hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr3846.txt

Episode: 3846
Title: HPR3846: HPR Community News for April 2023
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3846/hpr3846.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 06:36:48

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3846 from Monday 1 May 2023.
Today's show is entitled HPR Community News for April 2023.
It is part of the series HPR Community News.
It is hosted by HPR Volunteers and is about 64 minutes long.
It carries an explicit flag.
The summary is HPR Volunteers talk about shows released and comments posted in April 2023.
Hello everybody.
This is Dave Morris calling from Edinburgh and this is the Community News Show and I'm
the first one to talk because Ken's not available today but I do have a long with me.
You're welcome.
Thank you.
And we need to sort of flag to say it used to be next but we've got no means of waving
it at each other.
But yeah, yeah.
So everyone's along with me and we're going to we've got the usual process of reviewing
the shows in the past month and having a look at the comments and anything on the mailing
list which I can tell you ahead of time there's nothing so but anyway we will plow
on.
So there are no new hosts.
We usually announce new hosts at this point when we're doing the show.
There aren't any sadly but there you go but we'll start with the first show of month
which was the Community News for March and we do have a comment on this.
Now click on and the comment is from Kevin O'Brien who entitles it updating your profile.
I've wanted to update my profile but I haven't discovered how to do it.
I could then add my mastered on account so it's Kevin.
It's yes, less obvious than it should be I always feel.
You need to send in a show, you can see what we did there and as part of the form there's
a place where you can adjust your profile or add one if you don't have one.
So that's really the way to do it.
But to ask Kevin to send in a show and he's extremely profligate with these shows seems
a little bit unfortunate.
If the worst comes to the worst we can edit these things so I'm prepared to do the odd
one or two if that's an easier way for anybody.
All right.
That sounds good.
It just makes things simpler, one, there's the encouragement and two, then we don't have
to set up a whole profile log in and all the security things that come with it this
way.
It just keeps things simple.
Yes, maybe we need better indicators as to where to go to do it.
It probably is there, a pretty certain that we'll be there, but you need to dig fairly
deeply to find it, I would guess, so yeah, we need to think about making it a little
bit more obvious, perhaps.
So moving on then to the next show, 3827, which is a reply to 3798, 3799, I haven't actually
checked to see what that is.
This is Brian and Ohio responding to a show which mentioned Slackware, I think, but I'm
not quite sure.
Yeah, I think he's responding to bootloaders.
It's just quickly looking.
That was 3880, that's the next one.
3798 is mechotroniac a show where he's talking about sending up a laptop and having some
issues about doing so, I think, and there was comments about installing Slackware anyway.
So I think Brian and Ohio is coming in to say, there's some hints and tips about how
to do it.
Sorry, I'm trying to get myself organized here, I had too many tabs open, and now I've
got the wrong one, I'll be right back.
It's usually me that gets me tabs tied in and not okay.
Yes, I think he was, I think Brian talks about Lilo and E. Lilo, which is one of the original
I think bootloader for Linux, and yeah, so he's I think, yeah, free rate, I think he's
responding to those issues that they were having with setting up the laptop.
Yeah, yeah.
Okay, that's good.
If you're interested in Slackware, I'm sure there's some useful stuff there.
Never wanted to try it myself, but you know, it's always a day when you think, oh, is
that laptop sitting there and it's don't like what's running on it?
What shall I try?
And Slackware might be a thing that you would try.
So yeah, worth knowing, definitely, definitely.
So next show is from some guy on the internet, Scotty, as he's often known, but the another
issue of the Oh No News.
And this, yeah, this is, he said, these are turning out to be really very good, actually,
highlighting various security issues and bits of news and so forth.
So yeah, it's, there's a good show for him, I think.
Yes, yeah, he's doing a great job.
I'm really enjoying his Oh No News and the added audio effects or touches that he adds
to them.
Yeah.
I know he's having a great time, isn't he?
I like the Oh No News in the background.
They're really cool.
Yeah.
You want to do that?
We do have one comment.
I can do it.
So Brian and Ohio comments on the episode entertaining knew that's entertaining.
I like it.
I think that was supposed to be news.
That's entertaining.
I like it.
Yeah, very good.
Very good.
That's certainly entertaining.
Oh, don't worry about that.
So next show was myself and Mr. X having a chat in recent past seems like a lot of time
I can.
It was March the 11th.
I put it in the notes.
So we were, what we've ended up doing is going to grab a large or late breakfast or something
in a pub and then since there's nowhere else to go and record stuff, you can't really
do it in a pub there's too much and we'd always be going to sit in my car usually and record
stuff there.
So you were just chatting about a bunch of different topics that had come up, things
we'd been doing, things we plan to do and that sort of stuff.
So yeah, it's always a fun thing to do.
I'm not sure how much fun it is to listen to.
It's fun to do.
And now I always enjoy them.
I mean, you two always have interesting topics, I mean, to cover and always seem to have
something going on, especially Mr. X.
Yeah, for a guy who's got a really demanding job, he always seems to have some interesting
thing to do or is doing or thinking about or developing or whatever, yeah, good?
We're planning another one before long, so hopefully we'll get some good topics together
for that.
Yeah, that's good.
Yes, the only thing is you've got to wear where you park so you don't look too shady
with two guys in a car, talking in a microphone, yeah, CIA, what's going on here?
Okay, so the next show is from Hooka and it's entitled Into New Mexico and they're moving
from...
Oh, they're before within Arizona, I think, and then they moved on to New Mexico, is that
all right?
And yeah, these, these are good, I love these, I've said this every time, I think, these
sort of travel diary type of thing with lots of pictures as well, if you go and dig
into the flicker stuff, I enjoy seeing people's holidays and vacations and stuff, it's
very cool.
We should I could do some of these myself?
Yeah, it is nice, and of course he has it like with his diary and everything, it
just makes it really a nice way to review it and multiple sort of aspects between the
pictures and his narration and just all the places they've been able to visit.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's good to be looking over the shoulder of somebody who's doing stuff
like this, it's good to him, and good for him for having the organizational skills to
keep these sorts of notes together, you know, that's very impressive, I've often wanted
to do that, but never really done it to this level of sophistication.
Yeah, the same, same here, not, I'm usually lucky to just get us organized and get there
and then relax without adding the extra, like I really should document, I mean, it's
true, you'd like to be able to go back and look, because now you think back on things and
remember highlights, but there's still probably a lot of details that just fade with, you
know, time.
Yeah, yeah, my son is a great traveler, he and his girlfriend try and go to lots of places.
I think they had tripped a chain, it was a little bit of a stretch, but anyway, that's
quite a few years ago, but there was one year they went to Japan and they were keeping a log
of everything with pictures on a Google Drive thing or something for us, a lot at home,
and wow, I must have taken them so much effort to do, you know, every time you come home from
some mountain climbing exercises, I'm going to sit down and write up stuff that you've done
in stitching all the pictures and things, it needs great dedication.
Definitely, yes, yes it does.
So the next one was some go on the internet again with another show, we're entitled
introducing Bumblebee, a friend who is joining him on the show, so they were having
some quite interesting discussions about all kinds of things that they come across on the internet,
quite a variety of things actually, all beautifully annotated in the notes, I should say,
but yeah, I found this quite fascinating and Bumblebee sounds like quite a
an individual. Lots of things to say, very bright and pleasant and interesting to listen to,
so yeah, cool.
Definitely, that brings, I think I like a fresh pair of eyes to things, you know, after you've
sort of been doing it for years and years, you sort of have your view set and now you're seeing
it through the eyes of somebody that obviously has some experience, but I still feel, you know,
sort of coming up in the tech awareness and tech, you know, the how it works side of things.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's good to have new eyes looking at on these things, new minds considering them
and so on. Very, very good. There were three comments on this one, I'll do the first one from
Trey, it's just great interview, Bumblebee, thanks for sharing, I look forward to hearing more from
you in the future. Scotty, what a great interview, I want, I love this format of open discussion with
a guest to get to know them and their perspective on the topics, keep up the awesome work.
And second comment from Brian in Ohio, I like to, I like the interview, hope to hear more of your
conversations. The shame that the cricket is so locked down, but there are great tools like
inkscape to make SVG files. Check out PC Linux OS magazine, lots of good gimp and inkscape tutorials,
looking forward to when you become a Slackware user, smiley face emoji. Very good.
I felt motivated to comment on this one, I was a bit late listening to show, so
I was a bit behind the times. Anyway, I said excellent show, I'm a bit late listening to it,
but this was the most entertaining and interesting show. I've always enjoyed shows with
several people interacting and this was a good example of how to do it. It's a great discussion
as well as some insights into the cricket. I'd heard of these devices and have a door to who'd
love to have one, but not going to happen just now. Anyway, more of these types of shows please,
that's the finishing line. I do believe your wish will be granted. Yes, yes, I happen to have a,
my crystal ball is telling me, my welcome to me. So next we have a show from Minix, who has
contributed to HBO before, but not often, and he's a host on the Linux logcast, so I do
listen to that on and off, and he's talking about how I left Google behind, and this is pretty
good actually. I've followed this route myself to a small extent, but haven't managed to close down
everything, to avoid a fair bit. He also hasn't closed down everything, but he's done more work on the
subject than I have. I thought that was most interesting. Yes, I read different articles. I know
some of the people on late-night Linux have like, de-google themselves completely, and then I love
like listening, you know, how Minix was going about it. It's like one of those things you look at,
you're like, that would be great, but it just feels so mind-boggling, overwhelming to actually
start down that path, as I have let Google weave itself into so many aspects of things.
Oh, you're quite right. You're quite right. I think of myself painting myself into the
smallest possible corner, and then going, how do I escape? Realising which of my limbs I've
caught off as a consequence, you know, as it were, it's worrying. It's worrying that it is the
case, and that you feel it would be desirable to disengage totally, but the consequences would
not be good. But I guess that's how they get you, but yeah, probably it would be good to start
like picking something and working on, you know, some service or something that I can, you know,
use less of. So there's one comment, would you? I think it's your turn, would you mind?
Sure, and a comment from Brian and Ohio. Thank you. Great show, Minix. Keep them coming. You
might try a new pie to watch your YouTube anonymously on Android. Yeah, I didn't really follow that,
because I'm not investigating the area at all, but it's an interesting point. Yeah, I didn't
look into it. I wonder if it's something similar, like, you know, whether you have the,
what is it for the, the DL? So what YouTube DL think is the name of the program that lets you
download the YouTube video to your hard drive on your laptop or computer and watch it that way?
Yeah, yeah. I know of it. I have used it occasionally. I tend not to, not to want to, to watch
things on a, on a phone or whatever. I just watch them, you know, through the, through the web,
web browser mostly. But yeah, yeah, I can see. I mean, it would be useful to be able to, just,
to collect stuff and if you're traveling and you might not be in contact with, with,
good cell networks of wild Wi-Fi or whatever, to be able to do that type of thing.
Yeah, good. Next, we have a show from Ken Fallon and it's another one of the podcast
recommendations series where Ken is recommending a software freedom podcast. I think he said that he
had been in touch with the, the software freedom people while it was them and realized that it was
time that we actually had a proper reference type podcast to them. So yeah, we heard episode 14,
I think it was world of mesh networking. And yeah, I actually listened to the, to the podcast
on way behind with them. I hadn't heard this one yet. But it was, yeah, it's a great, great podcast
and they do a really good job. So yeah, excellent. Yeah, it's nice. And I think I had actually,
I think in the last year had started, I actually already had it in my feed, their software freedom
podcast. So it's kind of, you know, cool that those worlds were colliding. But yeah, yeah,
that's good. I mean, it's easy to miss these things unless you actually go out hunting for them
or you get recommendations and stuff. But, you know, I think it's a good thing that we on
providing recommendations, even if it's, it's superfluous to, to many people, it'll be some
that will appreciate it, I think. Yes, I agree. So next, we had the episode five of the
new year show recording. And this one, I've gotten how long these, these, these have been kept
in a reasonable length. So there's about two hours. I see this particular one. So yeah, so this
is a continuation of obviously episode four. And yeah, I do enjoy these. This one had, it was,
as interesting as all, all of them I've heard. But the, some of the issues with mumble,
somebody had speakers in their, in the background or something, because there was huge amount of
echoing whenever they, they keyed up. I think they had pushed a tour, wherever they, they did
the push. The echoing came in and it made it really dreadful to listen to I found. So I skipped
a bit of it to avoid that because it, it, it, it, it mangles my brain. Listen to that. But yeah,
it was, it, it, I think, it kept me commented on by some of the, the more experienced podcasters
on the, on the show, saying, you know, do something about it. But I don't think anybody actually
did fix it in the end. So everybody started to think when that particular person keyed up,
they, they, they tended to be quiet. So there was less chance of there being echo. But I don't
really, you know exactly what was going on there. But it does spoil it somewhat. I think that
message needs to be conveyed to, to next year's comfort participants. Yeah, but that, you know,
and I mean, I'm still new to sort of the group chat, but it, I mean, audio is always one of those
things that can be a real bug-a-boo to get right. And then, you know, on top of them having a bunch
of people with varying levels of skill and varying setups and, you know, it's, it's never going
to be perfect. Oh, yeah, certainly, certainly true. But it's, it, it, in general, it's good. I,
I'm getting about 80, 80 to 90 percent good ratings on these shows personally. That's my sort of
analysis of them. So it's not a massive deal. Yeah. And I mean, it is a really amazing undertaking.
And like we said, this year's show notes have been incredible. So, you know, don't sort of
slog through or skip it a bit. So you at least have a lot of information still to read over.
Absolutely, absolutely. It's, yeah, that, well, I think we've congratulated that the show
know right as several times, but I think we could definitely do so again, because it's a brilliant
piece of work. Makes it a whole, a whole different experience, I think. So next, we have Archer's 72,
who is continuing work on his retro karaoke machine. This is part two. And he's, sub sub tech says
Archer's 72 fixes, misplaced belts and figures out what really happened. So, I, I definitely enjoyed
this episode. Yeah. I do, do enjoy these, fascinated with the con, how these things work. And,
you know, to see somebody who's got the skills to, to debug and fix them is, it's, it's pretty
fascinating. Yeah, especially when you're dealing with all those rollers and belts and things.
Yeah, no, I know. It's a nightmare when you, you look inside one of these things for the first
time in, from a point of view of inexperience. It's quite scary. But yeah, he's, he's made some,
some good, good headway with it, I think. So yeah, he did actually fix it, didn't he? Yeah, it
doesn't say quite as much as that in the notes, but my, my notes, I say, yes, he did actually get
it fixed. So I made it work more reliably. So, I think it, you know, clean it up. I think he
still had some issues with it, maybe like, like, where you see the picture is putting his finger on
and I can't remember. I thought at the end, he had a little bit of issue with it, not latching,
yes, right? And now you say that, I remember saying that. So the location of the cassette was not,
not ideal. Something was, was broken, maybe on the, something should have been pressing it in,
holding it rigidly that was, maybe not working, but yeah, it's, it's amazing that we ever used
this sort of stuff, isn't it? It's quite surprising that we rely it on, on this strange mechanical
stuff to, to listen to music and things. So yeah, good to see. So the next show was me again,
and I'm talking about a Linux tool called, I don't know how you say this, I'd be calling it
Zoxide. It's a Z and followed by the word oxide. I think I did work out that it's based on
another thing that was written, he just given the name of Z and was written in some language
or other. I'm not sure what, and then they, somebody rewrote it in Rust. So the oxide, does that
refer to, I would say that's probably the rust. Yeah, it's a pun, it's a joke. I give it a very
American name of the Zoxide. Yes, I know, I was bothered by not being able to decide on how best
to say it, but anyway, it's an alternative to CD, but it knows things about where you've been.
So if you give it a partial directory name, then it will work out where you're likely to want
to go based on the data it has and a sort of waiting scoring system. And yeah, for me, it does
the job really, really well, and it's great for the lazy people like me who can't be bothered to
type great long directory names. So I think it's very cool. I haven't tried it yet, but it's
definitely interesting. I still, and then actually push D and pop D, it's like one of those things
I cycle through and I use them for a while, and then I forget about them. Tell somebody reminds me
that they're there, but the Zoxide does sound very useful. Yes, since I've found it, I've been using
it constantly. I occasionally forget, but even if you do, if you type CD, this thing still watches
you and knows where you've been. So yeah, I find it to be pretty useful. I don't know how I've
managed to survive without you, to be honest. So yeah, I noticed that the, I think you pointed
this out to me at some point, didn't you, that the way in which the show notes are shown, they contain
a bunch of unicode characters, and they're being rendered, rendered messily at the moment,
but I'm going to comment upon this whole issue, we get to the any other business, a bit later on.
So if you're following along, as you listen to this show, don't be surprised that there's
some apparent junk in the in the notes. There is an issue that we are resolving at the moment.
So next we had, we were running very, very low on shows, but that particular time, and there was
a void opening up in front of us, as far as shows or concern, and Ken used a couple of emergency
shows to fill the two empty slots. This was the first one, which was from Mike Ray, and it's
sort of called make a vortex cannon. He's making this device, which can extinguish a candle at 10
feet. He says, so yeah, good, good stuff, actually. I've never done this, but I've seen people
do it, and I always find it quite impressive. Yeah, that is a good show. I am now thinking, this
one might be fun to try to do with my girls, or maybe for an upcoming birthday party, or something,
see if you can blow out the birthday candles with a vortex cannon. Oh, that would be fun.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. One of the things about this, Mike said to use a whole punch or a whole cutter,
in the base of the Pringles can, which is metal. And I was thinking, I'm not quite sure what he
means, and I suddenly realized that there was a point where we all had access to these things where
you drilled a hole, you put a two-part thing through it, which was held, the two halves of which
were held with the bolt, and they had cutting edges, and then you tighten the bolt and it's cut
through the metal. I've not actually done that myself, but I've seen people using it. I don't
know, I mean, they must still exist, but I've never seen anybody use one of those since, it's usually
these pole saw type things I see people using. Not good for this type of job, though, it'll
leave a horribly ragged edge. Yeah, I don't age. Yeah, I don't even know if I've ever had a
whole punch, that's going to be perfectly fine. I think I had access to one when I was a student,
maybe, and there was a workshop that we could use with all sorts of fancy stuff in,
and whole punch was definitely a thing I saw, saw used, but never used myself. But yeah, anyway,
it's just a thing, it's a sort of a device from the past, as far as I'm concerned. It would do a good
job. I've forgotten whose turn it is to do the comments as one here. I'll take it. Okay, I've been
doing a lot of Brian and Ohio's. Comment one from Brian and Ohio intro. The nice thing about
an emergency show was hearing the original HBR intro music. I like it so much better than the
new intro music. It seems like a lot of people, most again, the old in parentheses better, intro
music, don't produce shows. Go figure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a controversial statement.
Yes, yes. It was quite nice to hear the old tune. It did great a bit of variety, I think.
When we were using that all the time, it did get a little bit tedious, I found, but it was nice
when people were rotating around the different tunes, but I don't want to give Ken more work in
having a random tune selector necessarily. So it would be nice to have there in. I think maybe if,
well, once we get some other things taken care of, maybe we can look at, I think the biggest problem
people had was just trying to get the sound volume, you know, and that I think if, you know,
we could have automated that a little bit, made and made of made that, you know, better for people
and found that not so annoying, but yeah, it was nice to hear the old music.
Yeah, yeah. I know that one of the things I was involved with in the early days when I joined HBR,
as a janitor, we weren't janitors in those days, but anyway, was to say, can we not turn this
thing down? I think we reduced the volume on the audio that you could drop into your show and
stuff, but yeah, because when you looked at the levels in audacity or something, the differences
was frighteningly, there's a huge big step from the blaring intro and the outro as well.
People said that they got woken up by the outro, remember that, which, you know, there was
a certain serendipity there, I guess, I'm not sure. Very good. So next, we have the other emergency
show that I mentioned. This is John Culp, who is, according an episode, as he bikes to work. I don't
know if this proceeded. He was, he had constructed a reclining bike by fixing two bikes, pieces of
frames together, brazing them, I think he hit it. And yeah, whether this was that bike, I don't
know, I don't think he ever said, but it was, yeah, it's good. I like these type of lambian things.
Yes, sorry, God. No, I don't, I don't think he definitely didn't mention the reclining bike.
I think Bigley rings a bell, but I don't remember it exactly.
I remember it particularly because he, he had all, he had a lot of images of the construction
process. He had them on his home server and then he's server crashed and all the pictures linked
from the show, in the show, I should say, failed, we're failing. So we managed, he managed to recover
all the pictures of his, of the disc of his server. And I put them onto the HBR server as a sort of
thing that you could scroll through, I think, I can't remember what I did now. But yeah, so I
remember that one in quite a lot of detail. He went to a huge amount of trouble to get all the
bits and and fix them together and make a reclining seed and all this stuff look, look really good.
Amazing. Never ridden one of those. I have to go back and look for that. I guess the one thing
episode about this episode is I was just sort of getting, you know, getting settled to listen to
this nice long bike ride to work and like I didn't realize he was only like two or three minutes
away on his bike. Yes, I know. He said something like he couldn't go this normal route because the
bridge was was out. He lives next to a river or a stream or something and he had to go the long
way around. But even the long way around was was pretty short, matter of minutes. So yeah, that's
good though. Good. It's nice to hear John's voice again on this on HBR. I agree. And we had
another show from March 72. This time ripping CDs from the terminal using command line stuff.
So yeah, it's he's talking about an odd name. I keep my eyes keep skipping over the name,
ABCDE. She did explain. I've lost the explanation but never mind. But yeah, it sounds like quite a
cool thing for turning the audio from a CD into a digitized form on your machine. So yeah.
Yeah, that's neat little tool. Sometimes now I wish I'd known about it earlier back when I was
converting some of my CDs and you know, ripping them onto my disk. Yeah, yeah, I know it was never
that easy to do. There's a not a thing called K3B or something. If you were a KDE user,
I think I used that which was a reasonable GUI thing that you mounted the CD and then
told it where to put stuff on how to name things and that sort of stuff. But this one uses
one of these databases CDDB which is now a GUI thing. I don't know much about it. What was it called
before? I can't remember. I think originally there was music brains. Oh, that's right. Yeah.
Then they closed down. You know, you can actually need a subscription now to use it. It's not
quite as open and out there. So there's the new db.org. I guess it's now what he's using.
Yeah, yeah, which is pretty cool if that's available. Anyway, yeah, nice. Because it can
make the whole process of converting a CD a lot more straightforward in that you get all
of the proper track names and that sort of stuff which may not be in the visible in the CD.
It's only certain formats where that would be the case, isn't it? Yeah, I think there are,
yeah, particularly for CDs. Oh, sorry. But yeah, it does make it much nicer. I spend a lot of time
typing in album names and track names and artist names when I was first doing conversions.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think I used, I've been a KDE user for a long time. There was a tool called
Amarok in the earlier days of KDE. And I think it did actually do various searches to find out
the names of tracks and stuff and track ordering and all that sort of stuff. But I think you had to
configure it up to point to whatever these things were. Maybe not music brains, but there was
a thing called CDDB was there. Is that the generic name for these things? I don't know.
That sounds familiar. Yeah, it's been a while. Yeah, same here.
But yeah, this sounds really good. That was a good thing to know about. So no comments on that.
One next show is from Huka playing the original civilization and he gives hints on playing that game.
And it's the origin of the civilization hierarchy of games, I guess.
Yeah, it sounds like this was he was talking from the original games, but for the original game.
It's been and then how they sort of some of them evolved, as particularly with some of the
commands you could do. Yeah, I think he's got more shows on this subject further on down or
yeah, well, anyway, there's a there's a bunch around this particular subject whether they
precede it this or follow it. I can't remember. But yeah, cool, cool, cool. It's always good to know
about these things. Not a thing that makes me want to play it personally, but then I'm not much
of a game player. So I'm no, no, no, I'd stick at all. I'm right there with you Dave.
We were definitely not, I think the people to be doing reviews of games. No, no, no.
Yeah, I'd be I'd be turning people away in droves. I think if I tried that. So comments are
pretty sparse, but the next one is from Scotty and Bumblebee. They've got another edition of
the Oh No News, and they're talking about ransomware in relation to the US Marshall service
amongst other things. So yeah. Yeah, that's another another good episode. I mean, you always know
ransomware is going on. You just never think about like all the places, you know, that are getting
hit and all the various, you know, not only from, you know, your personal computer to your
healthcare provider to your local government. Yeah, yeah. I could not understand back in the day
as as windows were starting to become, I could back quite a long way, but, you know, Windows 3.1
was leading on to whatever else. And how it was that everybody was running in administrator mode,
because if you didn't, you were you couldn't do half the stuff that you needed to do. And as a
consequence, things like opening a link in an email would cause bits of software to grab the
privilege and rip your system apart. Why is that still the case? I don't I something I'm missing
here. Is it just there's no incentive to to make it any better? I thought Windows had been
improved in terms of this sort of stuff, but is it still an issue that you just click on a thing
and bam, you you got ransomware all over your your environment? I mean, it's definitely getting
better. I mean, I think like particularly the latest versions of Windows, you know, it doesn't
even, you know, I think generally creates, you know, has you create a regular user. I mean,
with ransomware, it can still be, you know, particularly I guess a like a business or, you know,
something where there's a bunch of users and they have to have access to certain resources. So if
somebody, you know, even if it's not encrypting the whole file system, it's still encrypting,
you know, it's getting into their data. And if it's data, you need for your job, you know,
that a lot of people that need access to that same data, you still end up with that, you know,
even if it doesn't take down the whole system, it gets through all the data that everybody needs
to do, to do the business, not the job, not necessarily, you know, the operating system itself.
Yeah, see what you're coming from? Yeah, yeah. So if it's a, if it's something that you have
right access to, even though you're not privileged, then it could, and it's a shared resource,
then it could grab it and encrypt it. So you'd have thought that there would be ways in which you
could limit access or limit the right, right ability or, you know, have permissions on,
on various bits, having worked in the university where we were always paranoid about students who
tended to be fairly smart, getting into things and, and destroying stuff. We always tried to have
as many, whatever they were, policies or whatever, that restricted access to only those areas that
were relevant to the students' work and stuff. But I don't know, I wasn't involved with that.
I was a Linux guy, one of the Linux team, so yeah, I was just observing. But
well, I think people are becoming more and more aware of, you need to, you know,
do push that least, you know, least permissions down the stack a little further. I think
there's sort of leftovers from that. Well, I'm not running as root, so it must be okay,
so I'm not really going to worry about how do I need read-read-only permissions or read-write
permissions. I mean, I don't know. No, no, I don't know enough about it really, but it just
puzzles me that things are so, or have been, or so wide open in the past, and it's been incredibly
slow process to make them more secure over the years. It just seemed ridiculous. The assumption
that opening an email could devastate your business, it seems to me to be the height of insanity.
There you go. That's just me. We should all be using pine as our email reader.
Yeah, yeah, done being there, done that, didn't like it really much. So I don't know whose turn it
is to coins, but I'll comment on this one, because it's really a retrospective thing. Ken posted
on this show that the play button on each show page has been moved to the top of the episode,
and this was the show where it was commented on. I think Bumblebee was asked what do you think of
the HBR stuff, and she said, yeah, but why is it so hard to find the button? And I think, as you
was saying earlier on that fresh inside, fresh view of things, is why would you put the button on
your cassette player underneath it? Why would you do that? That was very, very useful and helpful,
comment, I think. Yeah, I think it's one of those things where it was put up there as sort of like,
oh, in case you're here, and you want to, but with the idea, I think most people who worked on
the site came from it from, oh, I'm just, you know, it's going into my pod catcher. I'm playing it
on some other, through some other means, so you don't even really think about the usability of
the website. That's very, very true. That's very true. I don't use the website itself to listen to
stuff, but well, except very, very, very rarely. So yeah, it's easily, easily done. The other
factor was that in the earlier days, show notes were very, very minimal. So you'd see it,
see that the button, because it would be there on that, you know, you wouldn't need to scroll at
all the find out in many cases. That was probably another reason. Yeah, that's probably a good
reason. It took so long for it, you know, because people are now, I'd definitely even, in just
since I've been listening over the last, well, I don't know how many years now, five or six or seven,
but the show notes have definitely improved. I would say improved as a good word to describe,
you know, in general. Yeah. And so they've been getting pushing. I guess that would push the play
down the page a little bit. Yes, yes, yes. Anyway, it's fixed now, so that's good. So next show was
from Mr. X. And I think this is the show he mentioned when we're chatting about shows and stuff,
saying he recorded it a while ago, but he hadn't got ran to doing the notes and all that sort of
stuff yet. But so yeah, this is in the series, what's in my toolkit or what's in my bag, as it's
often interpreted. And it is what's in Mr. X's Rucksack. See, he goes through the bag that he
takes to work. And very detailed in everything. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. He's got some
strange and wonderful things in there. I'm sure we're all guilty, if it's guilty at all. I mean,
we could all be, we could all find that we would make shows of a similar length if he went into
into our various bags. I certainly would be one of those. I sometimes reach in,
what on earth is that? Why have I got a piece of string in the bottom of this bag in a bag?
And those sorts of things. So I think I probably had a Rucksack which needed a bit of string to
stop things coming undone or something. I can't remember would be the answer to in my particular case,
but you know what I mean? It's very easy to accumulate weird things in the bag that you're
looking around all the time. Yeah, sometimes it becomes quite the archaeological dig as you
indeed. So usually find out when by, you know, you have to move from one Rucksack to the other,
like, why don't I guess I don't really need to carry that around with me again? Yeah, yeah,
no, that is very true. It's, I, yeah, I think bag I have here beside me could do with a, could
do then completely emptied and then refilled. And I think Firmad would not return back to it.
Yeah, good, but I, I love to see, showed the pictures. It always adds a dimension to the whole
business. So yeah, it was good. I enjoyed it. I did enjoy the pictures too. I'm just scrolling
took a long time, but yeah, no comments on this one, but yeah, it was good. So next we have
contribution from the Linux Logcast podcast. And this is a thing that, this is Honki Magoo,
who I think organises, he has done this before sending in the sort of pre-show stuff that they do,
which they often, which they record and then put on the end of their shows, but yeah,
then he has in the past sent sent them in to us and not attach them to his shows because
it's a good way to have to send a show of some sort in when we're very low. And that's what he's
doing here. So they're just generally chatting about all manner of stuff. They're quite a lot
of TV and movie watching and things. Yeah, I enjoyed this actually. Yeah, good to do. They definitely
covered a wide variety of topics. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I know the show itself can be a bit like this.
I do listen, though, the rate at which they produce long shows is overwhelming. I can't
give up with them. So I'm way, way, way behind with them, but yeah, I enjoy what they do. They've
got some gems amongst all the other odds and sobs that they compile. So yeah, it's very cool.
Thank you for that, Honki Magoo. And it looks like there's one comment from Brian and Ohio.
Thanks. Thanks. Reminds me why I don't listen to Mintcast or TLL. Yeah, that's the Linux link
texture. And I think he's, I don't know what he's getting at really. I don't listen to Mintcast
anymore. Again, too many podcasts. I can't keep up. TLLTS tended to be incredibly long and
got a bit sort of rancorous over over the years. Lots of, you know, people firing shots at each
other and things. So I'd stop listening to that one too. But yeah, yeah, whatever. That's
Brian and Ohio's view. Okay. Yeah, I don't think I've actually listened to to any of the
those podcasts myself. The Linux link texture was one of the very early podcasts. And as I was,
that come across the idea of podcasts, maybe 2005, something like that. Got myself a little
player and I river player. I was hunting around something that might be interesting and found them.
And I did enjoy them. There was a different style of things in those different people.
So yeah, I did listen them for a fair number of years. But you know, things change, including
yourself, you know, so I moved into other areas. Yep, I understand. My podcasts have changed
a good bit too since from when I first started listening. Yes, yes. So the next one is another show
from the New Year episode six from the collection. And again, another two-hour episode, which was,
which yeah, good, some interesting stuff again and fantastic notes, as you said before. It's
you can get a lot of that just reading the notes. So yeah. And there's one comment from Brian
and Ohio. Interesting show. Eddie, did I miss it or did pro-podcast or ever mention the shows he
does? I'm sure pro-podcast, possibly with Joe Resington. Because he's, he's, I think he was making
the point that he wants to make a living. He said this from the start. He wanted to make a living
being a podcaster. So yeah, he's got a fair number of shows now, has he? There's the bun two
podcasters recently been resurrected under his podcast hierarchy or something. Not sure.
I have to admit, this was one I had on sort of in the background at work and so I'm not.
Don't have a really great recollection of none of the other things going on.
I was, my attention was going in and out because I, as usual, one tends to listen to
basically the longer podcast while doing something else. I can't remember what I was doing,
but it was something that took my attention away from time to time. So yeah, yeah, quite understandable.
But I think with Joe, Joe Resington, who has had a tradition of joining in with these things,
and some interesting things to say. So, okay, so we're coming on to the last one, which is
using T-mux, the terminal multiplexer, and it's an overview for a March of 72, and he uses T-mux
and restores sessions between reboots, which is good. Yeah, I, this is one I'm going to have to
go back and listen to again because there's a lot of quite packed amount of information in here.
I don't use T-mux, I still use screen. There was a point a few years ago where I thought, well,
screen's really old now. I should have moved to T-mux, shouldn't I? And then I looked at T-mux and
said, well, what does it give me that screen doesn't? What is there that I would want that it does
off for me that screen doesn't offer? And the answer came back, well, actually, very little,
I'm not sure I'm prepared to change. However, listening to this, I'm going to need to review that
because I didn't realize there were plug-ins for T-mux. Do you use it yourself, Ron?
No, I've used screen a little bit. I think I might have tried T-mux because I remember when it first
came out, and after a year, and I've read different articles on, you know, the differences
between T-mux and screen, although I don't remember any of the particulars at this point.
So there have been times when I'm like, I don't want this long-running job to die
when my SSH fails, so all of I are up, but I think I've used, I think I end up defaulting
to screen because that was probably the first one I heard about.
Yeah, and they all work on the basis that you have to, like, both work on the basis that you have
to put in a prefix control A, I think, is the default, followed by some character sequence,
which causes various things to happen, like creates a new session, or splits a screen, or
those types of things. So once you've got that wide into your brain, there's a certain reluctance
to move away from it, at least in my case, I'm a bit reluctant to drop it and start learning
over again, I suppose I could reprogram T-mux to be closer to screen. And I think I'll pretty
similar in many ways, so maybe it wouldn't be such an issue to do. But yeah, I'm sure if you look,
there's probably somebody out there that has, like, a blog on how to set T-mux up, like, screen.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I'm tempted to, to give it a proper try actually, based on this.
I use it to do various HBR things, I blog into Remote Sheen, and I have several sessions
open, screen sessions open, I can then hop around in and do various tasks. So that's quite useful.
I don't use it a huge lot, but it is quite useful to be able to come back to and find the thing
in the same status as last time. But if I were to run it on my desktop, then the reboot thing
would be, would be an issue. So it would be, you know, because it effectively lose everything,
you can't scroll back to see what you, what you, you talked a bit earlier on. You could still,
you sort of find it in the history, of course, but you can't scroll back and see, output,
and that type of thing. So I'm just wondering if it would be quite fun to have T-mux instead. So,
yeah, good show, very much appreciated. Yeah, I'm a very interesting show. So that's the,
the month shows reviewed. And we have a bunch of comments that relate to previous shows that have
come up in the past month. So we can, we can have a quick look at those. The first one is a comment
on show 3819 remapping mouse buttons with X-Bine keys on Linux by John Culp. And it's a comment
by Zen Flota 2. And he says, it's that John Culp again. I thought for sure they banished
him from the internet for playing a musical instrument. He's apparently out now.
Very good, very good. And on a comment on episode 3822, a tale of wonder angst and woe by Bookworm,
a comment to Bookworm, a small update. A worker found this link to an article explaining the
functionality of the watch. And that gives a link to an article, Hong Kong uses tracking
wristbands for coronavirus quarantine. So this is, I guess, in response to Bookworms talking about
when he went to Hong Kong and got tested positive for COVID and had to be quarantined.
Yep. Well, yeah. I think the previous comment was from Windigo who said the watch didn't have a
huge lot of functionality itself. It was more it plus the app on your phone that would,
that would blow the whistle on you if you left the place you were supposed to be or something to
that effect. So let me share it. Looked at this, but I was quite intrigued as to how it worked.
So I must must remember to go and look at this particular link. Yeah, by plan on looking at it
myself. Next one was 3823 GitLab pages for website hosting by Norrist. And this was a comment
from me. From you. So I'll let you read it, I guess.
Configuring an HP R site generator, a show Norrist. It didn't make me revisit the site.
I'd config file for the generator. I thought I had a section to configure where the templates
folder and output folder it is. And there is, although to be fair, I think I added it after his show.
If you look for, and then it shows a portion of Bitcode to look for, there's a template's pass,
and an output pass that you can now variables that you can now set. Would save you the copy step
in your CI steps, smiley face. Are you good? Yeah. Yeah. Good stuff. Now I was fascinated that
Norrist piled in there and did some interesting stuff in this area. Very good. Very
encouraging to be honest. Indeed. Indeed. So the next one is 3825, which was
show from Minix, and he's talking about creating a natural aquarium, a self-sustaining freshwater
aquarium that he built. And he comments himself. It's comment three. He's saying, here's a video
from my peer tube instance that goes into more detail about creating one of these tanks,
and he points to a video. I've watched nearly all of it. I found it fascinating.
What he was doing to set up his tank, I'm quite interested in the subject. I doubt whether I
do it myself, but I like finding out more about it. So yeah, that was good thing to add to the show,
I think. Yeah, I enjoyed that. I did watch the whole video. It's definitely, I mean, I think you
do it in small steps, but yeah, it's definitely time consuming, but it's definitely something you
have to give yourself to to get it set up right, I think. Yeah. He's a lot of dedication, I think,
doesn't that? That's the word I'm looking for. And then with comment from Ahuka, brings back memories.
Thanks for bringing back a lot of memories. I used to keep a bunch of aquariums all fresh water
back in the 1970s. I gave it up shortly after starting in grad school because I just didn't have
the time. I know you might not think aquariums need so much time, but it's more about how grad school
hit me. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, well, sort of the point you were making wasn't that the dedication
and the amount of brain power to time you have to give to that sort of hobby. But yeah, good,
good if you can. And the final comment on the show was from Minix, who says, hi, Ahuka. No, trust me,
I know that aquariums can be very time consuming, especially the more you have, things go wrong,
and they're never perfect. That's just life. Glad you enjoyed it. So that's all the comments done.
And the next thing we would normally go to would be mailing list discussions, but all there is on
the mailing list is a call for shows from Ken and me and Ansi recording of this show. So I don't
think we need to bother. I agree. The LWN.net thing we're tending not to pay much attention to might
be, might be worth dropping that actually. But it's a useful thing to look at if you're in an area
where there might be some sort of event that you would want to attend, but not show we need to review
it in the way we were doing it. So finally, I've got a little bit of AOB material to comment on.
And did you have something you were going to say? I just have a very brief updates about the
static website. So we did actually have one new contributor, Norris, who added a nice link to the
H and Hacker. I think he, I can't remember. I must have suggested it through the website,
through the repo posted a, I think he posted a comment somewhere. I can't remember exactly where
that Ken replied to. And then he posted a patch. And so that is now included. I'm not sure if it
made it into the PHP yet, but it is up on the working in the static. So that was the, the biggest
event for the static website. Yep. Yep. But we're very close to being able to go live with the
static site. This is my impression. Yeah. So I think we're getting close. Yes. Yeah. Everybody
to find the time to do the last little push. Yes. Yes. It's a real life, life in general,
gives Ken in the way in so many, so many cases of things, doesn't it? So yeah. But we'll, we won't
promise that it will be moved ahead by the next time we do one of these shows, but it should be
within the next sort of couple of months. I would, I would imagine the outside, but don't hold
that down spare. Yeah. Yeah. Of course, a minus a month or two on that. Yeah. Yeah. So the only
thing I was going to say was that I won't read this whole article because I got a bit verbose
with it as I was writing it. It came about Unicode characters in shows I alluded to briefly on
the way. And it came to light during the month that shows the Unicode characters in their title
summary or notes were not being represented properly on the website. I put in a definition of
what Unicode is from Wikipedia and link to the, the Wikipedia article. If you're interested,
there's, there's a lot of information to absorb there. The software and the database behind
the HBL website, they come from a time before Unicode, I'm pretty certain. Or at least before
it was very popular or implemented widely. But they've been updated to use Unicode encoding
a number of years ago. But I think we missed some changes as we did this because we found that
in some cases, the characters, the non-asky characters were going into the database and being
displayed from the database correctly. But if you looked at it behind the scenes like
grabbing the data out of the database and putting it into the static site, it was, it was messy,
it was, it was garbled and not proper Unicode. So something was, was changing it. And the same
thing was changing it back again on the way out, but which was quite amusing. So we're currently
ensuring that we've got all the changes made to the code that runs the, the website. And also
we're going to have to go through the database and fix up anything that got mangled
during the era of mangling. And then it will be, will be sorted. We'll mention it somewhere.
I doubt that there anybody is going to be overly upset about it. But you know, if you look,
if you look at stuff on or HPL webpage, it looks strange. Then you, you can probably just assume that
we'll get it fixed in the next month or two, a famous month or two timescale. And we, if you,
if it's still awful, when you next look at it a bit further down the road, then let us know
and we'll follow through. But I think we should be able to fix this with too much difficulty
down the road. We are having problems with getting Unicode into tags in audio files,
but something I'm working on at the moment. So hopefully we get that solved soon.
So that's it. And that's, that's all we have to add. Unless you have something else.
Yep. And thank you for that update on the Unicode. It's one of those things.
I take away from running on Linux in a browser. Like I've had so many various issues like that
that I just assumed when I saw it initially that like over occasionally that it was just something
with my browser. I didn't even think about the fact that, you know, it was some weirdness going on
in the background with HPL. So that may be part of the reason. I mean, obviously it hasn't caused
a big stink as we haven't really got them any comments about it until maybe recently.
Yeah. Yeah. It, it's one of these sort of semi magical things that go on behind the scene.
You put weird characters in and weird characters come back out again in the same, same layout as you
wanted them to look. And you don't actually consider much about how it all works. And I said, maybe
you, the listener, have no this insert out, but I don't. And so the journey of finding out
something about how it all works is quite, quite stretching to the, to the brain. But it's also
very interesting. You've been doing a good job so far. So you can keep your job.
Okay, look at a race. Yeah, zero plus zero equals. Anyway, that's that's us for this month.
And so join us again next month for another one of these recordings or listen to the show there
after. First Monday of every month we, the shows are supposed to come out. So until then goodbye. And
yeah. And goodbye from Hacker. Public Radio. Okay, thanks.
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