.
And then when the next one came out, I go, oh crap, I got to read it over again.
I started at the beginning and read all of them again.
And so I read the whole thing more than once.
So the last couple of books maybe just twice.
Somehow, Asimov seemed to think about stuff more than just, you know, other, you know,
that the possibilities that this guy really kind of considered this stuff.
Well, I like a lot of the stuff that has come out of his works.
And where his works have led, most of his books never really captured my attention all that much.
Like Tolkien.
I enjoyed his first book.
What was your one first?
The Hobbit.
I thought the Hobbit was barely okay, but I kept going and really liked the rest of the series.
I've only read it once.
My brother has read it multiple times and has the leather bound volume.
And I think he wishes he had more hair on his toes or something.
But I've never watched the movie all the way through.
Many of the movies, except the first one I tried to watch and couldn't watch it all the way through.
So, you know, I guess I, it carried the fantasy part too thing, but Sam Wise is okay in my book.
Yeah, he was the real hero of the tale.
Yeah, I don't know why they talk about Bilbo at all.
Probably because of the first book.
Yeah, I read old books.
I don't read them anymore, but I listen to an old, I get to start digging for Robert Heinlein stuff.
And my brother used to say before he, the books that he wrote before he went crazy.
But I kind of like some of the ones he went went after he went crazy.
Robert Heinlein, it sounds familiar.
The moon is a harsh mistress, stranger in a strange land, things like that.
But the moon is a harsh mistress is definitely, you know, this top of list.
Let's check them out.
Some starship trooper.
Yeah, not how they recommended, but some of his early robot stuff was kind of interesting.
He was a, he was a nudist and an atheist.
And I think maybe a communist, I'm not quite sure about that.
But if you read some of his really early stuff, he kind of worked those things in and into his books so that I believe that the average science fiction reader of today who had never heard of Robert Heinlein
and just picked one of them up would go, where is this coming from?
There I need to kind of talk to you.
All right guys, I'll be back on later.
Let's jump off for a little while.
All right, take it easy.
Hey, is there anybody on right now that wants to talk a little bit about Linux?
Maybe, what do you want to talk about?
Well, I don't know, my laptop, I'm using Ubuntu 1604 with a GNOME desktop, which I like.
But they decided for the standard to dump Unity and went to a version of GNOME for 1804.
That doesn't translate that well in an upgrade when you run the upgrade directly.
And then the extensions don't work and stuff.
So I haven't upgraded my laptop that I actually used.
I haven't upgraded, I have put some, I've tried it on a desktop that has a test and didn't like what happened.
So I was wondering if anybody else had similar problems or had a...
And it's made me want to go out and look at Mate and everything else again, which I had not done for a while.
Yeah, I tend to, I've had lots and lots and lots of issues with upgrades with Ubuntu.
So I've kind of moved away for most of these, and there's only one computer in my house that uses Ubuntu,
and that's the gaming computer that my daughter uses downstairs.
I've gone to pretty much rolling on everything.
So like everybody, I'm going to tell you that I use Arch because you're talking to me.
So I have to tell you that I use Arch.
That's the stereotype at least.
Just to kind of keep from that.
I use GNOME most of the time.
I either use GNOME or I3 on whatever I'm doing.
But I think that the computer downstairs is running in 1804 or 18010, I can't remember which one.
Because I just recently redid it.
The GNOME on there wants you kind of going and strip everything out that they put in that makes it like Ubuntu-y.
It's standard GNOME, and you can go ahead and put extensions in and stuff like normal.
But yeah, I'm not sure what the upgrade path would look like.
I would almost say if you were going to try to upgrade from where you're at,
maybe switch to Unity and then do the upgrade and then see if it breaks.
I would just go into it expecting to have to reinstall.
It seems like that is going to be pretty complicated.
But to be fair, the 18 series has been really good.
I'm actually kind of surprised with snaps and stuff.
I don't feel as restricted as I did before.
It's almost kind of like a stable base with a little bit of rolling on top.
I don't have any problem with how it works.
Like I said, I put it on a desktop and it seems stable and it works and you can do things with it.
I really don't like the dock.
So I basically took this desk and I built it the way my laptop is that I use all the time.
I put all my extensions in and everything.
Then I ran the upgrade and did broke everything.
Then I tried another install where I just didn't...
Some of the extensions don't even work and that might be why they broke.
I might just be depending on what extensions.
There are a few extensions that I used or used, I guess past tense now,
that because of, I guess, Nome Shell moving to a newer version,
they never went back and patched it.
So it just doesn't work in general unless I downgraded Nome Shell, which I'm not going to do.
I'm trying to think specifically what some of them were.
There were a couple that I handful, but they were nothing.
It was like mission critical that I felt like I couldn't do it.
It's just the way the Nome plugin architecture is.
It's kind of like the theming thing.
It seems like it's kind of a hack.
People, if they build for one version, as soon as they update, they have to do something to rebuild it.
I've never looked into it.
But there have been several extensions that I've used over time that have just been kind of sunset
because somebody didn't take care of it.
Now, I kind of understand that not to understand what it takes to actually build one of these things,
but I only use four or five extensions.
I don't really load it up, but like my main thing is to get rid of the...
I do the dash of the dock.
What do they call that thing on the side where those silly icons on the side?
I move them to the top of the screen.
It's kind of where I like them.
That's been working fine for me for a couple of years.
That's what I like, but I can't get the 1804 to do that.
I'm still in 1604.
I know that all this stuff works.
It's like I said, 1804 works.
I could live with it, I suppose.
But then I'm not in the mood to live with it right now.
I live through 25 years of windows changing and learning all the new versions every time.
I've got a Linux thing.
I like the looks of it.
Let's keep it this way for a while, then two years later, bam!
I don't know if you're watching the chat.
Kevin Wisher's throwing some stuff in there, and he's talking about...
Right before Christmas break, they upgraded the server that they had from 1804 to 1804
with no breakage.
That's insane.
And completely atypical of what I've ever had with Ubuntu.
But to be fair, I don't use it often.
So it could have gotten much better since the last time I did it.
Well, server is...
You can do that with server.
It's desktop.
That's the deal.
Server is fine.
You can upgrade server.
That kind of breakage is why I've just stuck to Debian and Debian-based distribution.
So lately I've fallen into antics and MX Linux because they're a Debian-based
with some nice cities on top.
Every time I've tried to upgrade Ubuntu, even Ubuntu server on any major leap has been all sort of...
I keep hearing about MX.
Like, it seems like that's the new hotness.
I had no idea it was hot.
I thought it was not very well known, actually.
The forums are very quiet, and the release cycle is very slow.
And it seems like a hobby project to me, but I find that it just really works quite well.
So on my machines have a little more horsepower.
I use MX.
And as I understand it, it's just the Memphis repositories with the antics loading facilities.
And just those two projects combined.
If I have a super low-power machine, I just use antics.
So it works really well on low-power stuff.
There's not a lot of customization you can do.
I mean, there's some stuff in the menus.
And you can do your own customizations.
But it does come with a lot of opinionated defaults.
But I find that the defaults work really well.
And the defaults work really well for me in MX as well.
But it's interesting that you say that I didn't realize anybody was using it with any regularity.
I thought it was kind of a hobby project.
It seems to be inhabiting the same space that Solus did like last year and a little bit the year before.
You just started to hear rumblings about it and then everybody was talking about it.
Like, MX has come up like four or five times just in my world in the last two weeks.
Which is kind of like, oh, that's some momentum for something I'd never heard of before this.
So it seems like people are catching on to it being a cool thing.
I have yet to try it.
That's pretty funny that you mentioned that because I just looked at distrawatch and MX is the second page hit ranking on distrawatch now.
I've been using MX for a couple of years.
So that's kind of funny.
I first found out about it through an amateur radio operator on YouTube.
OH-HSTN or survival tech Nord is a guy that builds batteries and does all these portable radios.
And I caught him using antics and I installed it on one of my netbooks and it worked so well.
And then I saw that they had MEPIS and I thought, well, I'm sorry, MX Linux.
And my other machines have a lot more horsepower and I thought, well, I might as well install it and try it.
It works really well.
That's hilarious.
I think that's the first place I heard about it, too, from his videos.
Yeah, he's got a lot of good stuff.
That was probably four years ago when he first posted about using antics.
It was pretty interesting to see.
I've gone through this mess of using all these tiling window managers for years and and rising out my installs.
But these days, I just all I need is a terminal full screen.
That's pretty much it.
And if I got a couple of monitors, I need like five or six terminals open and maybe a web browser and a copy of MX.
And I'm content.
I don't really care what it looks like anymore.
Yeah, one of my kind of New Year's resolutions because I operate in two modes with with my stuff is either it's known for just basic stuff or if I want to do any kind of gaming or a lot of just any of the things I want to do that are pretty graphically things I use known but the rest of the time I use i3.
And I am a diehard EMAX user.
So I want to try.
There's a window manager called ex WM, which is basically kind of i3, but your computer uses all EMAX shortcuts.
And I'm like, yes, I need this in my life.
I tried to use that for a while and it drove me nuts.
I can't have my EMAX key bindings anywhere else.
I used VI for about 15 years and switched over to EMAX while I was on a list contract and have now gotten EMAX and muscle memory.
I found that so my my tiling window manager choice back in the day was I on three and I found that I took well to plan nine because of I on three.
It borrowed its key bindings from Acme the editor and with that rabbit hole is going to say the tiling window manager I was using the most here recently is called notion or not I on and I got a real kick out of that.
Someone resurrected the project and it was a lot of fun.
I do enjoy i3, I use i3 at work, but these days it's just a lightweight window manager for me.
Typically I'm using like JWM on antics or xfce and mx and I found that when I'm not using a tiling window manager I just keep going back to xfce because of how you know it's medium weight.
It comes with its own utilities that just generally work and it's fine.
The machines that I built for other folks though like at a school I do the it sometimes the kids machines and stuff we just use cano it works for them it's pretty and they have an easy time getting around but I'm with you.
Yeah that's funny I the first thing I do when I set up i3 is is try to get everything is close to EMAX key bindings which is kind of hard because a lot of things don't want you to have crazy key bindings.
But yeah I'm the guy that installs plugins and Firefox so I can use eMAX key bindings there I'm just a little warped I guess.
Now I used to do that sort of thing but I got tired of dragging around my dot files so I just learned to live with the defaults now I've switched machines too much.
Luckily the last few years I've had very stable machines where I've kept the same machine for a long time but I used to avoid the warranty far too often and really tired of loving around a bunch of dot files man you weren't kidding about the popularity of mx I've been doing some digging here this is kind of crazy and antics is increased in popularity too.
I wonder if it's because they just released 17 of antics I don't I don't know if mx has gone that's that's interesting to see just because I really thought it was obscure but you know it's going to be a double edged sword wide scale adoption means good changes and then wide scale adoption probably means a lot of dissent.
You really can't hate something until you get to know it a little bit so fine point.
I was a Windows administrator for a server administrator for a really long time and worked on every version of windows from 4.0 to 2012 and you just you know windows they always every new version came out they had a few things they always deliberately moved from one place to another so that you just have to go look for them.
And they besides the desktops the things the administrators go look for they also move those as well and so you okay fine you just got to get used to them but with with linux you can look at a whole bunch of different distributions and figure out one that's pretty close to what you want and then maybe you can adjust it a little bit and that's kind of where I did I looked at a bunch of different distros.
And besides several years ago that like gnom and but it took a couple of extensions to get it just right and then those broke damn.
Boy I feel that pain and that's pretty well why I've settled on the next one.
It's got just about everything I need pre-installed and just a couple of tiny little tweaks and we're up and I'm glad we've had this conversation because it appears as if they have updated to version 18.
That means I'm behind I guess I've got to kind of keep up but it's not real pain but it's it's kind of like oh man I thought I had it just the way I wanted it and the one that the 1804 works just fine it's really and it does have some new features that I'm trying to get used to I have a also a
Ubuntu server in 1804 and I'm using the desktop to try things out before I put them on the server so I'm keeping the desktop version but my laptop which is my lab you know my little my little desktop is is still 1604.
There's nothing wrong with the older software as long as you keep up to date with security patches.
I run a lot of older versions of things and yeah as long as as long as security updates are there I see no problem with it.
That's one reason why I enjoyed devian stable so much was because it was just that stable yes the packages were old but they met their work.
Yes and 1604 is not really really old it's just and it is it's definitely up to date and it's the LTS and so it's fine.
I didn't realize that one was still LTS that's a good answer.
Yeah I don't see much point in doing the odd number of years and this server I just built it so it's 1804 in fact I held off building it for about two months
until 1804 came out so that I wouldn't have to upgrade it just you know right off the bat and then I can keep it for you know I might keep it for five years before I change it because it's basically going to be my my NAS and it doesn't have to do anything specialized.
I probably will put a couple of VMs on it but it's basically going to be a file server just going to stream some things to the laptops and and phones and stuff here in the house so I don't have to it doesn't have to be too smart all it has to do is continue to work and hit the hard drives and you can do it should be able to do that for for until the hardware is old.
Yeah I know to mention that I need to overhaul my file server need to update it and fix the storage I've been thinking about getting an external raid but I just haven't spent the time to do it my home network is a bit of a misspent more time focusing on my office network making sure all my business stuff was put together properly.
And my home networks and shambles especially now that my kids starting to hack with stuff and put devices into the network it's crazy over here so I've got to spend some time with my NAS and my local servers and make some of the make some of the magic happen well this will be my first NAS I've I've got a windows box that has been I guess it's been my desktop but it's been.
Of course for years but it's been also the server so it's you could always map to a share on my windows box if you want to watch a movie on your phone or or laptop but I decided to move that off to another box and so I did a purpose build with some cheap cheap slightly out of date hardware.
But with all brand new of NAS hard drives and I'm set them up in ZFS and because I thought that sounded cool from everything I read but so I'm trying I'm learning as I go.
That's the best way to do it learning as you go is the best way to learn in my opinion next to teaching teaching is another way that is terrific for learning.
As far as ZFS is concerned it's rock solid I really enjoy ZFS and just a side note the free BSD project is moving their ZFS implementation from the Solaris legacy implementation over to Linux ZFS I read recently so that's cool.
How are you planning on sharing all these files with your devices you said you got phones and laptops are you going to just mount some shares are you going to use something like like Plex or something like that nature to stream it or Cody or whatever the flavor of the weekend media streaming is.
I'm just doing shares right now I've looked at the stuff and I haven't got Cody to run for me I've looked at Flex but I haven't installed it and I've installed Cody like over and over and over and it just crashes I don't know I've run it on a couple of different pieces of hardware and I can't seem to get it to act right although.
What happened to me I can't seem to find online that other people have some kind of problem so I may be doing something wrong but for some reason it installs and then I go in and start configuring it at some point it just goes to hell on me that's been my experience as well and I don't have a memory serves me correctly Cody is not a server but it's mostly just a local client you install it on your media machine and you use that as a dedicated thing to watch your videos you don't really share it.
Unless you're doing DLNA serving stuff up with DLNA and if that's the case I normally just use mini DLNA on the command line and call it good I don't like to use Plex I have a friend that works there and everything seems fine but it's I just don't like the proprietary nature of it and I don't really trust the code even though I know one of the developers.
So I do the same I just not shares I don't have a lot of media but I typically do NFS mounts everything I've got running Linux and so NFS works well enough for that could probably do some Samba and as far as sharing to my phone is concerned again I use mini DLNA for that and just use a DLNA client on the phone it's not as pretty as something like Plex but anyway I do not think your experiences are abnormal I think that's that's kind of.
The way it is with Cody you got to get a machine that it works on and get it set up and then just don't touch it.
Well I use Linux for stuff that I can use Linux for and I have Windows to fall back on for that my wife uses only Windows she has an iPhone and I have an Android phone so we have okay wait we got one of everything so I've got the Samba shares on here and you can get from the Windows box.
And you can get it from Linux and you can get it from the iPhone and that's that's probably where it's going to we're going to leave it we don't.
Streaming is kind of cool and putting on the TV but right now for if we want to watch on the TV we take a laptop and set it next to the TV plug in a cable to the the receiver and just play it that way.
You know off of the server. Yeah I think that's a terrific way to go don't don't fix if it ain't broke.
I guess if we had a newer TV we could stream it directly you know we could tell a TV to go look at the server but we don't.
Yeah I'm not sure how that would work unless it had something like Plex built into the television but all good points with that folks I'm going to have to drop out here I've got to get some lunch going.
I'm going to hop back in here shortly so I'll probably be back in about an hour so I've tried to add some of our information here in our discussion to the etherpad get a little bit more of that done with that it's food time talk amongst yourselves.
Oh great enjoy your lunch everybody taking a break hello hello how's it going yeah it seems that way everything interesting going on.
Well you could hear how how it was going what do you bring into the table.
Right now not much I'm looking at this Dell venue 11 pro 10.8 inch 71 30 seems like an interesting device user replaceable M.2 cards.
I brought it up on a couple of different shows and I was just debating on whether or not I wanted to get one.
What's a form factor just like a little.
Oh it's a it's a tablet.
Like like a little net book.
No it's a tablet.
Oh no no tablet.
Right well you can put it in a keyboard dock which has a battery in it which is kind of cool but now the reason I'm looking at it is because you can easily put Linux on it.
And let me post this link.
You can easily put Linux on it and replace the Bluetooth and Wi-Fi module and have basically everything work perfectly.
What version of Linux would you put on it.
The only thing that seems to work for a tablet is the old phone version.
No I disagree I have three tablets right now that are running Linux Mint and they're doing it very well.
I mean the other Dell venue that I have doesn't have the user replaceable M.2 but so the Bluetooth doesn't work but the Wi-Fi works just fine.
None of the ones I have the camera works but everything else with tweaking I mean I had to write scripts for the screen rotation except for on the T100 TA works just fine.
Oh that's interesting. I've tried several.
I've got an HP 360 Ultrabook that you can fold back into a tablet mode and the Linux things I tried none of them were any good because the touchscreen stuff wasn't working.
I didn't try Mint.
The touchscreen has greatly improved at the kernel level through what's called from Ubuntu.
So basically all devices, well most devices should work. I have had no success with some of the cheaper Chinese devices.
If I get around to putting 1804 Ubuntu on my laptop it may work in tablet mode then huh?
Yeah like I said touch screens have come very far in the last couple of years.
Of course I never had a touchscreen before but once I got it and then with Windows it's kind of handy.
Not often but occasionally you want to use it if you got it and so it just hasn't worked for me with Linux.
Right now a lot of devices will still have problems with suspended resume.
There are scripts that might help might not depending on the device but just for overall usage yeah it's completely there.
And that's in the kernel so I might get so Ubuntu may work as well.
Yeah and there's a lot of write-ups about people using Fedora or Arch.
I think the one I sense let me go up to the top on this because he talks about what he's using.
Yeah Fedora 25 and open source tumbleweed.
Well you know I like the low end machines.
Some people can't stand the that they're slower than the high end processors.
You got to have an i7 or an i5 or something.
I had a netbook with a one core item processor that I used for years and years and it worked just fine.
And when Windows no longer work on it I put Linux on it and it kept working and okay it just takes a little longer to do something but it still did everything it was supposed to do.
That's kind of the way I am so I think you might be you know that might not be a bad thing if you're kind of like that.
Yeah well I used to swear by the Acer Aspire one loved that netbook and that form factor.
And that form factor kind of went away that size and the usability of it dropped off significantly when a lot of distros stopped making 32-bit operating systems.
So in my search for something that was similar I landed on the T100 TA which is the ASUS transformer which does Linux pretty darn well.
You can put a 64-bit on that one.
Yeah yeah you have to get creative because it's 32-bit EFI but you can find write-ups on how to make a USB stick that does that.
It's 32-bit EFI and a 64-bit operating system.
Oh I hate that stuff.
Yeah it takes some work especially you know the first couple of times you do it.
That's good to know I knew that such things existed.
My netbook had you know straight 32-bit processors.
There wasn't any fooling around with it but yeah if you could do it I'd willing to do stuff like that.
The only problem I have with my netbook was the 10-inch screen was a little small I'd probably go with a 12-inch now.
Although my laptop now is a 13-inch and it's just fine and so I probably will never end up buying another low-end box because this one is small enough for most things.
I may never actually buy another small one but I always really like that thing for vacations and for grabbing something to go and just having it with you.
You know you will go in McDonald's and sit down and get on a stock market.
What have you wanted to do?
Well my company that I work for has some interesting rules in regards to what you're allowed to bring into the office.
You're allowed to bring in a tablet but you're not allowed to bring in a laptop.
A personal one anyway.
Oh because they don't want you to connect to the network?
Something like that.
I don't hook into their network anyway when I'm at work. I just tell her my phone.
Yeah when I was working we had rules like that.
Anything you did bring in if you had to bring it in and we ran somebody would run some kind of stuff and basically what they did make sure you had virus software.
But they still didn't let you hook it on the network.
We had a what we call a green, the green network which was Wi-Fi that was just basically the internet.
You didn't let you hook in local.
They didn't let you connect internally.
I'm not sure what happened if you actually plugged an Ethernet cable in.
I don't know if it happened.
I don't know what happened though.
I don't know if we had a way to recognize it wasn't one of Liars and rejected or not.
Or if we were just trusting that people wouldn't do it.
Yeah well work does offer a Wi-Fi that you can access.
If you go through the process of setting up an account on everything and it's separated from everything that work does.
The thing was as they were blocking VPNs and I wanted to use a VPN on everything that I was doing because I'm paranoid.
But with that blocked it was just easier for me to instead of trying to get around it or using SSH forwarding for all my internet traffic was just to tell their my phone.
I'm okay with not using a VPN if I know the network and the guy who runs the firewall.
So I knew who that was and I knew that she really took a good care of things.
So I knew that I could run a Wi-Fi.
The Wi-Fi was not Starbucks.
Well you know it's not just that but I was using the VPN.
My dog's just one nuts.
I was using the VPN to make it seem like I was on my home networks.
That's why I could do some very specific things on my server and I wasn't able to do that.
Ah yes of course.
For that though you probably like you say you tell your phone and then you're not on their network.
Right.
But I think I still got a couple of the Spire ones sitting around because you were able to get them at a really reasonable price there for a while before everybody dropped 32 bit support.
And I had gotten it from my kids because they needed Windows devices to be able to do things at school and yeah they age.
I think I still have maybe two of them that work but I really enjoyed having them for years.
It sounds like you hang on a little hardware until it's probably doesn't make any sense like I do.
Yeah and I also like getting other hardware that other people have given up on and making it do tricks.
A while back I was going to I wanted to build a router so rather than do what you're supposed to do and go buy something I call my brother and say if you've got like an old PC sitting around somewhere and he says you know.
I think they're one up in the attic let me let me go look.
Grab a couple of nicks for them in.
Do you have sense in your good to go?
Yeah I built a NAS recently and I built it entirely around two sticks of RAM.
I had eight gigabytes of DDR3 and everything is DDR4 now.
And so I go down to micro centers and say look I got to have a motherboard that takes my memory and a processor that fits that board.
And I'm trying to spend no more than about a hundred bucks.
I got out there for a hundred and ten dollars.
I walk into stores and ask for motherboards that have DDR3 and they're like yeah we don't sell those anymore.
Oh no this was the only one he had it was an open box return and sitting on a clearance rack.
Right now I'm much more likely to hit up for old hardware.
I'm much more likely to hit up something like Facebook marketplace and if I can't find it there I'm probably going to go to eBay.
I don't buy my stuff over the internet but if I can get 11 Houston and...
I live in Dallas.
Usually you can live in a big town you can usually buy stuff in an actual store and I try to do that.
Well the great thing about the Dallas area is there's two goodwill for computer parts so I will also go there for computer parts.
I really wanted to walk in and buy an entire working system for usually about what it's worth.
But if it's an older system then that's not too bad anyway.
Well I'm perfectly happy with this box.
It's the processor.
It's an AMD processor.
It's the first one I bought in years and because that's what the motherboard was.
You know I couldn't tell you.
It says 8 core and it's...
It's a 38 something maybe.
I was going to go with the 48 series but yeah the 38 series is pretty good.
I kind of think it's 38.
I think it's somewhere not too far off from an i5.
I might be wrong but it seems to be...
It's certainly plenty for a NAS with...
I can make a VM off of it and run a router or something like that.
I'm not going to do anything heavy duty with it.
My plan if I need more memory is I've got my experimental box that I use for VMs and for temporary bills to test stuff out.
I've got 16 gigs of RAM and if necessary I'll take that 16 and I'll just swap the 8 for the 16 if I ever figure out that the NAS needs more than 8 gigs of RAM.
I'm still a lot of devices running the DDR3.
A lot of stuff runs it but you can't buy it to brand you in the store anymore.
That's true.
All three of my boxes are DDR3.
I've got my play box is a second generation i7.
My real desktop is a fourth generation i7 and my NAS which is my new box is got a processor that's probably four years old.
That's that AMD thing.
You know what? I picked up some laptop RAM that was DDR3 at micro-center and that was recent.
You can still buy the memory and stuff like that for you.
If you buy new motherboard you're going to get this all going to be DDR4 stuff.
My laptop is about three years old I guess.
It's a sixth generation Intel.
What generation mine is GE726D.
Not there.
Chipsets HM176th Gen Intel Core i7 processor.
Is that a laptop or a desktop?
It's a laptop.
Okay here's the MSIG726QD, the Apache Pro.
Okay same generation as mine then.
I think it's like three years old.
That's about harmonious.
I do a lot more with the desktop stuff than I do with the laptop.
The laptop stays turned off most of the time but that's what I'm using right now to talk on.
No I have two laptops and a set top box and then I have my server for anything I need a bit more stability for.
I mean I call it a set top box but it's actually one of the nook clones from gigabit the bricks.
Oh yeah those are great for basically anything that you need a headless system for.
Well I'm actually I have it hooked up to a couple of TVs and I'd use it to access everything else.
I call that headless.
TV is not a monitor.
It's not connected to anything except the network.
I know but when you connect things to a TV you're using for streaming and stuff and that makes it a kind of a plot rather than a general purpose computer.
That's in my brain it's not it's not saying anything about the ability of the computer is just saying okay this is the way it's used.
So it's headless in that you turn on bring it up but you then runs as a streaming device for oh it looks like a monitor.
No it's not it's a TV set we're watching movies here.
My oldest box here is a it's probably at least 20 years old.
It's an ATX tower that has had countless or at least uncounted motherboards in it over the years.
I've no idea how many times it's been upgraded.
I don't know what the first I don't remember if it was a 386 or a 486 that went in at first.
It's had many hard drives.
It's been upgraded one piece at a time over and over and over again.
It had floppy disk one time you know it's had a CD and now it's got a CD DVD and it's it's had as few as one hard drive as many as six.
Right now it's got a single hard drive and DVD and it's in the last few months it's had an SSD and three or four hard drives.
So it's you know just depends on what I'm doing with it.
Sometimes it's a VMware server and right now it's just a straight Linux box.
It's got two versions of Linux dual dual boot on a single single hard drive.
Cool. No I think my tower is seven years old and more in that range.
I've had it for a long time now.
I think some of the parts from it came from my previous build which was also like six or seven years old.
How do you say that Sviva?
That's what I was just wondering.
Is there a Savers in Texas?
Yeah see a couple of Savers here and there.
That's why I get someone I heard.
Well that's what nearby here.
I'm visiting family right now.
And yes I'm still in Texas.
No they don't really have much of an electronics selection.
Mongo, do you have any Savers?
I'm not what are you saying?
What's Savers?
Savers.
Yeah it's a retail.
Not that I know of.
We've got basically two places to get real good computer stuff which is fries and a micro center.
No yeah those are not resellers.
Oh then I don't know.
The goodwill for computer parts.
The goodwill here is a joke.
Okay.
And I don't know of any other.
If I'm looking for electronics I'm probably not going to go to the Savers.
But I will go to one of the two goodwill for computer parts in the Dallas area and check those out.
Or the.
Of the different cities north of Dallas have community outreach places that do a lot of resale.
And you can usually pick something up there for decent prices.
A couple of years ago I talked to a guy.
I think it was that a.
A car club meeting and who worked at the.
He was you know volunteer at the goodwill computer thing and he built.
He built computers for him put Linux on them for them to sell but they never.
But I think they they gave away or something because if you ever went to their store they actually had nothing but junk.
I guess it would be nice to be able to buy you stuff but you know where you could.
Go and see somebody face to face and pick it out but I'm.
I've never actually been to a place like that.
Now I do have a closet in my house is kind of like that.
Good evening.
Hello.
Oh you can hear me.
Oh fantastic.
This is the first of you is the mumble in iOS.
I was trying to drag my name into the into the right channel.
Could not find a way to do it and then just brain farting.
I thought you know what the double click on the thing that might bring me.
And here I am.
You invented the double click.
Well I thought about that but somebody had beat me to it.
I've been said that I'm sure they might be and I could write for something right for that.
Well it took me 20 minutes to get push to talk working.
I'm usually any time I've been here before or by the way for people that don't know me.
I don't know if I'm not very often 50 150 knows me.
So it's count file.
You probably heard me on the chat before the years ago under the name Fistlewood.
That's me.
I've just sort of pre-randed and changed all that kind of stuff.
I don't really come here very often but yeah, usual annual annual appearance.
I usually set up with push to talk but this time round I'm using iOS.
And it was just a bit awkward.
I couldn't could not figure out how to try to drag my name into the right thing.
It's more intuitive.
I'm just overthinking how to move around in iOS.
That's all.
I imagine that was it.
I certainly missed around with it for longer than it should have been.
It should have taken me this morning.
A lot of the time it's easy and hindsight once you've figured it out.
And tell you actually do the thing that you should have been doing all along.
I'll need to remember that.
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