hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr3409.txt

Episode: 3409
Title: HPR3409: Linux Inlaws S01E37: All about Hacker Public Radio
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3409/hpr3409.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 22:55:57

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3409430, the 26th of August 2021.
Today's show is entitled, Linux in laws S0137, all about Hacker Public Radio and is part
of the series Linux in laws it is hosted by Monochromic and is about 96 minutes long and carries
an explicit flag. The summary is an interview with Ken Felon, janitor at Hacker Public Radio.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by Ananasthost.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HPR15, that's HPR15.
Better web hosting that's honest and fair at Ananasthost.com.
This is Linux in laws, a podcast on topics around free and open source software,
any associated contraband, communism, the revolution in general and whatever fences your
vehicle. Please note that this and other episodes may contain strong language, offensive
humor and other certainly not politically correct language you have been warned.
Our parents insisted on this disclaimer. Happy mom?
Thus the content is not suitable for consumption in the workplace, especially when played back
in an open plan office or similar environments, any minors under the age of 35 or any pets including
fluffy little killer bunnies, you trust the guide dog unless on speed and QT rexes
or other associated dinosaurs. Welcome to Linux in laws season 1 episode 37.
Martin how are things? Things are great, we got another great guest tonight.
Yes we do. Why don't you introduce yourself, Kevin, for the few people who do not know you?
I'm Ken Fallon, I'm one of the janitors as HPR hacker public radio. I'm on to talk to you
tonight about hacker public radio in a paid sponsorship deal.
Needless to say, the listeners hacker public radio is the platform that boosts it a small
independent podcast by the name of Linux in laws over a year ago to its current fame and fortune.
So we have been loyal to hacker public radio since it's very beginning as in the beginning of
something called Linux in laws. So tonight we're going to explore what this platform is all about.
So hacker public radio is a podcast that is released as one show every weekday, Monday,
Friday on any topic that is of interest to hackers. That sounds interesting.
That we've managed to scrape Linux in laws under that.
And we are more than grateful for this, Ken.
You touch on a very interesting subject from the start. Before we go into other interesting topics
like the history of hacker public radio, why don't you explain a little bit about the philosophy
and why this is not necessarily to bound to tech subjects?
Well, it's of interest to hackers is a nice
catch-all really for what's of interest to hackers because what I found interesting down
through the years is every show is uniquely different. And
sometimes that might be somebody reading the 80286 instruction set. That's definitely
of interest to hackers, but equally we had a show where a guy strapped on an MP3 player onto his hat
went for a swim down a river in France, went as far as the weir turned and swam back.
And that was of interest to hackers. So the amount of feedback he gets from shows
is this interesting or not. So yeah, it's been a good barrier. It encompasses the technical
aspects, but it also encompasses the friendly aspect that you're sitting down listening to
you know, somebody servicing the car or fixing their bike or painting their house or
cleaning the gutters. These have all been shows that people are just chatting. So you have
a hacker space feel as well to it, but equally you have the important messages, you know,
where in the period of time we've done try to do some social work as well to, you know,
put forward messages of internet censorship and the like. So whatever it is, if it's of interest
to hackers. Full disclosure, I first came across hacker public radio ages ago and something called
Schwarzwicky. I don't know if you remember the episode, I think it was you, but it might have
been somebody else talking to when Render was still around as in Render Schwarz, the second
person learning that podcast. And I can't remember who it was basically, but somebody mentioned that
there was actually an episode on somebody talking about his or her experiences in a mental work
of hospital. Yeah, and that was an interesting episode and you know, timefully as far as I know,
they're doing a lot better right now. So that's great, but you know, that's an experience that you're
not going to, that you're maybe not going to think is going to be of interest to hackers, but yet
turns out to be, yeah. And experience, we've quite a fairly hefty series on mental health issues.
And experiment on other things like accessibility and such, but the mental health issue
series is a popular one. And you know, if anybody listened to this, is having, is feeling a bit
down, no harm to go have a listen to some of those and reach out to us here on the network,
where we're happy to check in and see everything is doing okay. Is that so wrong that series?
Yeah, I'm serious is roaming, so you know, some series go quiet for a while and then they come
back to life, so yeah. Okay, why don't you explain a little bit about the about the history of
the project before we continue that discussion? Well, the history of the first mention of hacker
public radio goes way back to a show called Radio Freak America. And I don't know if you're
familiar with the freaking scene, but it was like the pre-internet sort of hacking thing,
where hacking in the sense of gaining access to telecommunication systems of companies usually.
And at the time, you know, international phone calls and long distance phone calls were
extremely expensive. You know, we're looking now at all the recording things that we have now,
it's considered free just the two. What we assume is normal that I'll be able to communicate with
anyone, anywhere in the world, and have a video conference, and I'll be really annoyed if like
10 people are not allowed to join or the bandwidth status back in the day we had to pay for stuff,
so there was a whole underground movement called phone freaking at the time. And on that,
the internet was starting and one of those groups was started to share information with hackers.
So to promote hacking as radio while freaking as it was at the time hacking kind of came later.
And from that, a lot of people were released the show up onto the internet, and then
the RSS protocol came along, and then that became an RSS feed, and the whole podcasting thing started.
And then two other computer groups, one was called the Bin-Rev-Radio, Bin-Revolution,
and they had a podcast coming off from that, called Bin-Rev-Radio, oddly enough.
And they ran for a few years, and in parallel with them was
Inflammacon communicators, that they had one as well. And some of those guys had
podcast incubator things where they were encouraging people to try podcasting, and a lot of people
were podcasting at the time. Global Linux links was going as well, and TLLTS are still going strong.
So those guys
came up with the idea of starting a shared podcast. And one of the last things that was mentioned
in the Radio Free America was the idea of starting this thing called Hacker Public Radio,
which is a play on the US public service, called PBS.
So having like a PBS service book for Hacker, and the idea there originally was that they would
start a today with a tech issue. It was around the time that Leo Laporte was starting off his
network, so this was a play on words. Not very... people shouldn't really pick jokes when
joke names when they're doing podcasts. So today with the tech issue started,
and the idea was that a calendar will be put up on every podcaster that was podcasting at the time
would pick a day in which to release a show. And it was actually that project that I started
I got involved in because they were saying that while after a while we're going to open it up
to the public so that basically anybody can send it to the show. So that ran for a while, and then
after 300 episodes that basically just rebranded into Hacker Public Radio overnight, and that was
the merging of the two podcasts. So
been radio had stopped, and infonormal con radio had also stopped, and the two teams came together,
and I think Enigma started posting shows at that time as well. So that continued on for quite a while.
And that's where Hacker Public Radio came from. So then there was a schedule
central and basically anybody could post a show, according to you pick a slot pick calendar,
and that's basically the history of HPR in essence.
Nice one. So was there any personal motivation for yourself to
was it creating a forum for people to do this, or was it something that you felt you wanted to
bring your own messages out there in terms of podcasting?
Well, at the time I wasn't involved in this, I'm not part of the Ben Rev community,
I'm also not part of the digital load bound largely because I'm not in the regions where those
two computer clubs basically, I think we would call them Hacker Spaces now, operate. So
when they had the opportunity to, when they were doing this idea of sharing knowledge and
you know, I come and place the post shows, I thought well, brilliant, I'll just contribute as a host,
but my involvement as a janitor didn't really start for oh, a good, maybe it's uh, so we started
HPR itself, today with a techie started 15 years, seven months ago, excuse me, 15 years, seven
months ago today, as you hear this, and 13 years ago it was renamed and they kind of ran for,
I think I'm started to help out about 10 years ago now, let me see, one second.
I was actually sponsored, so if you go to the website and go full episode guys, full episode
guide, I look for old soldiers that was back in 2010 was when I started giving them, you know,
I volunteered as a janitor to help out, so 2010 that was, yeah, well, this was approaching 10
years ago now, past 10 years ago now, so fair enough. So 2010, what was happening was the,
the number of shows coming into the queue was, was going down, basically life happened to the admins
at the time, and I'm using the word admins and janitor interchangeably here, I can go into that,
more detail in that later if you want, but at that time, so the project was going for, you know,
good, a good five years at that time, and then it started basically to pop fade a little bit,
and I didn't know whether, as a host at the time, we can get a lot of feedback on when your shows
were put in, basically just put them into on the FTP server and they got posted or they didn't,
so I had posted two hours and they were working coming out, so I kind of emailed the list to say,
okay, what's the story are we going to continue with this project, or we're going to put the bed,
you know, basically, old soldiers was a lost and bronx episode, basically how to deal with
pod fading, you know, that you have a, if you're building up a listenership as a podcaster,
and you decide to stop, how is the best way to do that, so you, you know, you tell your audience,
well, I'm intending to stop, here's the reason why, and then you say it'll be in so many episodes,
I'm going to stop, not just, okay, this was the last episode, and you leave them high and dry,
so that was, you know, a new archive, your stuff, and you make sure it's up on internet archive,
and make it available to people, you know, you don't redirect the website to different places,
so do you wrap up the project nicely, so I posted a question to the HBR mailing list at the time,
saying, okay, guys, what are we going to do, are we going to, are we going to keep this thing going,
and basically, if you, if you want, I can help out, and then, or if you want, I think we should
continue with this, and then Enigma says, hey, our troops, I can't remember one of the, one of the
guys says, do you want to post the shows? Okay, fair enough, so from that moment, I got the keys,
to the history, as they say, I guess. Well, yeah, but it's important to remember a lot, it's
important for me to, to make it clear what my role it here is, and essentially, I'm a bash script
that just says, hey, could you do a show on that, could you do a show on that, and our goal has been
to automate as much as possible, but the thing that she, as a, what we were called was admins,
but I like to think of us as janitors, if you go to the Hacker Public Radio website, and go to
the about page, there's a bit there about the HBR community, and the governance of HBR, so we've
got the, we've got the real admins of Josh, who, who has a, runs the web server and stuff, he is
the real admin, he does the spam stuff and keeping, keeping people off, keeping, you know, all that
all that networking stuff is done by him. There's a surprisingly little amount of technology involved
in, in having this website, so it's basically just a website that we post a copy of the database,
and put an RSS feed out, so that, on a particular day, it chunks out a show every day.
Kind of lost material, oh yeah, governance, so what I tried to do was, when I started helping out,
was to, number one, give feedback on every show, so have a community news episode every first
released on the first Monday of every month. Then we have a community news show, and what we do
there is we go and review every episode to make sure that everybody gets some feedback on their
shows, and it's invariably positive because, you know, I can, I can find something in every show
that there's been on, that has been, that I've gone, okay, well, I can't see myself using that now,
but I might be able to see myself using that later, or was entertaining, or made me cry,
or whatever. So, I already got good. I made you cry in a good way, or in a bad way.
Sometimes, in a bad way, in that, you know, somebody is not, that episode where,
where St. Flop was in the hospital was, was not a pleasant episode to listen to,
but on the other hand, she also made me cry when she did the Cisco episode, where she took some
Cisco phones, and, and when they modified this firmware and stuff and got them, got running
VoIP over these phones, and the audio was totally crap, but the enthusiasm of the, you know,
hey guys, I'm recording this down the VoIP phone, and then here's how I did it, and I just had to
recompile the component, and get butterflies to float over to change bits on the thing. So, yeah,
it's, you laugh, you cry. So, yeah, that's, that's it, but governance, important point was,
for me, was to make sure that everybody got some feedback, because through feedback,
you know, that's the currency of the podcasters, getting feedback, you guys know that, if, you know,
somebody sent me an email and it's positive, that's great. That is the currency, so it's
important to get feedback. The first feedback I got was on a, you know, on a show where it was,
some guy said, hey, that comment that you had about Ubuntu, that's completely wrong, it doesn't
work like that, I'm not gonna reply back, yeah, but the episode you're listening to was two years old,
so, you know, they've fixed it since then. So, yeah, that's, that was my thing, but it's also
important to remember that we, I do not set the policy, I suggest the policy or I'll bring topics
up on the mailing list, but equally, other people bring topics up on the mailing list this week,
because this week has been actually very busy on the mailing list for topic discussions, but
we'll cover all that in the community news. So, managers, we, we basically, I am not Mr. HPR,
I'm just essentially a bash script that will ask you to do shows.
Needless to say, the link for the mailing list will be in the show notes people, so if you want
to subscribe to this mailing list, you're more than welcome to. And Mr. Felon, sorry, can,
I understand and correct me if I'm wrong, that there is no censorship on any episode or any content
that people submit or is there. I'm just wondering if there's a general policy, because I don't
simply, I don't know about, and if there is, where do you draw the line, if you draw one?
So, if you go to the HPR website and you go to give shows, the first thing you'll,
you'll see is the list of stuff you need to know. So, basically, this is summary of the podcast.
So, we're going to stop as a podcast if we don't get enough shows. So, I will say to you or
your listeners, if somebody thinks they should, they have written a blog post, ask yourself the
question, will this make a podcast? And the answer will be yes, yes. Will anybody be interested
in it? Yes. Yes, send it into how could Bob be creative? We'll come back to that. So,
the stuff you need to know, we don't send to kid shows, we release them to CCBISA,
you have permission to register you to show entirely, which means if you've got music on there,
you need to have permission, and you sure will not be moderated. So, if we click down to that one,
can, can, sorry, sorry, for the few listeners who don't know what CCBISA means, maybe you should explain
this. Yeah. So, just in case. Not a good, very good, thanks, and thanks for pointing out. So,
we are here to promote sharing knowledge. And as part of that, our license is the Creative
Commons, Creative Commons license, which means that if somebody stumbles upon a piece of work
that has got a Creative Commons license on it, even though there might be different variants of it,
at least you know what you're allowed to do with it. So, at the minimum, if it's got a Creative
Commons license, you're allowed to download it. So, technically, if you listen to a podcast that
doesn't have, that has create, that has copyright, all right reserves on it, or has no copyright
on it at all, that work is copyright, all right reserves, which means it's illegal for you to download
that under, I'm not a lawyer, by the way, but this is my understanding. Now, obviously,
it would be very difficult to prove that, or it would be very difficult to argue that if somebody
sputters on the website and says, hey, please download my podcast, but that is the license. So,
to get around that, this Creative Commons thing has come up where the shows, where you can license
a work, and you can say, well, I want people to listen to my stuff. And so, I would go and pick
a license. So, let's go to the Creative Commons website. As you do, amazing how often I go here,
the Creative Commons website, and there's a lovely button on there called pick a license,
and it'll tell you the various things that you're allowed to do. So, if you choose a license,
you get CC. So, you can CC part is Creative Commons. By is, if you see that tag associated with
the work, it means you have to credit the person who, if you're redistributing it, you have to
credit the person who has created. SA means share like. So, if you download it under one of the
Creative Commons licenses, you need to share it under the same license. And sometimes people put
in a non-commercial clause in there. I would advise people not to do that, because that actually
prevents people from putting it on a CD or on a USB stick. And then, if you sell that USB stick,
you know, to cover the call search, promote your project, if it contains a CC bias, a NC,
non-commercial stuff, then you're into a gray area, do you need to are you violating the terms
of a person's license by doing that? So, does that explain Creative Commons? It does indeed, thank you.
So, moving back to the general Packer Public Radio itself about your original question,
is do we moderate the shows? And the answer is, no, we don't moderate your audio. We might edit
your audio, we might try to improve it. We convert it to mono usually. But we don't
vest edit or moderate or censor any audio on the show. We trust you to do that. And that's an
important thing. So, if anybody wants to talk about pedophilia or drug use or any other
subject that is illegal in most jurisdictions, these are just examples, but you get my drift,
you wouldn't censor this at all. No, because I don't even listen to it before it's posted.
And that has two advantages, one, the history from that is, why should I censor other hackers?
So, I've got a hacker space or, you know, you can imagine a bar camp, for example,
Fostem, for example, Lightning Talks at Fostem, I know you, I think we've met at Fostem.
We did indeed, yes. So, a Lightning Talk, they're a bar camp at a camp or something like that,
or you're out in the middle of a tent as one of the hacker festivals. Are you going to talk about those
so you're going to go and a hacker comes along and they are my peers. So, why should I say,
why should I have any right to say what they can and can't put on the metric? That said, though,
if that said we do, there's a happy balance there and there was a great show done
on freedom of speech and censorship done by murder sheds and that basically has set our policy
with regard to this because there's a delicate balance there. So, we do ask you to announce the
fact that you're going to be discussing these sorts of topics before or, you know, you're going to
be talking these sorts of topics. So, you know, say you're in, you want to protect
miners or whoever who don't want to listen to this. So, we will put that warning on that the show
itself has got an explicit content, although that even the use of the word explicit
is also a problem for people who find all my shows are explicit because I go into explicit detail
about this technique. In the iTunes version of what explicit means, but also we ask people to
put a warning on us and we ask people to give people the opportunity to turn off the radio in
case through our miners or in case they're listening in a public area or something like that.
And then if you have, if you say things, you know, it'll be making a point about
pedophilia, for example. And it's a valid show about dealing with pedophilia or
some interesting aspect of it from a social worker point of view I can imagine. That would be
of interest tackers. And yeah, so long as it's wrapped up in the, in the, with some warnings and
give people notice then, yeah, it's a perfectly acceptable show for the most part. And that show
about on freedom of speech and censorship basically uses the analogy of a CD case where the
real case, you go into a CD store and there's explicit warning, explicit material elements,
so that's what we're asking people to do. I've used that, about warning on several
shields. We did, my wife and I did a show on IVF treatments and that can be tough for some people
to listen to. And also, as a parent listening in the car, you might be, you might bring up some
questions to people. So, yeah. That's it. Yeah, no, it's very sensible. I don't agree with
the freedom of speech piece and everybody has a choice to turn it on or off if they want to.
Yeah, but it's important that they know the, that you know you have the choice and that's what we
ask. That's what we're, the whole point of trust is there. So if you're, if you're just, you know,
out cycling and you listen to your podcast and then you don't get this warning, you need some time
to, you're listening to a show about something else and then this comes up, then there's a break
of trust there. And the only thing we can do as janitors is go back later and put in the explicit
warning on the show. But thankfully, that hasn't happened too much. Okay. And the other thing is,
of course, the, the safe harbor thing, kind of the fact that we don't listen to it or editors
allows us to do the safe harbor thing, not that we've ever been told to take down a piece of
work as yes. I think you mentioned earlier that you you listened to each and every show so far.
Yes. And so my question on that is when and where do you listen to shows and what is your day job?
I listened to, I listened to every show and if you don't, I sometimes think, hey, did I listen
to every show and sometimes I, I have to go back and listen to, listen to, there's a topic and I
go back to the HBR tags page, which is on the main page and it gives you a link to every, all the
topics that we've covered and thanks to all the community who's gone back and added all these tags.
And I think, God, did I listen to that or not? And then I play the show and I can immediately
remember where I was whenever I heard that podcast or any podcast. So it's, I have listened to them all.
Yeah. And it's a requirement to be on the community news show. Well, it's not, yeah, it's a
requirement. We ask people if you're going to be come onto the community news show that you listen
to all the shows. Well, it's not a burden actually because there, there has not been a show that I
haven't listened to from start to finish. Oh, there's been a few, the snoring episode of 5150,
may he rest in peace. That was one, that was, that was hard to get through and the one,
the April Fool Geokai did where I put in all the pin numbers from zero, zero, zero to 9999.
So that, that was more, that was just more boring than anything else.
Okay. If you listen to how many shows does it know,
three thousand, eight hundred and eighty six shows, then, you know, you, you kind of have to listen to them all.
So when do you get it and listen to the shows? So prior to COVID and lockdown, I had a
now and a half commute and morning and a now and a half commute and so that was
new problem whatsoever. And I also speed up my podcast twice to speed.
Fair enough, and who would, I mean, what is your day job with any else?
My day job is I work for a large cable operator on their back end.
So you're a computer guy yourself.
Yeah, my official title is, well, I'll video, video system engineer, but kind of a system engineer.
I mean, you sound Irish, but I understand that you don't live in Ireland anymore.
No, that's correct. I am Irish. I, uh, be Jesus, but I'm also Dutch now.
So you're Dutch on my co-miserations.
So if we just go to my co-hosts is of Dutch origin too, but effective to be UK at some stage.
Very sensible.
While we, uh, I, uh, oddly enough, I think the last, I met my wife in the last place where I
expected to meet, uh, my wife, which was in an Irish bar. So, uh, but it's still weird as
look would have it. So she moved to Ireland for, uh, two years and then, uh, she works in the
healthcare and a lot of the health care in Ireland is, uh, run by, uh, on a voluntary basis, you know,
a lot of the, unless she work in Dublin, uh, the, a lot of the treatments are, are Dublin based. So, um,
for the stuff that she does, um, anyway, but she's Dutch, I suppose.
She's Dutch, uh, although you wouldn't, she's actually the voice who does the intro and outro at the end.
Does they? Oh, right. I see. Okay. She's been on quite a lot of shows as well.
She's done a few shows as well. Um, uh, so then we moved, we did a year in England, um,
under the naive idea that if we were in a country halfway between Ireland and the Netherlands,
people coming over, but it just meant that we had to travel to Ireland and we had to travel
to the Netherlands. So, um, I, um, I said, you know, in an IT sector, you can get a job anywhere
basically. So, uh, I, I thought she'd, uh, moved to the Netherlands and it proved actually, uh, more
Irish in a way, um, than, uh, than living in England. It was, it was kind of weird that way.
Okay. I'm, you say, no, the Netherlands is more.
Can we, in which sector?
The curious thing.
Ignoring the, the, the term dimension for, for a staff, the police and total lack of geography,
other than the geography that they've met themselves. But I actually really find that, um,
you know, it's freaky, the whole, the whole Dutch thing, right? You're walking around in a place
that's nine meters where I work, uh, where like nine meters below sea level, nine meters below sea
level. You could have, we need four people of my height stand on my shoulders and you'd still drown.
But nobody passes an eagerness shirt's grand. It's just, we're all over here and they have a,
they have a church called the new church, which is under water or, you know, under sea level,
which is older than the United States of America. It's just, you see, Ken, there, there's a place
in Dublin called the Long Hall that might qualify for the sea level to be depending on,
on the spot you're in in there, depending on Bob. And that's another story, I suppose.
Yeah. So, um, yeah, no, uh, the Netherlands is, it's, uh, nice. The only thing was that
they've all worn anybody. If you come over here, the first Monday of the month at 12 noon,
they have this, um, air raid, sorry, I said, it's okay. They're, uh, so you're welcome. This is
you, right? You're welcome down on the street, minding your own business, all of a sudden,
goes off everywhere. And not just in one place, but everywhere. And your, your mobile phone is going,
everybody's mobile phone is going nuts. And nobody is doing the thing. All the Dutch people are
cycling along, happy out. Nobody's passing any news of the slush you're in. They,
they came from another world. So, yeah, it's, uh, but that's maybe the old adage hasn't changed
that the Netherlands wants to consider themselves to be constantly under attack from foreign
nations and stuff. Yes. I do not know. Martin may have a comment on this.
So, we have these, these neighbors, which are on various sides. We think they're invading us.
Martin, I think it's actually other way around. And caravans do play a bad important role in this.
Uh, to be fair, but I digress. The, uh, I don't know, have you heard the Dutch National Anthem yet?
So, uh, yes, yes, yes, yeah. It talks about the dispensary invasion in the 1600s.
We do remember things. I'm of German blood.
You are okay. No, no, this is special. I'm William of Orange. I'm having a drink. Sorry. Okay. I just
got confused there. Okay. Back to HPR. This is not a podcast on history, but rather on something
else. Do you share statistics with, with any of the, of the people who broadcast on HPR? So,
they have at least some sort of notion of how many people are listening. As a matter of fact,
I mean, if you deploy, you say you've heard of search engine, you see that quite a few sites are
actively scraping HPR and syndicating for a, and either unknown or not, the content you have out
there, especially as aggregators. Yes, yes, absolutely. And I see loads more of them coming along,
they come, and they go, both, that's what the license is. The license is Creative Commons CC
by SA, and they do because we have it in the, they do give attribution because we put attribution
into the shows itself. So, yeah, that's, that's, but you don't keep stats yourself in terms of you
don't provide it to the, to the, to the, to the, to the, to the hosts. They, they, this topic has
come up on the mailing list for, and this is one example where I as a janitor will make sure
that the topic is discussed and that the requests of the community are supported. So, they,
the community wishes to know what the stats are for their shows. And you can get that by going
to the internet archive, and basically, it's listed right there for the shows.
For this particular, where the archive actually pays you visit, yes.
Yeah, so we serve our audio. Any audio that hasn't been, hasn't been in the main feed,
comes from the internet archive. Sorry, any audio that hasn't been, you know,
if it's on the internet archive, we'll take it from there. If it's not, it'll be from the
HBO website itself. So, Dave, my other janitor, Dave Morris, is busy at the moment,
going back, finishing off the last few episodes and tidying up the tags. And he's done huge amount
to work also with the internet archive people on getting the formatting and, okay, thing,
on the internet archive. For example, it turns out now if you type in Hacker Public Radio,
you're more likely to hit some of the internet archive page than you are on the Hacker Public
Radio site. Are you serious? Yeah, yeah, which is fine. And, okay, a lot of our hosts and
contributors have not even seen the website in, you know, five years, ten years, because
you have no reason to go there or you, you just go to the upload link and you get everything
for your feed. But, I don't believe that stats are useful. And I'll tell you why.
This is my own personal opinion. This is not the official opinion of Hacker Public Radio,
which is, we did the stat. As a, from a security point of view, I don't, there's a lot of
purposely related information that is in those stats, you know, from a GDPR point of view,
that your IP address when you log down and stuff, so you need to fiddle with them. But, thankfully,
the internet archive sold that first because the stats over there are more or less going to be the
stats that you get. So, that's it. If somebody has a request for particular stats, we, you know,
put that into the mailing list, we'll get it. But my personal feeling on Hacker Public Radio,
I'm only given show on Hacker Public Radio is, it is a standalone entity. And if somebody
drives value of that, if only one person drives value from that, then that show is a valid show.
And for that person who has driven value from it, then that to them is the best show in the world.
I give you an example. Every time I turn on my soldering iron here, this soldering iron,
I think of the misdirect show where he taught me how to solder on a podcast. Now,
I can imagine people have mentioned to me before when I've said that, they've said,
how the hell can you learn how to solder on a podcast? And I imagine a lot of people
turned off that episode. Because, yeah, okay, I'm not going to learn how to solder from a podcast,
I'll go to a YouTube video. But there you go. So, who am I to judge?
And if it's 4 o'clock in the morning, right, and you're stuck in the dust center somewhere,
and you find the HPR page with the Ock command that shows you how to transform
this stupid file that you have here, those four gigabytes, and you need to transfer it over there.
Yeah, that show was a value because it's a person's butt. And we get lots of comments on older shows
that come in that, you know, are four or five years old. You go, this really saved my butt.
I'm quite a lot of them are from myself to my own shows that I've done because I know I heard
that somewhere, and then I go back and I find out that it was a show, but I recorded some years ago.
On the issue of telling exactly how to do it. The reason, the initial reason for this question was,
basically some people are concerned about monetization of the whole thing. You see, at the moment,
and I can only discuss what I can, Linux in-laws, and infrastructure behind it is actually funded
by some cartels and other entities. Let's put it this way. But especially Martin is hot on the idea
of not only dominating the work, but making it good to deal with money with this podcast.
And this is the reason why stats are so important for at least Martin, if not myself.
Yeah, but then you don't want our stats because our stats are too honest. What you want to do is do impressions.
So the way I do it is, if somebody comes from an IP address within the 24 hour period for
any given show, that is one view. Whereas I have, I know of entities where they will gather every
impression on a media file and put that in as a view or as a link. Regardless of how long, even if
it's only a second, even if it's only the continuation of a block of media where somebody's
fast-forwarding from the start to the middle to the end, that's three impressions.
And then they will also multiply that by a number, five or so, and we'll give you the
M count, and that will be used for advertising review. So it's all, Leo the Port,
where does that fight? There's some very good episodes on subscriber count and how
basically it's, it's bull. And I find it completely, you're saying there's an episode on this.
I know Leo the Port has done an episode on this. We've had this discussion on the mailing list
several times. It's no harm if you want to bring it up again. We can happily, happily have this
discussion. But how do you, how do you, how do you consider what an impression is because,
you know, you could argue that a particular IP address, where there's 200 downloads from a
particular IP address, well, yeah, it could be that that IP address is, you know, in the Great
Wall of China, those are 200 valid views on the other side of that wall. So yeah, you could,
you could say it's been proxied on another network. Yeah, so it could be an impression.
Well, again, from my point of view, I'm not really less interested in listeners. I'm,
I am interested in this. Yes. I don't care about you people. No, I, I am interested in turning
you people into hosts on the network, even if it is only one show.
Sorry. Can Leo Laporte of Twit fame? Yeah, yeah. Are you serious? Yeah, Leo Laporte back in the
day, and it will be in the day now, did a, I can't remember. I'll try and root it out for you.
He has done, when he was starting up his, the Twit network, he was very open about how much money
they made. The impression is that when, when they were discussing with advertisers, so you know,
that those magazines on the couch, they were, you know, if you've got a subscription to a magazine,
I don't know, like, I don't know, flowers or else or something, yeah, the monthly magazine,
usually how to cut your flowers. And the advertisers and that will be told, even though they've only
got 1,500 physical prints, they will say, oh, well, those 1,500 things are sitting in a doctor's
office. So each, each one of those magazines is viewed on the coffee table of a doctor's office
200 times. So they'll take the numbers and multiply that out the number of impressions. So it's all
like pick a number, which is why I, I don't find it interesting. What I do find interesting, though,
is the relationship between people who use a thing and subscribe to a thing. And that is you,
NPR in America have done a breakdown and it's about somewhere around the 1%
will voluntarily give back to a project. So I don't know, if you ever listen to YouTube or
other podcasts, you know, if only one person give a dollar for, if I only had a dollar for
everybody who downloaded this episode, you know, I'd be a millionaire. Yeah, exactly. You would be,
but, you know, that's not how the world works. One can expect feedback of about 1%.
So given the number of subscribers that we have, I would have expected a lot more people coming in.
So that's, there's a bridge there. There's a number of the number of subscribers we have,
a number of listeners we have. If we got 1% to that, that's the number of hosts that we should have
in the year. So say if we have about three and a half thousand, four thousand people per show,
we should have, I don't know, 40 hosts per year. Yes.
What else? It just counts as a lot more than this. Can just do people promote
Patreon and the likes on their shows on HBR? Big non-managerations.
Well, here's the thing, right? The HBR, the Hacker Public Radio is being paid for out of the pocket
of Josh, now, one of our hosts, Josh. So he has a business, an honest host.com,
and if you're looking for serious hosting from somebody who, and this is an advertisement,
I absolutely appreciate it. It's a recommendation, a real one.
Josh knows his stuff, and when he says anonymous host, he means if you buy this amount of bandwidth,
you're going to get this amount of bandwidth. I'm not going to over-subscribe and do all the sort of
tricks. So, he's a good guy, and he does know his stuff. I mean, he kept us in the air for quite a
while. And the other people that we have is the hosting from the Internet Archive, which is
Exynoprojection, where they are basically directing as the Internet's library, and their data
servers are maintained voluntarily. So, I subscribe, I donate to them on the monthly basis as well.
So, there's nothing to stop you saying, hey, subscribe to my Patreon within your account, but it would
be within the context that the actual media has been served by these two people, either the Internet
Archive or Josh. And that's also, you know, if you go to something like Stitcher or Apple
podcasts or, I don't know, Google podcasts or one of Apple's iTunes or whatever, and you play your,
your, you play in HBR up, so there, that data is not coming from their servers, that data is just
coming from our servers. It's Josh who's paying for that, or it's the Internet Archive who's paying for that.
Don't, indeed, under any doubt as to who exactly is paying for that. Yeah.
But to be honest, a lot of the, I mean, we have people who financially contribute to HBR in the
sense that we have these booth kits that go around. And so, the idea there is you got free
back in the day. Whenever you're a lad, you could go to a meeting and you didn't have to wear no mask.
Ancient times, you know, where people would actually be within one and a half meters of each other
and share a pint and breathe into somebody's face, shout into their ear, and you're back in those days.
And we had a booth kits, we have a booth kit in the States. I'm going to book it here. And it contains
a audio recorder and stickers and pamphlets and HBR logos and stuff. And recently got some free
software foundation Europe stickers and that sort of thing. And it's basically a booth kit.
So we go and we'll ask at, I don't know, Ohio Linux Fester or Camp or our first time we were
lucky to get a table last year. Yeah, it was actually last year. So that was brilliant. But we're there
as a community. So if there's any swag that's paid for by volunteers. So I only need to go to
the mailing list and say guys, somebody send me on some stickers or I'll get them myself or pay for
the, pay for the banners and domain hosting and stuff like that. But, you know, it's not,
it's not worth the hassle dealing with the financial, you know, patent donations and all that sort of thing.
Just send us, you know, if we need stickers, we'll ask. And the tables are cool because, you know,
at the, at the first time table that was, that was brilliant. First time I usually went around and
interviewed all the kind of hallway tracks. It's kind of the hallway tracks that we do. So if somebody's
out there at an event and OLF or somewhere in America or wherever and you're never going to be
able to get there, then a HBR host will go around, record people, you know, on the hallway track.
Oh, I met the Linux in those guys. How you doing? What do you think of the, what do you think of
the show? And what would you recommend seeing blah, blah, blah. And then that comes up as a show.
We did have quite successfully for FostM for a few years. And those audio then are on the FostM
website. So that captured the whole feel of walking around to the Debian booth and to the
free software Europe booth and all the other places. So that's, that's, that's kind of cool.
But last year we asked every year for a, a booth. But I felt like the whole idea behind FostM
anyway is that you want to, they want to encourage more people to mingle. So they don't, you know,
you know, they will have a database room as opposed to a post catch room. So they're always trying
to cross-pollimate things. So we submitted a proposal for a podcast. They're free. It's on the
main HBR website, actually, if you go to there. It's they, and the site is down now because I'm
currently moving it to another one free culture podcast network. And that is basically any podcast,
anything, a list of podcasts that are active, that are released under Creative Commons license.
So we put that in there and I have a link. And then on the day we had like an A4 brochure
list in the podcast. So that, you know, if you're into, you might be into HBR, but you might very
well be into metal music. So the open metal cast is right off your street. That's sort of, so.
I can recall you giving this out at FostM. And yes, I, if I'm not completely mistaken, I saw this at
an up and an up come to in the UK. Yes, but maybe I'm wrong. I don't know. I mean, it's not.
I really like this FostM thing because I FostM for the few listens who do not know FostM
kids back in the olden days when people could still meet. You're looking at a gathering in Brussels
where about the official version is anything between six and eight thousand people would gather
over a weekend and discuss open source software. Notches from a technical but also from a
political and philosophical perspective. More realistically, I reckon we were looking at
at anything between 10 and 12,000 people at the hardware tracks. Never mind, never. Besides,
the official kind of schedule are the most important things because you get to meet people there.
As a matter of fact, this is basically where I run into Ken Fatton first time around and kind of
pitched the idea of something called English in Los NHPR. In 2020. In fact, the first,
well, the second talk that I attended after going to FostM for about four years was this year when
it was online. Prior to that, I was just too busy to go down the morning. No, you're on the
loop. Somebody's got a yaggy antenna pointing it up and you go, okay, what's this?
And then they're talking to you and you go, hold on, let me take out my recorder because this
is just too interesting. Okay, hi, who are you? What's this about? What are you doing here?
Nice, nice. It wasn't the case that Chris was actually stalking you at FostM, but
I've never stalked that FostM. You should know this.
I wanted to ask a bit about the hosts that you have and how they, I mean, I know you're always
asking for shows and I can see a lot of different topics on the shows. Is there something you would
like to encourage people to say about encouraging people to go onto HPR and do a show or is there
a specific show that you would say? Listen to this one because this is how it's really done,
excuse me, obviously. And then that should inspire people perhaps to do a show. Is there something
like that that you can point people at? I don't know. I don't know what floats your boat and I would say
actually, no, don't listen to somebody else. Don't try to get perfect audio. Don't set the bar
too high for yourself. Your first show is going to be shit anyway. Just as soon as you send it in
the better and we can all forget about it. It's a best show you can do, but especially if you're
a long-term listener is, I'm a long-term listener. I've been listening to HPR since Bla,
who am I? You know, basically this thing, who am I? It's like if you walk into a hackerspace
and you've got this HPR, if you imagine HPR is this hackerspace, you get this whole group of people
that we know exist and then you got this massive 35,000 people who we don't know exist. So send us
a show in just to introduce yourself. It's just, you don't commit to somebody's house and just go,
I am at the party and they don't say hello. You know, say hello. That's show number one.
They're like, of course. Dave and I will listen to your show and we'll go, hey, you got into
use this Epic microcomputer and you just happened to mention that and passing, come on,
do a show about that. Oh, and then we hook in, that's how we do it. And then we listen to that show
and we tell you to submit other shows. And then you become a regular and then then you're doomed,
you become a podcaster. But don't, HPR, we have this, we have this, a whole group of models,
one of them is, a flag is the best, but we'll accept the rest. So we do want perfect audio. Who
doesn't? You know, you don't want to listen, you don't want to be listening to crap audio. But
at the same time, you know, if you're, have the opportunity, you're in a boss and Linus Torvels
happens to be sitting there next year. And he's the only thing that you have is your crappy MP3
player. Yeah, that audio is going to be better than no audio. So that, you know, let's put things
into context because you know, yeah. And then another thing I read this week, Mike, one of our
long temples says he doesn't submit shows because, because he's afraid other people might know more
about what? Yeah, we have, we have plateau who does the new world order and he, he is basically
going through all the packages in the slackware. So essentially all the packages on the Linux
distro. And for some of the applications, he will open the image. I have not knew what this does.
And you can hear like, ma in space command. And then he reads it out. Okay, this is what it is.
I don't know why you would use that. And then Baba. And then two weeks later, there's a feedback
from some dude who has an old blah, blah, blah computer runs a tip deck. And this is the basis
of their inventory. And, you know, they have no money to update this tip deck and their entire
business is relying on this. And this command is very, very important to me. Yep. So like I did
one show right where we were short to shows and I give a tip on how to tell your left earbud from
your writing board, but put them not in it. That was basically just a call for shows. But it is
extremely useful actually. It's a good tip. And that spawned three different shows where people
send in other tips on how to introduce tactile feedback to the keyboard and to their mic and other
things. So it gets people thinking, my job is to is to lower the bar so much that people will
want to submit to us. I don't even know if that answers the question. And as far as the whole
circumcerned, I this weird thing where one of us, we've had, we've been running so long, I guess,
and that two of our hosts, I know, have passed away. Maybe more of them have, but Lord, Lord
Dragonwood passed away from cancer and 5150 passed away. It was a very good, very committed
to HPR and as was Lord D. And the weird thing was that we had known him by his, by his
both of them actually, by their handles. And then all of a sudden, this real name comes out,
you know, and this whole, for these people, there's a whole other part of their life that hasn't
been associated with HPR. So, you know, I've been, a kind of point I'm trying to make is, you know,
on the internet, nobody knows your account. So I was at a camp one day and I was just sitting at
the breakfast table, breakfast table, nothing on the Maywest, you know, yourself. And I heard some
do I? Yeah, well, you know, it's okay. No details, Christopher, please.
You've been tired of it, right? You've seen Irish people go follow one more. I've lived, I've lived
that for about eight years, yes. Yes, yes, I think you very well know one of me. If you haven't
experienced yourself, you've seen other people living this. But anyway, turns out, like,
you hear another fellow podcaster. And, oh, yeah, but you don't look like that. So it's,
it's, yeah, it's kind of weird, not knowing who your hosts are. Joe wrestling comes to mind, yes.
Yeah, yeah. I can't just, just wondering, you will see or HPR seems to have quite a few
regulars on this schedule, like clad to, like anonymous, like other people come to mind. What do you
think or what with the ratio between regulars and ones off? Or people who just produce shows very
irregularly, let's put it this way, as in what's in the blue moon? And the quick answer to that is
not, not enough. We don't have enough dried by horse. So if in the morning, everybody who listens
to HPR submitted a show for a start, we would have enough shows for the next 10 to 15 years. But
if everybody did that, then like we have 260 slots per year. So that's, that's not really a lot.
But of those about a half or more would be done by regular hosts. Half of them, okay. Yeah,
or more. And that's, and that's a bad statistic. Because, you know, I want the situation where you're
fighting to get a slot. And there's no such thing as an ideal show link that I always, I think,
I've seen some really short ones and some, some very long ones. I think you mentioned 24 hours.
Exactly. The, the thing, there's no limit on what the content can be. There's no limit about
what the topic is. You know, it can't be spam. Just, and I'm, yeah, it can't be spam. And it has to be,
you know, you've got to be, yeah, of interest hackers. But then again, if you're doing it,
then right there, you've got 50% of the hackers that you need. So you only need one more person
to be interested in what you're talking about for it to be of interest hackers. And as yet,
I have them across the show that I didn't find interesting. So, you know, that, the whole bar is
covered right there. Can't just wondering, define spam in, in, in HBAR context. Would be like, like,
art, like, you're not referring to the food stuff then. Yeah, I, I'll know when I see it. What,
what we, we have not had any, while we have had loads of comments spam, and even some good
comments spam. And I will say, if you are a spammer, please do a show on HBAR about that whole
technology, that whole field, that would be absolutely awesome. I'd love to, to hear about the
motivation, why you do this, the, the, the, the things that, the issues that you come across,
how you get around, uh, uh, blogs, what exports you, what exploits you use.
Can, you can only do so many shows on can't meet, no? Yeah, exactly. You could, you could make
it. But, uh, what I'll do is, I'll just listen to it. And, um, there have been one or two
occasions where we've had a comment spam come in, where it's been dodgy as to whether it is or not.
And what I'll do in that occasion is send it to the mailing list and say, okay, I think
this is spam, what do you think? Okay. Go by consensus at the point. If I, if I have a show,
and I'll fast forward, and those words like Linux and stuff, maybe it'll get posted before I
realize it. But more than, more often than not, I'll be more attentive to new hosts than regular hosts.
And just curious, um, never attempts to post shows by bots or something.
Bots tend, don't tend to post shows, no. Um, they do. The partles comments and the dead giveaways.
Hey, this was an excellent article, you know, it's not, it's not an article, it's a show. So, yeah.
Apart from the Selenium scripts are wrote to automate the upload process.
Yes, which brings me actually to a kind of minor, tiny question. There was some
letter proposing a, an API, a few, a few moons back. Um, unfortunately, there hasn't been much
progress on this. I'm just, and subsequently, this letter had to resort to other kind of more
mechanical devices like Selenium scripts. I'm just wondering if there will be ever an API
where you can simply include this upload process in your podcasting, producing workflow.
I think that the person who's requesting this is a, um, is unique in HPR's land.
Fair enough. It does happen. I guess, I guess. Other show, other hosts who post regularly do it
differently. They go through the process. Um, boss, I've been thinking, um, whatever I get time,
you know, the mythical, uh, mythical land where there is time. There is kind of a few things that we
are planning on doing with HGUR. One of them will not be done until I move doing some renovation
and the house and stuff. So, after that's done, later on this year. So, one of the things that we
would like to do is move the entire site to a text-based, uh, static site generated.
Like, like, like Hugo Orpingo in a sunflower dish. Something like, um, yeah, it'll be something
pythony because, uh, anything that we do in HGUR, we are a long tail project. So, if,
if we get volunteers coming to the project, their minimum commitment is they have to be willing
to support whatever it is they are contributing in terms of code for a minimum of two years.
And the reason for that is, like, we've been going for 15 years. So, it's a long-term commitment
on here in HGUR. And if you decide, if that contribution, um, is brilliant, whatever,
but if anything happens to you or you decide not to continue it, then other generators have to come
in and take over the maintenance of that code and we're already flooded. The main thing that we do
is trying to get new shows, trying to get people to submit shows. That is the main thing that we do.
Which is another reason why, if other people, if you meet somebody and you come across a topic,
always have in the back of your mind, would that be an interesting HGUR episode? And lots of people
will say no, but if 10% of those people say yes, then we have a new host. And if we can get one,
then to submit one show, it's possible we can get them to submit two shows, etc, etc. So that
keeps that in mind. However, if we go to a static site generated, um,
website, my kind of view is then we put in a distributed, um, we have, like, something perhaps
like a no-sequel database. Not a no-sequel database, but an SQL-like database. So the website itself
for the upload and the spam and whatever, that's a separate thing that will continue to be a
stack. But for the rest, um, excuse me, for the rest, I'm thinking of a sort of giz-like thing,
where you can edit your shows using GitLab instance, or GitLab instance, or our, you know,
GitLab-ish instance, GitLab-ish instance. That way, you know, if you want to go and edit
your show notes, you can, and we know it's you because you've got to log in and not the system
knows it's you because it's you. And that way, perhaps, we can upload shows that way as well.
Then it becomes like just a Git workflow that you submit shows, and then we need to,
we need to treat it like a pull request, basically. That's kind of very good.
Somebody wants to, uh, somebody wants to work with me on that at some point, bearing in mind,
I've been saying this for ages, but, no, very effectively.
So, that's the case, very good. And then the whole point is, I want to be able to take that database
so that anybody can replicate it, and then, you know, good luck trying to ded our sauce, because
everybody's got a copy of the database, and everybody can just check it, check, get, check out
their version of nursing, the media, and boom, you've got, you've got this distribution metric.
And again, like you were saying earlier, oh, uh, all these other people are syndicate in your
content. Great. Now, syndicate the database, syndicate the content system. So that's, I mean,
good to hear because the luck that I'm kind of tech supporting, and has made this move about
two weeks ago, we were running in my mind, which is a Python based CMS, and that given the fact that
the Python 3 part is nowhere near, uh, completion with regards to being able to run on Python 3,
we decided to abandon the idea of continuing my mind, and went for you, which is a set exact
generator, and that is basically combined with a GTIA instance. So essentially, it's, it's that
where, it's that where workflow that you're describing, you simply basically, whoever has,
whoever has, as a token or like, or login access to that side, can submit a pull request,
this is then approved, and then as part of an automated workflow, once you submit, or once
you pull request is accepted, you simply put in a hook that essentially regenerates the
setting HTML, and that works flawlessly. Perfect. I look forward to your show on that. In fact,
let's walk on this, yes. Because I would really like, um, you to do something like that,
uh, but like, take it as a, I don't know, a pet shop or something, you know, take a,
doesn't have to be here for take it as a, as a static website, um, and try and keep it as simple,
just bare bones as possible. You mean that by Selenium's script are basically then we will be
a think of the past? Excellent. You're on weight. I really want to go to a, I want to go to a stage
where people have their own, I don't know who you are. It's some of the fundamental things that
that HPR Center is kind of the whole, um, the whole energy in the sense that we, we don't want
rules. The only rule really is the one show a day, five days a week, and that, that rule is
currently up for discussion, discussion on the mailing list, uh, and as good that it is, um, as a
contributor as a HPR member, um, not as a janitor at the moment, my feeling on it is that we should
release every weekday, wanted to Friday because you have consistency, and you know, if you turn
on the radio in the morning and the news isn't there at nine o'clock, you know, your friendly weather
guy, uh, isn't there telling you what the traffic situation is, then you lose trust in that network.
So that's one thing. But a lot of guys and a lot of podcasts, especially when we started, there was
not the, the joy of podcasting back in the day was, hey, the show can have efforts in it great.
My show can have, can be four hours long today and I'll release another one in four weeks time
and our assessor will just pick it up, but we keep it a lot of that on the HPR, and it's important
I think that we do. Nice, nice. Yeah, so I was going to kind of follow on from that is, you know,
I've done about you, but it sounds so, or it sounds so, I got the impression that podcasting is
becoming more and more mainstream. Yeah, mainstream. Um,
Martin, we are obviously not for the youngsters, but
are you implying we are mainstream now? Oh god, I don't think so.
But, um, I mean, you've done this for, well, you know, not yourself, but, um,
HPR has been going on for 15 years. How do you see this, um, ending up in the next,
oh, I'll say 15 years. It's, it's, it's, it's kind of funny as I said earlier, it's a long-term
project and you see stuff calm when you stings have to go, you've seen, you know, what goes around
comes around. And we're, we're in a situation now where a lot of people are, there's a lot of
podcasts out there and there's a lot of aircoats competition. So we are going to see a, a case in
the subscriber numbers, which we have. And also the COVID has hit the subscriber numbers. So it's
been in a bad way or in a good way. Yeah, yeah, it's going to, it's, um, there's, let me see, um,
Dar, over there on the, if you go to the HPR, uh, Twitter feed, there's a, um,
HPR statistics. So we've got, uh, 40, we were steadily grown from around, say, 2017,
up until the start of the pandemic, we went from, uh, 25,000 to 40,000 subscribers a month,
you know, steady growth, up and down. Yeah. Wow. And we, and we've seen that now, uh, plateau in the
last year or two, um, to around 35,000. So our gaming subscribers, uh, at the same rate as we're
kind of losing. But that's down to the COVID. I mean, I don't, that's down to the COVID, Jesus,
because I, uh, I also, I don't have a three hour commute anymore. So, uh, I've got a Q
podcast. I, I'm working or I'm doing tech support for the kids, uh, or I'm going out for my
mandatory walk with my wife. Not that I, you know, life's different. I don't have as much, uh,
downtime waste of time. So, uh, that's the thing. And then you have, you have things like the BBC,
you are releasing a lot of shows on, uh, you know, shows that, that they, and even our,
the national broadcasters here, the national broadcasters are in order to be relevant. They're
spinning off lots of shows that are relatively niche into the podcasting world. And that's,
that's great. Which is, you know, it's funny because, um, I was a merc, and, uh, one of the managers
come up to me and goes, Hey, Ken, does this cool thing podcasting ever heard about it?
I'll do it for your business darling. Yeah, we've been running for 15 years.
You used to say that, but it's, it's good. It's good. The guys, you know, yeah, again, back in the day,
it was, it was kind of this rebel belay thing. And then that went to how do we monetize it and,
you know, I got to monetize it and produce in 50 shows a week and basically living in my mom's
basement, um, which is absolutely fine, of course. Um, but, you know, that was, that was the thing,
how to monetize it. And now national broadcasters need to do it in order to stay relevant. So, yeah,
but then again, there comes a point where you listen to all these shows, and I had at least a
point where I'm listening to all these shows. And I think, well, I can contribute, how do I contribute
back? I've got all this excellent knowledge, um, from people, how do I contribute back and
podcasting yourself is a way to do that. But this particularly in HBO, if you have something
that's relevant, then, um, then it's submitted here because, uh, we go on the internet archive,
and that's, you know, that's got a, the whole point of the archive project is, which is an
interesting thing if you do some research on what they've done. Um, they're replicating the,
the archive in multiple places. And hopefully, you know, if Armageddon comes, the, the recordings
of your voice in HBO will be there forever. And when the aliens come along to figure out
what it was, they'll be tuning into the Linux and those go, yeah, I can see why this project was
destroyed. Yeah, enough. So, so can find it before we wrap this up because we have to, in a few
minutes, because we don't want to kind of break the two hour mark, I suppose, any final call to action.
Yes, um, I, I need you to submit yours, uh, the people listening, and I need you if you think
that you can't submit show because, I don't know, English is in your first language, you'll have
speech impediments or whatever. Then write the script for us, and we have a team of highly-paid
professionals who will, uh, who will narrate that for you and submit it as your show. That's not a
problem. Um, if you are just keep it in the back of your mind is this HBO show hacked as a scout
for HBO. And, um, have a listen because getting, keeping the show, uh, the, the fees,
elderfold, that's a full time job. And if, if we have scouts out there helping us to do that,
that will be great. And another thing is we don't have a, we don't have a Wikipedia entry.
And the reason for that is we have, uh, how many homes,
all the people who are technical in nature are barred from doing that because they've also
missed the shows to HBO. And they're no longer, uh, no longer allowed to do that.
So, I mean, this is, this is the important bit people. Yeah, that's 24 people.
If, if you can manage to put in references that point to HBR of good quality,
on good quality websites, finally, Wikipedia will accept the entry. The entry is there.
It just needs a few more references. And then it's good to go. Then the editors will decide
that this is worth publishing. I taught myself about a year ago, or maybe one and a half years ago,
but I, but the, but the links simply weren't there. So the feedback that I got basically was,
if you can provide more quality links, we think about publishing this Wikipedia entry.
I reckon it's about 97% complete. All we're missing is a good few backlinks to HBR of quality
sites coming, coming from quality sites. And then we're there. And can to your first point,
absolutely. I mean, just the links in us is probably the best example about almost over,
slightly over a year ago, we were a little unknown herd of podcasts. Now we are getting offers
for TV shows. Cartels hunt us with the guts to kind of, I can't really talk about the details,
but there's a lot of money involved. Never mind global syndication rights people. Think about it.
It only took a year. Jokes aside. We do have bottom line is actually HBR's
the place to be. That's what I'm saying. Absolutely. On the above page of HBR,
there are references to where we've been published in news articles and print media and stuff like that.
So who can that has been more than wonderful? And we would love to work on ours, but yes,
but unfortunately we're working on the time budget. Thank you very much for being on this.
I'm dead sure that this won't be the last show that the Linux in-laws will do on HBR.
So we'll stay tuned and thank you for your time. And of course we are happy to be on HBR.
Yeah indeed. Thanks a lot Ken for all the great work. Yes, we do have feedback.
We do. We do. It's great. Some are called Brian.
In Ohio, if I'm a completely mistaken. Yeah, it's certainly confusing whether he's
suggesting he's not from Ohio. It's just temporary visiting. Brian, if you, if you're listening,
please do get in touch. The email does the feedback and it will send us on the you.
You don't have to post a comment on that. He just got in touch.
Yeah indeed. You want him to come in touch again.
No, but he posted this on on HBR. Brian from a personal approach, which is of course always
appreciated. The email does the feedback and Linux in-laws on the you, but of course posting
comments on HB radio is fine as well. So why don't you read out the feedback?
Well, the good idea. Yes. So Brian, not Brian from the
life of Brian, I think. Brian, as a topic is free speech and he says, so free speech is okay
unless the FSFE decides it's not okay. Except for RMS's quirky behaviour, he was never
accused of doing anything illegal. He was merely exercising his right endowed by our creator
of free speech. His only fail was not realizing that the source police had invaded the FSFE
down with Big Brother. So Brian, fair point. Indeed.
No, no, Martin, of course, he's absolutely spot on. It's all about free speech. So if you want
to endorse pedophilia, I'm just saying that as an example, you're free to do so, of course.
But as pedophilia implies, there is a certain, what's what I'm looking for?
Common sense. Yeah, there's common sense in this legality, right?
Yes, not to bring up certain subjects in certain contexts. And if the track card of a certain
written instrument never mind the historical records I need to go by. He didn't endorse,
he didn't endorse pedophilia, but what he said came, that came very close to this. My personal
interpretation of the matter, I need to say, but links, of course, will be in the show notes. But
even just from an ethical perspective, and this is exactly what the FSFE and the FSFE
and certain parts of the FSFE and the FSFE in particular, basically objected to. It's simply not on.
You see, you do not make jokes about that people. There's reason for this.
Similar, you don't endorse pedophilia. What's wrong with making jokes about that people?
You don't do it. Well, they're not going to hear it, are they? Correct, but you see the people who
still do it. They're not mine either. They object to this. Yes, that's fair.
Wait, not all of them, but certain people will. So it's about basic social protocols
that may have been violated here, and even the thought of this, and this is nothing to do with
thought police. Sorry, it's simply not on. So of course, Richard Amsterdam claimed that he's
suffering from autism. Even if there's not a pretext, that's only a lame excuse, at least
that's what it's coming across like. Sorry, this is not really on. Of course, this is my personal
opinion. Martin may disagree, but in the broader social context remarks like this that won't fly.
And that's exactly what many people have reacted to. Of course, we are talking about democracy here.
So everybody is free to voice their own opinion goes without saying. But quite a few people have
objected. Have voiced their objection on place like GitHub, and that's exactly what happened
in within the FSFE. And there has nothing to do with with with with big brother or the
police. No, it's basic moral standards here. Well, it's it's more so as you say, I'm putting in with
the society, live in my view. It's it's well in good saying that pre-speech has to be completely
free and nothing else matters. But if you're operating within the society, you have to abide by the
that's that's exactly the legal rules, but also the unbuttoned rules. Yes, we are marked as
explicit for a reason, a lack of public radio, because we do say things that might offend people.
But if Mama subscribe, we've never really endorsed Peter, Peter, or the way Martin
not that wouldn't go past. No, our own salt police system. And that's and that's exactly it.
We may imply unions and with vampires and all the rest of it, but there's a certain threshold
that we normally do not cross. We we we we we may we may make jokes about certain topics.
But for example, we do not endorse pedophilia. It goes without saying at least not in this
year's context. And I think that we should leave that. Yeah, yeah, I'm sure that some people
may comment should they wish to. That is our needs. And of course, exactly. If you disagree,
feel free to send mail to a former session deaf, former session, no, of course not. The email
says feedback. This is the Linux in laws. You come for the knowledge. But stay for the madness.
Thank you for listening. This podcast is licensed under the latest version of the creative
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You find these and other ditties license under creative comments at your mando. The website
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Ever wondered what my beloved co host gets up to when nobody's listening?
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Hold cell weapons dealing or organizing coke supply chains on the global level.
Stay tuned and find out yourself.
You
That's a little
Um...
Shocking, isn't it?
Semipro-Wistling and humming?
Who thought of that?
But wait, there's more.
Now for the grand finale.
Is that on...
Thingy...
...blowd...
...thingy-cloud, or a thingy-cloud?
Oh, there is, got it.
Okay.
You see, Martin, it's not enough to increase the lock-in.
You have to take a look at the locks too.
I'm just saying. That's a good idea. Why didn't I think of that?
You know what the latest craze is?
I just found out the other day because the federal idiots are running the show now.
Okay. You heard about this, right?
The individual federal states and listen to this.
Past a law? Yes.
Past an emergency legislation that allows, that gives Berlin more power.
In terms of really cracking down on local level with regards to school openings,
barbershops, shops in general, all the rest of it.
But you see, it's a federal state. It's not the UK. There's a difference.
It's a federal country where we have these weird splinter groups as well, like Wales and Scotland.
Not even coming close, Martin.
Okay. Now my local gym demands an attestation from a doctor so that I can get in.
Okay. And this is coming directly from Berlin.
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