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Episode: 4516
Title: Browser User Agent
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4516/hpr4516.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:13:04 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4516, for 2025-11-24
Today's show is entitled, "Browser User Agent"
The host is Henrik Hemrin and the duration is 00:04:55
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "A web site did not work for me. The User Agent has an important role."
Welcome to Hacker Public Radio. My name is Henry Kimlin and I'm your host today.
A while ago I visited a website that is an archive for old historical documents.
It is a database from where documents can be downloaded as PDF files.
As a visitor, I can login to the archive as a guest.
When I find a document of interest of the search, I can write click on the PDF icon and download the document.
But I can not. No download starts when I click on the PDF icon.
This is the first time I visit this archive so I do not know exactly how it works.
It was time to investigate the root course. I use Firefox browser on a Linux machine.
I tested several methods to see if any would solve the issue. I tried by changing settings for
pop-ups. I changed Firefox security settings. I disabled VPN. I disabled Firefox extensions
for blocking game trackers. I tested also the Chromium browser as well as the Epiphany browser.
All those methods resulted in no difference. Nothing happened.
I was in contact with a friend on Windows and also staff at the archive. Both telling me that
from Windows it worked, including with Firefox. So now I knew the archive works and that it works on
Firefox. So I thought, can this somehow be related to Linux?
I asked in a Linux forum if someone on Linux could test to download.
One person in the forum tested and solved the problem. I would not define it as a Linux problem,
but the site designed that affected Linux uses. The trouble was something I had not thought of
the user agent. When my browser contacted website, my browser can tell the site what kind of
browser I use which operating system I use and more. This information can be used by the site to
optimize the presentation of the content for me. For to me, unknown reason, maybe a mistake,
maybe related to some old design compatibility issue, this site did not accept the information
my user agent provided. The solution is to tell the website I'm something else.
In the browser, there are developers tools. When opening the developer tools from the menu,
typically a developer window with tools and analytics is opened at the bottom part of the web page.
One tool is network. Within network, I can simulate how the site looks on different devices
with different networks connections and I can also choose different user agents.
The tools are similar in both Firefox and Chromium. The exact list of standard options,
different and Chromium has more options pre-loaded. In this specific case, when I,
in developers on Firefox, change user agent to Chrome desktop, which relates to Chrome on Windows
as I understand and then reload the web page, I can now download the PDF file from the archive.
When this website interprets me to be this other type of user, they can understand each other
without any issue. I have reported back to the site owner and hopefully this specific site will not
need this workaround for the browser user agent in the future. Thank you for listening,
take care and goodbye.
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording podcast, click on our upload link
to find out how easy it is.
Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by an AnHonestHost.com, the Internet Archive,
rsync.net, and our mirror network.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
hpr_transcripts/hpr4517.txt
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Episode: 4517
Title: Cheap Yellow Display Project Part 4: The hardware
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4517/hpr4517.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:13:06 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4517, for 2025-11-25
Today's show is entitled, "Cheap Yellow Display Project Part 4: The hardware "
The host is Trey and the duration is 00:11:19
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "Explanation of the hardware which will be used for this project"
hello again this is trey welcome to part four in my cheap yellow display project series
if you have hung in there with me so far on this journey thank you if you have missed earlier
episodes you can find them on my hpr profile page and there's a link in the show notes
if you have questions comments concerns snide remarks or other feedback please leave an episode
comment or drop me an email using the address in my profile even better you could record and
upload your own show which shares your viewpoint or expertise to review i finally have an actual
project to build using the cheap yellow display it is a portable programmable morse code key or memory
which can be connected to my hf transceiver radios by simply plugging it into the code key input port
then i could transmit stored messages by simply touching their specific icon on the touch screen
so now i purchased a pair of cheap yellow displays each arrived in an anti-static zipper bag with a
usb-c cable a six inch long four pin pb 1.25 millimeter to dupont 2.54 millimeter cable harness
a plastic case holding the cheap yellow display itself and a small plastic stylus there are
pictures in the show notes depending on how many i-o connections i may need and how i plan to power
this i am probably going to need more four pin pb 1.25 millimeter wired connectors you can see a
description of the various features and connectors on random nerd tutorials right up about this board
and there's a link in the show notes the only difference i can see between this description and
what is what i received is that mine have both a usb micro usb and a usb-c port on them
i'm going to include some pictures for you of course the first thing i had to do was plug it in and see
what happens as you can see in the pictures it appears to be running some kind of simulation of a website
the backlit display looks all right it's not super high resolution but for the price it will suit my needs
just fine the touch screen is responsive but remember it is pressure sensitive and it works best using the
provided stylus or a fingernail and not your fingertip all right so i have the cheap yellow display what
other hardware do i need well i need to address how one of these will actually connect to my radios
modern amateur radio transceivers which support continuous wave transmission which is another
name for morse code generally can use one of two different pieces of hardware for input
the first is what we call a straight key below is a photo of the one that i own
this is a classic old-fashioned telegraph style code key it is designed to quickly and easily be pressed
down to close a circuit and when released the circuit is opened effectively making it a normally
open push button switch to send a dot the operator holds down the key for a short period of time then
releases it to send a dash the operator holds down the key for a longer period of time before releasing
it we will discuss the actual timing specifications for morse code in a future podcast connectivity for the
switch has been standardized to use a 3.5 millimeter mono mail phone connector which has only sleeve and tip
connections the second option is a paddle style electronic keyer there are many styles of these and i'm
including a picture of the one which i use which also belong to a close friend of mine who is now silent key
in general the paddle is two separate normally open switches in the most common configuration when an
operator presses and releases the paddle on the right a dash is sent if the paddle on the right is held a
continuous series of dashes will be sent until the paddle is released the left paddle works similarly
if it is pressed and released a single dot will be sent if it is pressed and held a series of dots
will be sent until it is released the function of these paddles can be swapped from left to right
using the radio configuration there is additional functionality which can be configured in some radios
for when both paddles are pressed simultaneously but i am not going to describe these here
the paddle generally uses a 3.5 millimeter stereo mail phone connector with the sleeve being common
the tip of the connector is wired to the left paddle and the ring of the connector is wired to the right
paddle most common radios have a built-in keyer which can be configured for a paddle and will
automatically transmit dots or dashes at whichever speed is configured within the radio based on which
paddle is pressed you can see this phone connector illustrated on wikipedia's phone connector page
and i'm including a link in the show notes you can learn more about the various devices which can be
used for sending morse code and how they function at morse code world ideally controlling all the morse code
timing within the cheap yellow display would be best that way it could be connected as a straight key
and a any key or settings already configured within the radio should not matter however if i wish to
also be able to manually send morse code myself using my paddles without disconnecting the cheap yellow
display and reconfiguring the radio that could be problematic i may need to factor in the possibility
of connecting my paddle to the cheap yellow display as well and then building in code to respond to inputs
from the paddles as i mentioned in a previous episode i have an arduino nano on my desk as a practice
oscillator for my paddles i may be able to reuse some of the code on the cheap yellow display
i'm including a picture of that arduino nano circuit in the show notes
so if i want the cheap yellow display to appear to the radio like a straight key
i will need it to be able to control a switch quickly and accurately
but i also want the cheap yellow display and the radio to be electrically isolated from each other
here this calls for a relay i was able to find and order some inexpensive relay modules which work
nicely with arduino and esp32 and i'm including a picture in the show notes these allow connectivity
to a 5 volt power display or power source and to one of the cheap yellow displays gpio pins
these feed an octocoupler circuit which in turn drives the coil for the relay this provides inductive
kickback protection to the cheap yellow display and can drive a coil which will require more current than
the gpio is able to provide all right time for a rabbit trail an inductor is simply a coil of wire
direct current flowing through any wire generates a magnetic field within the inductor because the
wire is coiled the magnetic field builds from each pass of the wire in the coil if you include an iron core
it sustains the magnetic field even better this is the basis for an electromagnet you've probably played
with one as a kid a relay is simply a momentary contact switch controlled by an electromagnet
one unique property of an inductor is that current wants to keep flowing in the direction it was applied
to be specific when the current source is removed the magnetic field still exists for a while
and it effectively generates an electric current in the coil in the same direction as the one which
initially created the magnetic field to begin with if it has a path to flow the current will create
another weaker magnetic field which creates its own electric current in a diminishing loop if the
circuit which drives the coil of a direct current relay is not ready for this continued push of current
damage can be done many times this is countered by wiring a flyback diode in parallel with the coil
and in the opposite direction in which the current will be applied this way when the current source is
stopped the diode gives a pass for the inductive kickback current to safely flow while the magnetic
field dissipates i'm going to include a link in the show notes that explains this in greater detail
all right back to our topic the switch side of the relay is a single pole double throw and makes
connections available for common normally closed and normally open
it will be easy to connect the common and normally open connections to a 3.5 millimeter mono mail phone
connector so that it may be plugged into the keyport on any radio transmitter i will need to do some
testing on the speed of the relay but i think it will work just fine once i start writing code for the
cheap yellow display i will be able to connect and test the relay
all right this is a good place to end this episode and it is one of the longest in this series so far
in the next episode we will begin to look at how we design the user interface for our program
something i do not know anything about just yet stay tuned weekdays for additional exciting episodes of
hacker public radio and at some point the next episode in this series
if you like what you have heard please leave an episode comment or drop me an email using the
email address in my profile if you have more than a single sentence to contribute to the subject
i encourage you to record an episode with your thoughts and expertise if you dislike what you have
heard you are encouraged even more strongly to record and upload your own show which shares your
your viewpoint or opinion until next time
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording podcast, click on our upload link
to find out how easy it is.
Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by an AnHonestHost.com, the Internet Archive,
rsync.net, and our mirror network.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
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Episode: 4518
Title: Cosy News Corner for Week 46 - Your source for Open Source news
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4518/hpr4518.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:13:06 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4518, for 2025-11-26
Today's show is entitled, "Cosy News Corner for Week 46 - Your source for Open Source news"
The host is Daniel Persson and the duration is 00:19:27
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "This week’s open-source roundup."
Hello and welcome to the cozy news corner for open source news and this is going to be for the week of 46
and this is not something that I will produce highly. It's just talking through a bunch of news and then
publishing so this will go out on my youtube channel and I also will publish it on hacker public radio as a podcast
so let's switch over so we can see some screens here but I'm going to talk about it
it's just so you get some visuals on youtube and the first news is Debian that now mandates that
rust should be used for a PT the advanced packaging tool and this is something that is
talked about in their news group by a person called Julien and Ress Claude and he's a long time
developer in the Debian community and also in lead maintainer for this tool so he him going out and
saying that this is the way forward you should switch over so all the ports are using rust going forward
and you have about six months to do it or else pretty much so Debian will switch over to
using rust for this tool and a lot of different things in Debian it's actually switching over to
using rust and a lot of things in the Linux world is starting to use rust as well we have
some things in the kernel that is using rust and more and more of the tools in the
guinea libraries will also go over to using rust and one thing that I want to mention here
that I listened to a talk about this by Brian Cantrell and this was the complexity of simplicity
and this was a keynote that he was given at the tallest cone and he's the oxide co-founder and
CTO and this was in Amsterdam in October the 17th and to quote him he went into rust pretty
skeptical and honestly he came back realizing that there were many things that he viewed to be
essential complexity that weren't that were actually accidental complexity and when it comes to rust
one of the big things there was the error handling so what did he mean by this so the whole talk
is about complexity and making things that are simple is actually pretty hard you need to put a lot
of work into make something simple but if something is simple and easy to understand it's less error
and when it comes to C and so on you can write wonderful applications in C but they might
become very complex and when you take that concept and take a new look at it you can produce something
like rust that has taken a lot of thought and worked a lot in order to make the code less brittle
more simplistic and easier to talk about and understand so that is pretty much what he is aiming at here
I would guess after looking at this talk I would recommend you look at a look at his talk as well
and listen to it's a lot of good and fun information is a great speaker I think
next up you're going to talk about some vulnerabilities in rust not particularly rust but one thing
written in rust so this is the pseudo errors so the pseudo command written in rust not public
any at the moment not the main thing used in the piano or a banto but it's a rework and they are
working against it and trying to get it into a banto as a stable release and they have found two
bugs and they are not great but it's good that they actually find these before any release so the first
vulnerability was that the password could be exposed due to timeouts that isn't ever good and
another thing is that incorrectly recorded it incorrectly recorded the wrong user in a time stamp
and the reason that but is that some authentication could be reused if you have cash credentials
so it's something that they need to look into and both these were reported by
two different medias here so the first media about the bian rust was reported by Steven Vogue
Nichols at the news stack and then we also have this report by pseudo errors by Sudrov Ronda
that is writing for its false so I'm gonna mention these as well so you know who have written
the story and who should have created for it. Next up I was also reading another story at the news stack
was written by Lorraine Larson and this is about snapshot and snapshot has actually released an open
source framework that they are using in order to write applications for iOS, Mac OS and also Android
and it's writing code in JavaScript in order to create GUI components and work with those kind of tooling
in native code so you write JavaScript and then this framework will compile it to native apps
so if you're looking for a crossplot form UI from framework then perhaps this snapshot
open source library is something that you need to look into and it could be an option for you at least
and now over to our first piece of AI news and there is a bunch of AI news out there and now
we're going to talk about a company called solo I oh so not AI I oh so this is another
title that is written by Heather Yoshlin the news stack and this is talking about an agent
registry for AI agents so when you have these kind of endpoints with mpc this protocol this
model context protocol where you can talk to agents on different sites there is a bunch of different
agent regicies out there but most of them are close source and behind pay walls and so on but
solo I oh has a solution that they have been using for a while now and they have now released their
agent registry as open source so if you need this then you can install that and use it locally
on your organization um I have not looked into either agents or agent registries yet that is still
a blind spot of mine but perhaps in the future if it's interesting I could look into this more
so next up we have a little bit of a controversy and it has been a problem for a while
still in the AI field and this was reported by sort of ruda and from it's false and it's ffm peg
and they are pretty angry about a lot of different complex contributions from AI so again we
create these kind of CVSs where we say this is a very bad bug that you have in your application you
need to fix it and it's AI slot pretty much in this CVS and they are pretty fed up with it and they
are just a bunch of volunteers that are trying to create the best movie viewing and movie
managing system so ffm peg is where you can take a bunch of different clips either audio or movies
and you can do operations on them and they can read pretty much any video filed that has
have been made it's an awesome application but it's just made by a couple of interesting
parties and none of them are working for none of them are really getting paid for it or at least
not paid well so they are pretty fed up they are swarmed with all these kind of issues and they
don't have the actual capacity to solve them all and they have reached out to Google and said
we need some funding here if we're going to work on this full time and so it has been a really
bad time for the ffm peg guys and this is not the first time that AI has been used in order to swamp
developers with either bad PRs or with the problems that isn't really a problem it's just
something that someone found and reported because they thought that that could be a huge problem
and another person that I've talked about this is Daniel Steinberg and he has is the sole developer
of the curl project and he had a time where he just ignored CVEs because there were so many of them
and they were not really good either pull requests or actual issue reports so AI will create a lot
bunch of slop and will make it much harder to do development in this case another person that also
has reported this is Steven J. Vaughn Nicholas at the news stack so I read both of those
reports but they are talking about similar things behind the ffm peg and they're problem with all
these CVEs. Next up we have Ubuntu that is now released information about their commitment
for handling releases and LDS releases and giving security and support and this have been a
big topic in the Microsoft world where they now not give any more security fixes for Windows 10
and they are leaving a lot of people behind that can't install Windows 11 because they have
two old computers and so on so this have been in the news a lot and a lot of people are angry
on Microsoft and Microsoft have been pretty good bit creating both security fixes and supporting
their operating system. I looked back and both Windows 8 and Windows 10 has had 10 years of support
from their initial release until pretty much a month ago where they stopped supporting
Windows 10 and then they said okay if you're in the EU or if you have enough Microsoft
points or want to send some information to us so we can benefit of having all your information
and you can still continue using Windows 10 or else you need to upgrade to Windows 11
but they have a 10 years support cycle and remember how large the team at Microsoft is.
Ubuntu is a very serious player in the Linux world but they are not as large as Microsoft
and they have now released and said we will support our operating system up to 15 years
with some caveats so the standard maintenance window for each release of LTS which is the long-term
support conversion will be five years so they give support and security fixes for five years
for all their customers even if you have not given them any money at all and if you are a
pro subscriber which I am as well and if you are an individual not the company those are also
free or at least there were free when I became a pro subscriber you will get another five years so
year 6 to 10 will also be supported by this pro subscription and you can also call in and get
support by their support team. Next five years a year 11 to 15 is something they call a legacy
add-on for security coverage and support and this is also for pro subscribers but they will add
an extra fee of 50% for those five extra years but still I think that is a very small cost if
you really need to have old versions of a bonto and having something that you can run in production
for 15 years without upgrading that is pretty cool so I think this is actually a really cool thing
that they have come out with and it's also perhaps a little bit of pointing at Microsoft that
you could have done this as well you have the resources and I think it's a pretty cool this was
reported by Sirov Rudai again at it's the boss and another thing reported by the same person is the
firefox built in AI so firefox has had built in AI for a while now where you had an extra
feature that you can open up in order to summarize pages and so on and do different queries to
different AI agents online and because we all are starting to use AI they have now taken it away
forward so before you have this classical tabs where you search for things or browse the web
and if you were in a case where you needed to be more privacy minded perhaps you needed to visit
the site that you didn't want it to be saved on your computer you could go into privacy mode of course
still every call goes through your ISP and so on so somebody could look up what you have actually
looked at but at least it doesn't store any information on your computer that's privacy mode
the next mode that they have is the AI window so if you're open up an AI window then you have
those tools ready at hand in that concept and there here have been a bunch of backlash on this AI
window people don't really want it and so on or at least they try to be before anyone creating a
lot of information about this so they are saying that this is something that is optional
you don't need to use it it's available to you if you have the need but you don't need to use it
so don't be angry at us but they haven't really come out and tell told us what it actually could
do it's a way of browsing the web in a gigantic way but they haven't really told us how it actually
how it will look or anything like that it's something that they are working for but it's
coming soon so that is something that could be interesting to look into and see when it actually
is released and have some first hand knowledge about and check out when it actually is released
so that was the report by Citroen Rudolf from its force and also from Ajit Varma at the
distilled so next up we're going to talk about a Linux distro called Nitrox 50 oh so this is the
five big release that came out this week as well and it's a some Linux system for modern computers
on an immutable foundation and it's powered by open RC instead of system D and it has hyperland
and so on so before simplicity and predictability and main attainability is their catchphrase
for this operating system and looking at it is very Mac like so it looks like any of the newer Mac
OS and perhaps that's good you have familiarity it seems like you have multiple desktop and so on
and also some performance and other metrics right in the operating system I haven't worked with
this haven't tried it out but it's an option and it looks interesting and it was released this week
and last but not least we are going to talk about a new project that has been open sourced
and it pretty much have been open sourced all the way it's just started off
this week that they released that it was in the making and looking at the commits it's very very
they are actually working on it right now so last commit was yesterday and this is a
Vulcan based implementation of DirectX7 so for applications and games that are pretty old
they are now trying to create this layer that you can use in order to play them in Linux under
so this is interesting and something that is in the making and we'll probably get into
some wine release later on but it's just starting work now so we already have a bunch of
implementation for DirectX12 and so on so we already have a lot of Windows native support for newer
games and applications but they are slowly but surely working it they're very back in order to
support even more applications and games so this was what I wanted to cover today I hope that you found
this interesting
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording podcast, click on our upload link
to find out how easy it is.
Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by an AnHonestHost.com, the Internet Archive,
rsync.net, and our mirror network.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
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Episode: 4519
Title: YouTube Subscriptions 2025 #10
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4519/hpr4519.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:13:09 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4519, for 2025-11-27
Today's show is entitled, "YouTube Subscriptions 2025 #10"
The host is Ahuka and the duration is 00:16:40
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "Ahuka shares part ten of his list of subscribed channels"
Hello, this is a hookah welcoming you to Hacker Public Radio and another exciting episode
And this one is coming to you from the reserve queue. So you know what that means?
We didn't have enough shows
Hacker Public Radio is a community project and it relies on the community to produce and submit shows
To keep things going and if we don't get enough shows at some point this whole thing shuts down
I'm gonna assume you don't want that to happen. I know I don't want that to happen. I think Hacker Public Radio is a wonderful resource
But keep it going got to get some shows. It's easy to do
So please record something get up there if you've never done it before
Traditionally people will post a first show about something like how they got into technology
So I'm going to now continue with my look at my
Different YouTube subscriptions
And talk about them
So the next one I'm gonna talk about is is one called parlagram
Parlagram is a music
Related site most of what they do, but not all
has to do with the Beatles and
So that might be thought they did
For instance some very interesting ones about
Some of the tapes
Original recording masters and things like that that they're able to look at and
He did a
a tour inside
Abbey road studios and got to talk to some of the people who work there
So stuff that I find interesting
So the next one is Paul Whitewick
I don't remember how I stumbled across this one
but
Paul Whitewick is
Very interested in the history of England
I say England because I think that's really what he focuses on
Not great Britain or the United Kingdom
And a lot of it is historical so
He will take a look at old Roman roads and
Look for historical sites that might be 2000 years old
A lot of what he does is getting out into
The outdoors and
Walking around to sites and showing them to you
And if you have an interesting history
Particularly English history
You might be interested in that
Then there's PBS Eons now
PBS is in America the public broadcast system and
What they did is they set up an arm called PBS digital and they are
Linked I don't know the exact
Contractual details they're linked with complexity which does crash course and some of those things
And so Eons is about
Prehistoric history so it's it's going back
Into deep time it could be dinosaurs it could be prehistoric hominids
Yeah, so it's long ago
Now these shows
They can vary
They've started the thing called deep time and these are like hour-long
Life and death on a tiny
Dinosaurs island could you survive the end of the triassic stuff like that
Others are you know the 10 to 15 minute range
So one of them
Good example of that how animals got anuses
which is you know it's a scientific problem to figure out
No one was when the Amazon flowed backwards
So interesting stuff and
Another one from PBS is PBS origins
Now this is a history show and because PBS is the American
Public broadcast system it's they're talking about American history and
Trying to look at why things are the way they are in this country
So they did things like
History of America's highways
um
Who can identify as a native American?
Things like that
So it's it's American history and then there's PBS space time
This is a very interesting one for me at least this is hardcore physics
um so
Typically these episodes that come out once a week they're gonna be 15 to 20 minutes long
So you know is the way function the building block of reality
What is the new ultimate energy limit of the universe?
What if the universe did not start with the big bang
This is some of the things that they have tackled
You know you over time you get a pretty good
Education in relativity and what's involved in that and black holes and all of those good things
um
Next channel is
PCJ Law
Now this is someone who's a gamer
so
He does a lot mostly civilization
Which you might expect for me you know that I would find someone who does a lot of sieve
um
And so he did for instance and his videos tend to be longer
so
Mastering the Civ5 early game on deity and he does kind of a walk through of what you need to do if you
Want to accomplish that
um
Or
Civ5 beginner tactics to win more wars
How to build big cities
And so on
A lot of it is Civ5
uh
Well, you know in our civilization series I've pointed out that different versions of Civ
There are people who are still playing them to this day and think they're you know
There there are people who think Civ3 was the best
Civ ever released
Another group of people think no it was Civ4 was the best and Civ5 and so on and as I'm recording this Civ7 is going to be out in a few weeks
Well, you know
That's how it is so this channel PCJ Law is uh it's gonna have a lot of Civ5 information
uh
The next channel is periodic videos
And this is another one of those ones by Brady Haran and I mentioned that he
He has a channel about chemistry
uh and this is that channel the periodic part is a
Reference back to the periodic table and
What it is is each video
It's kind of like takes a look at
A particular element and
There's a well-known chemist who is one of the main hosts of this channel
And
There will do experiments and see you know what happens if you take this and you know you take a particular mineral and
Um
What happens if you
File it into powder and then drop the powder into a flame, you know will it produce a particular color or something like that?
If you like
Chemistry this this is pretty good
Then there's a fellow named Philip Hawkins
And he calls his channel
Culture Phil culture filter, sorry
But the Phil coming from his name and this is another
Mostly doctor who occasionally does something else, but primarily doctor who related
Reviews analysis stuff like that
Then there's photo advanced
uh and this is a channel that is devoted to
Gimp
Inkscape and blender and it does tutorials
And so if you want it to learn more about any of those three software things
You know this would be a good place to go to get more information
um
So there's a Gimp beginners guide tutorial course which is a series of videos that take you through that
Gimp text blenders beginners guide blender tutorials and so on
Next is physics girl
Now this it right now is
Sort of on hiatus unfortunately the host
Diana Cohen
Got long COVID
And so she is just just recently got to the point that she could get out of bed and stand
Which tells you how bad it got
She spent several years basically just in bed I'm able to do anything
But she did some very nice
Videos about physics and I'm hoping she gets back to it and so I'm sticking with the channel see how she's doing and
Hoping that
Eventually she'll get back to doing the videos that she's known for
The videos that she did on physics is really good
So
Then there's a channel called politics girl and this is
You know news and
Public affairs stuff in the United States
So if you're not interested in American politics and I
Realize a lot of people aren't then skip over it but if that's something that is of interest to you
this is
And as you might expect given my leanings it did so
It's kind of a view from the left on this
Then there's popular cruising
And these videos
They're a little bit
longer than some of the ones I do it's
Generally reviews of either a cruise ship or some activity
and they tend to be
20 to 30 minutes
long
You know if you want that sort of thing and you want to know about what's the newest ship and and
What was it like traveling on that ship?
This will be one to check out
Next is one called postmodern jukebox
This is a fascinating one
The postmodern jukebox is
What they do is they take
Contemporary
What they call today's hits
And do them in an earlier musical style
So
Some of the ones
You know what if they did the boys are back in town by thin lazy
But did it as a 50s rock and roll
um
Or
You know chapel-runs good luck babe done as a 1960s Leslie Gorson
um
I love it
My wife and I have been to see them live they they do have a
A touring organization as well
And the live shows are also fascinating and and we've enjoyed them a great deal
And there is potato mick whiskey
Little ethnic stereotyping going on here
Potato mick whiskey is from Ireland and
He is
Another one of those people who is a gamer
Primarily sieve but
Really strategy for ex games in general
He does videos some of them are tutorial videos many of them are
He'll do a series of videos that take you through an entire game from start to finish
Now sieve games
Can take a long time to play so doing it from start to finish might mean 12 hours worth of video
And then he'll he'll break it up into you know 12 one hour segments or something like that
It's good stuff if you're into it
as is
Pravis PRA v u s
and again
More than just sieve so
He will tackle other games like
You know one is surviving Mars which is a real-time strategy game
um
Another game is rebel incorporated
Or some of the others plague incorporated
So
You know if he's doing a game that I'm interested in then I'll watch the video otherwise I'll say yeah skip it
So that's enough for now. This is a hookah for hacker public radio signing off and encouraging you to support free software. Bye bye
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording podcast, click on our upload link
to find out how easy it is.
Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by an AnHonestHost.com, the Internet Archive,
rsync.net, and our mirror network.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
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Episode: 4520
Title: Arthur C. Clarke: Rama and Sequels
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4520/hpr4520.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:13:09 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4520, for 2025-11-28
Today's show is entitled, "Arthur C. Clarke: Rama and Sequels"
The host is Ahuka and the duration is 00:11:56
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "A look at Arthur C. Clarke's other famous series."
Hello, this is a hookah for Packer Public Radio, welcoming you back to another exciting
episode in our series on science fiction and fantasy, and what we're going to do this
time, continuing our look at Arthur C. Clark, is to take a look at the other series
that he is known for. It's a little bit different from the 2001 that we had previously
discussed. This is the Rama series, and it starts with a novel called
Drondivu with Rama published in 1973, and that kicked off this series. The setup is
that an object has been tracked entering the solar system at a high velocity, and
only one spaceship is close enough to investigate. As we have seen with Umoa Moa,
the scenario is accurate. Umoa Moa entered the solar system from outside, traveling very fast,
and there was no way to prepare and launch a mission in time to intercept and investigate the
object. In the case of Rama, we're in a future time, it's set in the year 2131, when travel through
the solar system is more developed, and there can be a ship capable of interception. Now that
ship is called the endeavor, it is duly dispatched, and finds Rama to be a perfectly smooth
cylinder, 50 kilometers long, and 20 kilometers in diameter, so clearly of artificial origin.
It is a spaceship of some kind, and the crew find a way inside through a triple airlock system,
and inside they find three identical staircases. The Rama is rotating,
which provides artificial gravity, and has two circular planes separated by a circular ocean.
The crew investigates, and as the Rama gets closer to the sun, it starts to warm up and come to life.
Now, if this creates problems for the crew, storms start to brew, and one crewman is stranded
when a static electricity field wrecks his airbike, leaving him on the other side of the ocean.
As they explore an island, which they call New York, they notice that the structures there
always seem to come in threes, but there are no openings in their purposes unknown.
Creatures start to appear, but again the pattern of three is noticed. A spider-like creature
has three eyes and three legs, and comes to inspect the crew in their equipment.
One such creature falls from a cliff and is destroyed, so the crew decides to dissect it.
And they discover it as a combination of mechanism and biologic material,
so they dub the creatures by-outs. They decide that these creatures must have been designed by the
Romans, whoever those are. As Rama continues to get closer to the sun, the planet Mercury decides
it is a danger, and launches a nuclear weapon, but the crew managed to intercept it,
and taking advantage of the time lag between Mercury and Narama, they disarm it.
But now it's getting too close to the sun to stay, so the crew leaves and goes back to the end
ever. Shortly afterwards, the engines of the Rama come to life, and it speeds around the sun
and out of the system in the direction of the large Magellanic cloud. But as it speeds away,
scientists on the Rama committee realize that Romans always do things in threes.
Certainly sounds like a setup for a sequel.
This novel won lots of awards, including the Nebula for Best Novel in 1973, and the Hugo for Best
Novel in 1974. There was a planned film version that got stuck in development hell before being abandoned,
but recently there was a report that it might be back on, with Morgan Freeman producing
and Dennis Villanov directing. There was also a computer game made by Sierra Online in 1996.
This was directed by Gentry Lee, who mostly took over the Rama series.
Now the next is Rama II, published in 1989, and it is listed as by Arthur C. Clark in Gentry Lee,
but as Clark confirmed Lee did most of the writing and Clark's role was limited.
Now this takes place 70 years after the first book, and Arthur's ready, when yet another
such vessel enters the solar system. A ship has been ready, and learning from the experience
of the Endeavor crew, they have some better equipment for the task. Their ship, the Newton,
carries a crew of 12, and addition to the equipment, but interpersonal conflict surries even before
they launch. Then the commander of the expedition is killed while they're still outside the
Rama Investible vessel, and they have trouble deciding who the new leader will be.
Also, they investigate, but three of the crew are left inside the Rama Investible
when it speeds away from the solar system. Now the writing here is very different,
and it is fair to consider this Lee's story rather than Clark's. In comparison to the first
Rama book, there is a bit more characterization, which was never Clark's strong suit, but then it
never won any awards either. But it persisted, so in 1991, the garden of Rama comes out, and in this
book, those three astronauts left behind on the Rama ship, they consist of one woman and two men,
the woman duly produces children by each of the men, three girls and two boys. In a journey of 12
years, they finally arrive at the star serious. Now, since serious is just under nine light years
from Earth, this suggests that the Romans have good engines, but no faster than light propulsion.
At serious, they find there is a ramen node where they undergo physiological tests for a year,
while the ship is being refurbished. Then the ship, the ramen ship is being sent back to Earth,
and the Romans request that the Earth send them 2,000 more humans to study.
This request is kept secret from the public, and instead the secret government agency comes up with a
cover story about a new Martian colony and starts gathering people. Okay, this already sounds like a
disaster in the making, but then the secret of agency starts to select convicts, promising them
freedom if they agree to be colonists. Well, now we know it's going to be a disaster.
They divide the people into 3 groups and put them on 3 ships named the Nina, the Pinta,
and the Santa Maria. Yes, that's exactly what he did. And the people who are mostly convicts
are starting to suspect that they have been hoaxed. Once they arrive on the ramen ship,
a mob boss seizes control of the humans and begins a war against one of the other species
on this giant spacecraft. The 3 original astronauts, from the previous novel,
and the 5 children, are powerless to stop this genocide, but it has not gone unnoticed. Another
species is paying attention and starting to make plans of their own to deal with this.
The Rama 3 spaceship is also paying attention, and has transmitted an emergency signal back to its
creators. And as one of the original astronauts is set to be executed, the book ends on a cliffhanger,
because of course it does. You can't end it here. Then Rama revealed 1993.
The astronaut Nicole Wakefield manages to escape the death in store for her at the cliffhanger
of the previous novel. At this point, the humans had met on the ship two alien species,
the octospiders and the Mermicats. Now these are interesting species. The octospiders had
led simple lives until a space-faring species made contact with them and everything changed.
They focused on biological technology and genetic enhancements, and were able to form
kind of a utopia of sorts for themselves. The Mermicats were named that by the humans because
they seemed to combine traits of both ants and cats. Now they could form a connection with humans
through a network of fibers that enter the human brain. And they do this to inform Richard Wakefield
of their fears from the aggressive humans and get them to take some of their eggs to a safe place.
The murderous mob of humans, of course, are continuing their attacks and they're now focused
on getting those astronauts from Rama too and their children. These folks flee to the New York
place as it was named in the original Rama, but then the genocidal humans come after them.
They then flee to the octospider colony, but then the humans start bombing that area.
The octospiders retaliate and then the Romans decide that enough is enough and send the humans
and the octospiders into hibernation for the rest of the voyage. Finally, the ramen ship reaches
Tau Setti, where another ramen node is located, which is devoted to studying races capable of
spaceflight. Overall, I would have to say that the first novel written by Arthur C. Clark is
deservedly a classic, but the continuation by Gentry Lee is eminently skipable.
It is a jarring change of direction and voice from Clark and not terribly interesting.
The whole idea of ramen's doing everything by three seems to have been
disappeared along the way. I would have thought that should have been a key focus of the whole thing.
So anyway, if you decide to skip those novels, I don't play you in the least.
Just for the sake of completion, Gentry Lee did three more novels
that are not directly part of the Rama plot, but they take place in the same universe.
They are bright messengers, published in 1996, double full moon night 1999,
and the tranquility wars 2000. Now, if you love everything connected to Rama and you are a
completeist, you will of course want to check them out, but that's not anything I have the ambition
to pursue. Arthur C. Clark has written some other standalone novels that are not part of any
series and some of them deserve attention. So that's where we will go next in our look at Arthur C. Clark.
But for now, this is a hookah for our Hacker Public Radio, signing off, and as always,
encouraging you to support Free Software. Bye-bye!
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording podcast, click on our upload link
to find out how easy it is.
Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by an AnHonestHost.com, the Internet Archive,
rsync.net, and our mirror network.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
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Episode: 4521
Title: HPR Community News for November 2025
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4521/hpr4521.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:13:10 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4521, for 2025-12-01
Today's show is entitled, "HPR Community News for November 2025"
The host is HPR Volunteers and the duration is 01:10:24
The flag is Explicit, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "HPR Volunteers Kevie and Ken talk about shows released and comments posted in November 2025"
Greetings! It's almost time, once again, for the Hacker Public Radio slash Free Culture Podcast New Year's Eve show,
a 26-hour recorded audio stream where you can come on, say hello to the many members of the Hacker Public Radio or Free Culture Podcast community.
It starts at 10 UTC on December 31st, also known as 5 a.m. Eastern Standard Time.
If you want to participate, all you need to do is install Mumble. Mumble clients are available on all platforms.
Then check out Hacker Public Radio for the survey details.
It will run until January 1st, 12 UTC, or 7 a.m. Eastern Standard Time.
We look forward to talking to you.
Hello and welcome to another episode of the HPR Beer Garden.
So, joining me tonight is Ken. How are you tonight, Ken?
I'm fine, Kevi. I'm going to open up a bronze out of brown here.
And what are you having? Hold on. Let's check the agenda.
This isn't the beer garden. You fooled me.
This is HPR Community News for the month of November 2025.
So, you lured me here with false promises. I've already got the bottles open here. That's terrible.
That's terrible.
It's terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible, father.
So, Kevi, what is Community News?
Well, the Community News is a show, a monthly show, where we take a look back over the previous month's episodes, and we give a short talk about them, and also read out the comments, which are on every episode.
By, as you often say yourself, comments are the wages and the currency in which our volunteers are paid.
So, it's very important that we go over these, as well as any other stuff that's coming up, whether it's new hosts, whether it's other news that might be coming up that will affect the community.
Speaking of new hosts, we are thrilled to introduce two new hosts, Whiskey Jack and Elspeth.
We know Whiskey Jack from previous shows, and Elspeth has done lots of shows in cooperation with Lee, and of course, was on the episode here in the Netherlands.
So, welcome to both of you guys. Thank you for stepping up and volunteering to help out here with HPR.
I did not realise she hadn't done a show of her own, but yeah, definitely already a part of the HPR family, I would say, but great to see she's actually recording one for herself.
Very much so.
So, as you said, we go back and have a look at all the shows that were played out in this month, so that everybody has at least some feedback on their episodes.
And the first episode last month was the HPR Community News for October 2025.
And there are three comments on that.
The first one was from Archer72, one of our janitors here.
This is followed by comment two by CandyCaneArter07.
A lot of what I do falls into that, but it's also too small to make it to a proper episode, to which I would actually say, I have to confess, we've actually had some very short shows, especially in recent times.
They are not too small for an episode. Definitely not.
Absolutely. One of the things about HPR is there's no limit on the topic you can be, and there's no limit on how short or long the episode can be.
I think the shortest one now is down to 30 seconds or something, and the longest one is something like eight hours.
So, anywhere within that spectrum is absolutely fine.
Then the next one was Archer72 responding tip from operator, responding to that.
If you have heard operators record several tips at one sitting that he's gathered over a few months of time, or possibly more.
It makes for some interesting listening. Couldn't agree more.
Absolutely. Now, the next day was a 4502, where we had Trey talk about a cheap yellow display project, part three, reverse beacon network.
Actually, I've got a bone to pick with Trey. He's introduced me to the cheap yellow display.
I have wasted far too much time, and also now I'm on number three of this.
So, thank you, but also I'm also cursing you for actually producing me to this piece of hardware.
Every time one of these episodes come up in the feed, I get even more guilt than I haven't had the time.
I have something like three or four of them in the box here, literally here.
And this sounds like something that might actually be useful to do.
So, thank you very much, Trey, for that episode.
No doubt people were unable to comment due to their busyness with hacking their cheap yellow displays.
Yes. Actually, I suppose the one issue, as you've said, is that what goes on to a cheap yellow display, it's about the same question as what goes on to an episode of HPR.
Exactly, yeah.
What I would like to do, actually, is just make the perfect alarm clock, you know, with ISO 8601 dates, year-month thingy, and time synchronized.
That would be thing number one. That's what I'd like in my cheap yellow display.
And then after that, I would like it synchronizing with an NTP time server.
And then after that, I would like it having the temperature inside.
And then after that, I would like it to have, like, little icons for the weather, etc., etc., etc.
Oh, I've done your fourth project there. I've got a wee weather map right in front of me.
If this was a video feed, I would show you, but it's not.
But, actually, if you check out last month's Tux Jam, we did an episode purely, because of Trey, actually, because of Trey's influence,
we did an episode purely devoted to the cheap yellow display, and we each did our own project.
And I just did a wee weather forecaster.
And it was actually a great project, I must admit.
Is that out? Is that podcast out?
Yes, yes, that is out. Yep, definitely out.
Okay. I'm behind on my feeds, then.
So, the following day, we had one password using OAuth tool.
And if you are living on planet Earth and dealing with computers at the moment,
you are definitely using two-factor authentication and stuff like that.
And this was an introduction to how you would do that on the command line using the command line OAuth tool,
and then getting a UI using the Xenity tool, which you can wrap scripts in.
So, we had candycanator07 said,
I think it's really cool that you can generate one-time passwords locally,
but I'm a bit annoyed that companies don't let you do this in the first place.
But I think it would be a bit impractical for me to actually use daily,
since you need to figure out the secret code for each website individually,
as well as a show version they're using.
Also, there's a pretty easy way to automatically copy the code to the clipboard.
It's something I use a lot in my own scripts.
Printf, dollar code, which is the variable.
Pipe that into xclip, space, dash, selection, space, C, lowercase.
The printf to remove the leading new line.
Interesting.
And this is, sorry.
This is from somebody who, but moments ago, said they had nothing to do a show on.
Folly, sir. Folly.
He's proven himself wrong.
That was a whole show in itself.
That was a show right there.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Did you know that you can copy commands from the console to the other day?
I've basically written the show for him.
All he needs to do is record it.
Yeah.
So, okay.
We had another comment, though, on this by Whiskeyjack.
And it was, he said,
The reason that I started using OathTool was because GitHub and PyPy made OTPs mandatory.
After putting it off as long as possible, I was determined to find a solution that didn't involve giving either of them a phone number to send an SMS message to or to install their OTP app.
I thought there must be a way to do this with a free software application on my PC.
And there was.
It just took a bit of digging to figure out.
Any website that uses an Oath standard OTP will have some sort of key that they need to give to you, typically by going to a web page where you generate one after logging in.
It's not any more difficult than, say, changing your password and you only have to do this once for each site.
The main issue is, as said, GitHub and PyPy at least do not document their Oath options.
Or at least they didn't when I started using it a while ago.
So, anyone who wants to use OathTool for GitHub or PyPy, though now knows what options are needed after having listened to this podcast episode.
Actually, I think we had two shows here.
These shouldn't have been common.
These shouldn't have been shows.
Couldn't agree more.
Couldn't agree more.
So, moving on to the next day, if you can hear me.
Yes, can you find me?
We had part seven of my list of subscribed channels.
Which means, can only mean one thing.
That we didn't have a show that day.
We didn't have a show.
Very sad.
Actually, we should have had two shows for the next two days.
Correct.
I'm not sad.
I'm just a little disappointed, you know.
You know, we had expected.
You're here at the parent-teacher meeting and you're sitting down and we're looking at you a bit sad and a bit disappointed.
You know, you could have applied yourself.
You know that thing that you did this month where you thought, gosh, that would have made a good HPR episode and you didn't bother taking out your phone and recording it, you know.
When you knew we wanted to hear about it.
But, that's okay.
New beginnings.
Spring.
Next month is a new beginning.
And we always give you a second chance here at HPR School.
School of Podcasting.
So, feel free to submit a new episode.
Well, I like that, school of podcasting.
Yes, that's what I like.
Yes.
But, that's not to say that this wasn't an excellent episode.
Because every single time with, yeah, Ahuka likes cruises and he likes space stuff.
But, there's occasionally, which very much Venn diagram overlapping with my own interests.
So, I am glad to see these coming out of the reserve queue.
And, that's what the reserve queue is there for, is to fill up with shows.
So, if you are submitting in shows, submit one to the main queue, one to the reserve queue if you can.
And, that will keep us chugging along nicely.
Absolutely.
And, of course, you know, the thing is, people will say, oh, I'm not that technically minded.
I'm, you know, not into coding.
You know, this just proves you don't have to be into coding.
You know, it's not all about giving it a bunch of terminal commands as part of a show.
People are interested in this.
You know, and it's, any of us can just say, right, what are podcast listens?
What do we subscribe to?
What YouTube channels or peer tube channels do we follow?
So, and especially with something like, you know, peer tube.
I mean, if people here are regular users of peer tube, I think the one issue there is just the, it's so fragmented, it's difficult to find a lot of stuff.
So, if you do that, that to me would actually be an amazing show to do, to say, here's what I find interesting, and here's the links.
What is peer tube?
I look forward to hearing your episode.
My problem is, these days, I've got so many dash beer gardens, I'd be breaking my own rules if I was to submit more than just a beer garden.
Well, you can submit it to the reserve queue, and we'll get it through.
That's a good point.
Actually, yes, I should, actually.
Yes, I'll do that.
By this time next month, I shall have a peer tube show done.
Excellent.
So, we have the next episode, new site looks great from Archer72, helps somebody blinded by the light of a HPR new episode, HPR new website even.
And this was because, because if you don't know, Roan and the lads have done a new version of the website based on loosely on a whiteboard drawing that I did, and they made it actually work.
But some people use dark readers, and Archer72, a bug was reported, and Archer72 took it upon himself to find a fix for that, and it's awesome.
Well done.
Absolutely, yes.
And it was actually, it was amazing how quickly that was implemented.
And I have to say, yes, because I missed last month's recording.
Yeah.
I love the new website.
Really do like it.
And this one was something that, you know, he actually, in the show notes, if you go and have a check out of it, he actually goes through some screenshots as well, showing the dark theme, and also showing how to change it as well.
So, yeah, really good.
But we had one comment on this episode, and that was by Foki, and it was, thank you.
Thank you very much for your help, Archer72.
It works perfectly on LibraWolf, and I would guess other browsers in the family too.
Well, I can confirm it works on WaterFox.
That's all I can see.
Perfect.
Perfect.
Perfect.
Well done.
And there was a short episode, short sweet to the point, basically.
Here's something cool I did, and they, it's actually quite good.
They, Git, Git team people are starting to log requests over there, feature requests, and have a look at stuff.
And if you want to help out, you can.
And there's a lot of, like, tidying up documentation and moving it from the HPR main site into the wiki.
That's stuff that's going on as well.
So you don't need to be super technical in order to help out here at HPR Towers.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
It's, yeah.
Please do, like I said, any way you can.
And the thing is, you might think, oh, I can do so limited.
But remember, it's those wee cogs that make a machine run.
You know, one of these cogs missing, the machine won't run as well.
And you only need to, yeah, target your audience.
You found it interesting.
So you're one hacker.
One other hacker is all that needs to find it interesting in order to be able to justify of interest to hackers.
So send it on in.
The following day was a UCSD space P dash operating system.
And this was by Whiskeyjack.
This came out of nowhere.
And I was removing the floor in my daughter's new bathroom, old bathroom in her new house, new to her house.
And I was listening to this episode while I was baiting away at the floor.
It was fascinating.
I had no idea this existed.
And my life is enriched as a result of this episode.
Absolutely.
Yeah, I was.
I listened to this one on the way to work.
And it was a case of, wow, this is brilliant.
And it was like, I actually want to try this.
And I was listening going, I can't try this.
There's no way to try this unless you've got a very, very great eBay find or something.
But absolutely.
Very interesting.
The whole, you know, touched on the history of Pascal and touched on loads of other stuff.
And just fantastic episode.
Well done.
Keep them common is all I can say.
And we had people answer or people have commented.
Andrew says, a blast from the P code past.
This was a fun blast from the past for me.
I remember working on several projects using the LSI 11 UCSD Pascal system in our computer science laboratory back in uni.
Thanks for the trip down memory lane.
Brian in Ohio added a comment with, good show.
I enjoyed this.
Hope Whiskey Jack can walk us down other parts of memory lane.
And Trickster said, this was very well done.
I really enjoyed this dive into UCSDP system Pascal.
I've always wanted to know what it was like from somebody who actually used it.
And this episode delivered on that many times over.
I hope Whiskey Jack does more episodes.
Spoiler, yes.
Actually, I remember doing Pascal programming in school on the RISCOS and on the Archimedes.
Now, if anybody's actually interested in doing that, Open RISCOS is still available.
I don't think it's available on 64-bit architecture.
I think it's only available in ARM.
But we did this before.
We tried it out.
And it works nicely on a Pi as long as you've got a lovely big screen to connect it to.
So there's a wee tip.
The following day, I did a What's in My Bag episode.
Largely because we were short of shows.
But also because I was wondering why my bag was so heavy all of a sudden.
So there's why.
Yes, I must admit, I'm always actually interested in these What's in Your Bag episodes.
And no different there.
You did not disappoint.
Anything weird?
Nothing.
I didn't feel that was out of the ordinary.
But then again, people say I'm weird.
So it may just be great minds think alike.
So the following day, we had another one from the reserve queue.
We're chugging through them.
Number eight.
We're almost finished.
The Ahooka ones anyway.
And let's see.
Some language ones.
Some science ones, obviously.
There was, and of course, some Doctor Who.
So if you know Ahooka, you will not be surprised by the selection here.
And again, at least one, if not two, of the subscriptions I already have in my tool bag.
And at least one, if not two, of every one of these episodes gets added to my subscription list.
So Ahooka is a great opportunity to, or it's a great idea.
Excuse me.
It's a great idea, and I hope other people will join.
Now, I'm actually disappointed that you, being a good Irishman, didn't pick up on the Michigan Irish Music Festival one.
Oh, yes, I did.
Or so you didn't mention it.
No, no, yeah.
Well, I do listen to, I find that Irish, the Celtic, the traditional Irish music, depending on where you find it, I actually do like Scottish Celtic music.
It's, and Breton Celtic music, and of course Irish Celtic music.
So, yeah, good stuff.
Now, the next day we had episode 4509, and it was HPR Beardgarten 5, and this was Heferweizen, which, if you guys actually listen to this one, you will get there's a bit of a joke in here.
Because we decided to do HPR Beardgarten episode 4, and looked at German wheat beers, and then we decided to do Heferweizen on the recommendation of somebody, only to find out that a Heferweizen is a German wheat beer.
Yeah, but I was absolutely fine with that, and I was, when I was doing this, I was cleaning the upstairs attic in my daughter's new house, just as a by the way, and I really enjoyed this episode.
Did I, I remember sending in a comment to you guys about how one can review beer themselves, because I'm drinking a brand, this brand out of brown, and it's a really nice beer,
but I'd like the formula for describing it for your show, maybe as a drive-by, and this week, this month, Ken sent in this review of this beer.
Well, you could, but it could be actually a, it could certainly be a review left in the comments, or it could be a review as a show in itself.
Yes, but I'd like the formula for, here's how you do, you know, like a template.
We should maybe have that on the wiki, or on the episode, so on your beer garden episode, if you want to do one of these shows, here's, here's what you fill out, and then in this section, describe the taste, or whatever, yeah.
Okay.
Yep, no problem, I shall do, I'll speak to David about that.
We've already got, I think, two recorded, so it'll be a few episodes down the line.
That's absolutely fine, absolutely fine.
And I do wish to point out, before we move on from this one, is that I actually missed this one, just because I was choked up with a cold, and I had no desire to drink beer that night.
Yeah.
So this was actually, Paul, Paul Jewell was actually joining the show for the first time, and I missed it.
That's rather annoying.
But it was nice to have, like, a guest host on.
I really think this is something cool that you can do from time to time.
And people, if people don't drink beer, but there are, and I think you've mentioned this before, it is the HPR Beer Garden, but it can be non-alcoholic stuff, and it can be, you know, specialty drinks from your region, or whatever, if I understand you correctly.
Yes, anybody can request it, like I say, can put in comments for that, and also even their own shows, you know, so, yes, please do.
I mean, a pub garden, a beer garden, which is part of a pub in the UK, certainly, doesn't have to just serve beer.
Yeah, actually, you might describe what a beer garden is to people.
I imagine everybody knows it, but I'm just so used to the concept.
It's far more popular in the UK than it is in, for example, Ireland or the Netherlands, having a beer garden.
Really? I'm shocked.
Well, okay, then.
This is something that, to be honest, I assume we just borrowed this from continental Europe, because, to be honest, the last place you would want a beer garden in reality is actually the UK.
Maybe with the exception of Antarctica, but all it is, is essentially, in the UK, no, not 100% of the UK, but in 99.9% of places, it is illegal to consume alcohol outside of a designated area.
And that designated area is generally inside a bar or inside your home or something like that.
And, yeah, it's just essentially, it is tables and chairs outside.
Now, it's got to be an enclosed area.
It doesn't have to be a walled area.
It can, certainly in Scotland, it can just be like a roped area, a temporary barrier set up, but it does have to be marked out.
And that is literally all it is.
It's a place where you can go, you can sit, have a drink outside.
Even in the middle of July, right, and off here, you still want to wear a puffer jacket or something similar just to kind of keep warm.
Either that or drink a bit of whiskey.
But it's also the one reason it's probably quite popular in the UK as well is many beer gardens, not all, more and more are banning it now,
but many beer gardens, that's the only place you can smoke, and smoking was banned indoors here.
I, my brother and I, when I went over to visit him, he, we would go for a walk around the, you know, the canals or wherever.
And then halfway, you know, you'd stop for lunch at a beer garden and then move on.
And then halfway again, you'd stop for another beer or two, a real ale, and then head home.
That sounds ideal.
Yep, sounds absolutely perfect.
Lovely, lovely afternoons.
Claudio says, both are tasty.
Thanks again for this episode and this beer garden series, fellas.
Both of these I've had here in the US of A, and they're pretty good.
My eldest son likes that word, which is Schoenheifer.
Schoenheifer.
Schoenheifer, is it?
Obviously, I pronounced it correctly, but fine.
Yeah, good.
Right, okay, I was just thinking it was Paul who said it, I remember, to us.
So that's what I was just thinking.
I'm going to go for his.
Yes.
In the long-continuing tradition of butchering words, Ken Fallon continues his narration of the comment.
And I'm quite fond of the Erdinger Dunkel.
I only get the Dunkel every once in a while, as it's not something I'd be drinking consistently.
Just something to enjoy every now and then when I'm feeling a little dark.
Smiley face.
There's, by the way, there is another person on our requested guests list for the beer garden.
Absolutely, yes.
Perfect.
Actually, in saying that, it would actually be quite good to maybe have a beer garden from
different areas because obviously somebody from America, you know, being on the show the
same time as us, or that side of the pond anyway, they're going to be either drinking very early
in the morning or we're going to be up during the day.
Yeah.
So it probably might be a bit better if you actually get people from roughly the same time
zone.
Yeah.
This, of course, would be a good reason, you know, if you happen to be somewhere with
somebody, you know, do a live episode of the HBR beer garden.
And then you go up, you get two different beers and you sit down and you drink them.
Actually, oh, I mean, I'm going to miss the next dog camp, sadly, just due to what commitments.
But I think this is something, Ken, you need to do.
Because, I mean, one thing I did discover, certainly, when I was at dog camp was a lot
of the beers do, a lot of the geeks do enjoy their beers and especially ales.
So just go with that.
We recorded a year and fired it down on the pub table, right?
Review you two.
I've had a review and this one is very good.
Episode 74 of the HBR beer garden.
Anywho, playing Civilizations 5, Part 5, we continue our look at the game mechanics of
Civilization, Part 5.
And this one, oh, by the way, this is just a series about Civilization, which is a game.
And this one is about world wonders and natural wonders and guilds and projects and international
projects you can do and stuff like strategic consideration, science, domination, culture
and diplomatic wins.
So you actually started playing Civilization 5.
I'm impressed.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I'm definitely not reading the show notes here.
Yeah, actually, I enjoyed this one.
Like I said, I'm not that familiar with Civilization, the series, but I know plenty of games like
it.
But it was quite interesting just because obviously if you have one of the wonders of the world,
then you get a bonus.
But depending which one it is, it's very different.
I mean, some of them will give you cultural points.
Some of them will give you military points.
Some of them will give you religious points.
So it depends on the kind of victory you're going for.
And yeah, the other thing I actually thought was quite interesting, I hadn't thought of
this before, because you can only have one of these, you know, so let's just say you
produce or your goal is to produce the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, for example.
Then you can go and set out to make it.
Now, it's not a case of one move.
There you go.
There's your gardens.
A big project like this will take several moves and a lot of resources.
You could actually spend, let's just say it took, you know, 15 moves.
I'm just saying as an example, right?
And you were on day 14 of it and somebody else finishes the day before.
You can only have one.
So you could have spent 14 days working on it and you don't even get much of the benefit.
You will get a monetary boost, but you don't actually get the benefit that that specific
wonder brings.
Oh, that would hurt.
So you play this game, you can play this game against other people, is it?
As far as I know, no, but you do play it against other civilizations.
Right.
I don't think it's an online, it's still an old school world builder or empire builder
it actually is.
Yeah.
So I don't think it was ever initially designed.
Guys, I'm not, like I said, I'm not that familiar with the civilization series myself.
I played it years ago and I played the open Civ.
But as far as I'm aware that certainly the early ones didn't have online multiplayer, the
new ones may have.
Actually, given the way the gaming's going these days, the new ones probably do.
Well, at least when the license server breaks, that you can continue to play it, which is
always a good thing.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Yes.
And the next day, episode 4511, we had audiobooks with Lee.
And actually, just like a hook as listening, viewing pleasures on YouTube, this one was really
interesting.
And the one thing I liked about it was just the fact it was not, I mean, you tend to get
will people, especially about, if anyone says, right, oh, Geeks audiobook listening series,
that must be really exciting.
You know, you're thinking it's all books about, you know, Python programming or something or
network management.
But, you know, no, it's not.
And it's amazing just to see the complete broad range stuff.
I would never have put Lee down as that person.
He goes through the entire series of basically audiobooks he's listened to.
And it was really good, really interesting.
I went through this.
I thought I'll throw these show notes into ChatGPT and ask ChatGPT to look for the author
on Wikipedia.
And if you can't find them, then link to their Goodreads profile.
Yeah.
And do the same for the book.
And it completely gave me, beep, made up answers.
Absolute, 100% conviction, links to Wikipedia articles that didn't exist.
And then I go, but they don't exist.
Oh, I'm terribly sorry.
Let me do that again for you.
And it links to the exact same one.
So it's complete tangent there.
Having Wikipedia help you out, or having ChatGPT help you out.
Yeah, and it just shows you, you cannot rely on these AI-generated answers.
I would have been far better off just writing a bash script to generate, to guess at what
the link was on Wikipedia.
But anyway, that's a by-the-by.
The following, oh, did we go through the comment?
No, we got a comment.
And from Lee himself, which says, SimCity was created by Will Wright, which is Maxit,
not Sedmider.
Sedmider is renowned for the video game civilizations.
And number two, inspiration for listening to the Forbidden City actually came from watching
the TV drama series Ming Dynasty, which was running from 2029 to 2020.
Thank you, Lee, for that.
But that's a good one for the all-reserve queue there, lads.
What's, what audiobooks am I listening to?
What's, yeah, or what regular books am I listening to?
Yes, absolutely.
Absolutely.
So the next day we had episode 4512 with Home Assistant, Nmap, Network Mapper, and this
one, why have I just blanked here?
Oh, this one.
It's by Reto.
Yeah, it's by Reto, yeah.
And I should have put this into the Home Assistant series section.
And I just realized it's in general at the moment, but we can pop that in there.
This is definitely something on my list and a great addition.
Thank you, Reto, for this.
Forums and how to do this.
And it's something that I really would like to do.
But as yet, half of that time.
Yeah, it's one of these things that's always on the list, but it's, for me, it's just never
that high up the list.
So it always keeps on getting pushed down.
But I do need to get around to it one of these days.
Well, I intend to have it linked to my work clock in, clock out system.
You know, when I'm working down here, then I must be working.
So therefore, add some task lists to my work system.
Okay, the following day, we have had Al with Living the Tux Life, Episode 2, show notes.
And Al broke my upload script.
He broke the upload script because he has a valid host name that is two characters long.
So right out there now, some host is deciding that they're going to be a one-letter host name.
Yeah, I like this one.
Al's just documenting.
Actually, this one shocked me.
Given Al's a co-host of Tux Jam, is purely the fact that he is not 100% user of Linux,
or wasn't up until he started doing this.
Well, if you're using it at work all the time, it's just, you know, as your daily driver, that's a different thing.
I think it's interesting that people draw the line.
You know, I find that interesting that you work on Linux servers, and that you don't run a Linux desktop.
I always found that interesting.
I'm not judging or anything.
We're judging.
No, we're not judging.
Yeah, well, so he's talking about just basically journaling his whole thing.
And actually, I'll tell you one thing.
For doing it for the very first time, and you as daily driver, he's blooming brave doing it from a laptop.
Because that's the one place I've always found Linux can be a bit on that.
Nah.
I'm personally starting a desktop, personally.
It's like the introduction of one of the FOSSTEM guys where he was doing hibernation on Linux.
It always works 50%.
We're 50% done.
We can do the hibernation part.
It's the wake-up part that's the problem.
So, anywhoos, the next day we had another one from the Reserve Q.
So, guys, that's a lot from the Reserve Q this month.
And a lot of these were from NASA because, essentially, let's face it, a hookah is doing it alphabetically and we're in the ends.
A bit sad that some of these YouTube channels have been shut down due to reasons.
But I guess you have that.
And, again, quite a few that I've listened to.
So, a lot of the NASA stuff, stuff about photography, some cruise line stuff, learning Spanish, and OLF conference as well.
And history recommendation.
Great, great topics, all of them.
Absolutely, yes.
And, like we say, please do, you know, keep some of those shows coming.
Keep a recording.
Because, yeah, like you say, we've gone through an awful lot of a hookah's YouTube subscriptions this month, which is no bad thing for listening.
But it also means that we're not getting the shows pushed in.
But, yeah, so, but one person who's certainly been also a hookah, and there's also been Archer72, who's done his bit.
Because this is a second show.
And I like this one.
Privacy, I don't have anything to hide.
Dot, dot, dot.
The dot, dot, dot being very important.
Absolutely.
I do quite a lot of the stuff in this, but quite a few of them were ones that I hadn't even considered.
So, thank you, Archer.
I've considered them, and I've implemented some, but not all.
I didn't actually know about the advanced controls on uBlock Origin.
That was one that really got me interested.
Yeah, very scary stuff, though.
Yeah, yeah.
Six months later, you go, why is this app not working anymore?
So, but good recommendations.
Excellent little episode.
And, like, two minutes, 52 seconds, you're telling me this isn't a valid episode.
Yeah?
Oh, but it's amazing, though, just how much I got from a two-minute episode.
That's what I was really impressed with.
Yeah.
And one, like, one minute of that is the intro and outro.
So, there you go.
Yes, actually, yeah.
The following day, we had Henrik Hemeren with another very useful episode, and I can speak
to this myself, which is browser use an agent strings and why websites don't work.
So, if you're not aware of it, have a listen to this episode.
If you have sudden weirdness occurring on websites and, they say, unsupported browser, simply
changing your user agent might be an easy way to get around the problem.
Absolutely.
And those of us, certainly, who came to Linux, I would say, more than 15 years ago, we all
knew this because, oh, my word, I remember that when I first came, the amount of websites
I wouldn't go, you're not running Internet Explorer.
I'm like, I'm deliberately not running Internet Explorer.
Yeah, exactly.
Yes.
So, oh, that one, I'm actually surprised that one didn't actually get a comment there.
Yeah.
Well, you see, we're getting to the end of the month now, so.
Ah, yes.
Yeah.
It was only four days ago, so lots of people have stuff in the queue, so they haven't got
to it yet.
Then we had the cheap yellow displays, part four, the hardware.
Now, this is where Trey goes through, basically describing the box and showing you how it works
and his key and paddles and straight key and stuff.
So his key, when, of course, I'm using the word key and paddle like as if everybody on
the planet is a ham radio operator.
So it's for sending Morse code.
It's called a Morse code key where you're keying, where you're sending out signals for
the dits and the dals.
And then a paddle is like a faster way of sending and receiving.
One side is dits and the other side is dals.
Oh, it's got two paddles vertically instead of horizontally like a straight key, as they
call them.
But yes, you don't, by the way, you don't have to learn Morse code in order to be an
amateur radio operator.
And in fact, as I prove, you don't even have to have transmitted in order to be an amateur
radio operator.
But we will fix that at some point.
I'm loving that old school key.
I mean, it literally looks like it has just recently been stolen from a museum.
It's brilliant.
Yeah, I agree.
Real old school style.
Yeah.
You know those films from the cowboy films where they rush into the stage.
The stage has been robbed.
And the guy, the clerk, is there with his shirt with the black things around his arm.
You know what I'm talking about?
Oh, yes.
Yeah, yeah.
Yes.
And he's there placing on that.
Yes.
Quick.
And then meanwhile, you cut to the cowboys cutting the telegraph lines further.
The telegraph's been cut.
Quick, sure.
Call the Marshall.
Anywho.
Mere Wee says, explanation of silent key, Trey said, which once belonged to a close friend
of mine who is now silent key, but missed to explain the term for those to whom it might
not be obvious.
Silent key is an amateur radio jargon for deceased person.
Took me ages to figure out that one.
And Trey, now I have to confess actually before I say that, is that I didn't actually hear the
word key.
So I just heard that they were silent.
I said, I assumed there was a deceased person.
So actually, me not hearing the term key made me understand that.
So Trey commented with, responded to the comments saying, thank you, Mere Wee, silent key episode
link.
Thank you for sharing that explanation.
I sometimes forget to explain items like this when I'm recording.
If anyone wants to learn more about the term silent key, please listen to episode 3922 when
I recorded about it back in 2023 and link provided.
Yeah, I think I also need to put in a bug.
Archer, if you're listening, can you create a bug?
Oh my God, I'm terrible.
Allow HTML links in comments.
I stripped them out at the moment, but now we are manually reviewing every single comment
that comes in.
So, well, we've always been doing that.
So I think it's okay to do that.
I'm getting more relaxed in my old age.
Ah, you're allowed to be.
Right.
So speaking of relaxed, what better way than to get some cozy stuff?
I mean, this is a cozy news corner for week 46.
So this is episode 4518, Cozy Corner for week 46, your source for open source news.
And this is hosted by Daniel Person.
And yeah, actually, when I listened to the title of this, I was like, cozy news.
Why in the world am I wanting to listen to cozy news?
It actually was like, okay, when you actually listen to it, not that.
I thought it was going to be very, very lighthearted news.
I have to confess that.
So that's my mistake listening to it.
Yeah, just a roundup of a bunch of different Linux and open source news things.
And I actually thought this was great.
This would almost be something I'd almost want to hear on a monthly basis.
Like, not instead of the community news, obviously, but alongside it.
Well, there has been various different news items on HPR in the past.
And there's complications related to timing and who you're going to get to do it and stuff like that.
So, yeah, there's history there.
Yeah.
I mean, I suppose, to be honest, if it's news and you want to keep it up to date, HPR is probably not the best one.
Because, you know, the best it's going to be usually is, well, let's just say in an ideal world, it's about 10 days before you can post.
And you posted something that happened 10 days ago and there's already been updates and then they don't work anymore.
Yeah, that can be an issue.
And then we had YouTube subscriptions part 10.
And as we know, everybody knows what this means.
And we're in the P's section and hit upon one of my favorite links was postmodern jukebox.
And he was actually at the live concert of them.
Tremendously jealous, Kevin.
Kevin, I'm tremendously jealous of a hookah for being at that.
But I'm sure they had a lovely time.
Absolutely, yes.
Absolutely.
Actually, one that I must admit that I had not heard of before, which I was, I mean, to check out.
I do enjoy, I am a gamer.
I do enjoy watching people play the Let's Plays.
So he mentioned one there.
Was it Parvis?
Parvis, something like that, gaming.
So that one actually caught my eye.
So that's something that I did not know about.
So thank you, Hookah, for pointing that one out.
And the following day, we had a hookah again.
The rule about 10 days between episodes doesn't apply if I'm pulling it from the reserve queue, as you can imagine.
And in fairness to Hookah, he is rock solid on his every two weeks.
From the science fiction and fantasy series, Arthur C. Clarke.
And he covers Rama and the sequels.
Yeah, that was interesting.
I didn't actually realize that the sequels to Rama weren't Arthur C. Clarke.
I was listening to this episode, and I knew they were kind of co-authored, but he admitted himself that, he was saying that Arthur C. Clarke admitted himself that he didn't really have very much input into the sequels, although he was classed as co-author.
But, I mean, it's one of these, Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, these guys, they were always one of these kind of on my to-read list.
And actually, since I Hookah started doing this, I've started reading them, and I'm really enjoying them.
I really loved That City and the Stars.
It was one that had been on my wish list for far too long.
So I've not long finished that.
But I'm taking a wee break over Christmas, because I'm reading something Christmassy just now, but I'm going to get straight back to this.
And, you know, if anybody really does dearly love me and wants to buy me the Arthur C. Clarke I just put on my wish list, please feel free.
Feel free.
I put, I think it was a six-book set.
Oh, very good.
You're a funny guy, Kevin.
Funny guy.
Well, I mean, they say comments out of the currency we're paid.
I'm quite happy we're paid in books too.
You're happy to be paid in actual currency.
And that, I'm afraid, folks, was the end of the shows for this month.
And some of the comments that we missed when we were recording the show earlier.
The first one is by myself.
And it was on a show by Dave Morris, which was some thoughts on numerisms, a.k.a. alphanumeric algorithms, alphanumeric abbreviations.
Or numeric goal contractions.
So, that's where accessibility goes to a 11y.
Or kubernetes goes to k8s.
Just linked to this.
Thanks, Dave, for the example.
Just linked to this and work and found I was no longer embarrassed to look at the HPR website.
Dave replied.
I was surprised to see the show being referenced again after three years or so.
I had fun preparing it since there's a bit of opinion in it and a script.
An ideal combination, in my view.
I'm glad if anyone is able to get some benefit from it.
Smiley face.
The site looks magnificent, by the way.
Couldn't agree more.
And the next one was another comment that I put onto a show by Tlatu, which was transfer files from desktop to phone using qrcp.
And basically, you type qrcp and a link to the file and a QR code comes up on your desktop and you scan it on your phone and bada boom, you have file transfers.
Or not, as the case may be.
I knew this would come in handy, and I said I ran into two issues using it, which qrcp-help allowed me to get round.
The first was which of the many network interfaces to bind to.
So, dash dash bind space 192168.0.123 or whatever your IP address fixed that.
And the next one was the port.
So, I could open a firewall rule to allow that file out.
So, I used dash dash port space 43210.
And then I opened up my firewall daemon GUI and added that as an exception.
Kang Deaconator07 said, issues with qrcp.
I remember having a lot of issues with qrcp on corporate networks, where, like, it doesn't let you connect to other devices.
I'd personally recommend something like 0x0.st over qrcp for a lot of cases, as long as you know how curl works.
To which I replied, qrcp is private, 0x0.st is not.
And then the body, even if you trust what people say on their sites about keeping it private, it is still putting your files in the public domain in some form of another.
The site can be compromised or can be ordered to disclose your information by the local authorities.
Even if it were the case that this did not occur on a corporate network, it is also very likely that out and inbound traffic is also being analysed.
Using qrcp keeps it local, which means the transfer is fast as it can be, and it means it also never goes out.
Then we had a comment by Candy Canator saying thanks for Archer72 saying thanks to Candy Canator and Sakaya for comments on Git for GitHub and GitLab.
And that was where Archer72 talks about GNU privacy guard and SSH keys for Git.
He says thanks, it's always a good feeling when the show helps a couple of people smile.
The comments happened to be close to my birthday and that helped.
Candy Canator then replies saying to that comment, glad we made you happier on your birthday.
Huge smiley face.
Or, well, early birthday.
Then we had a comment on Beer Garden 4, Vice Beer, which Kevi did.
And T.A. Springer says, great episode, I look forward to hearing more.
I thought it was good coverage of my current favourite style.
I too, and constrained by what I can find in America, but sampled and loved both Erdoganer and Francis Craner while living in Germany.
They may be mass produced, but they are good, and I look forward to reviews of new brews to explore.
Antoine had an episode called Exploring FUTO Keyboard, and Archer72 had one comment, Keyboard Use.
That was episode 4494.
Keyboard Use.
Hi Antoine, I have been using FUTO Keyboard since you mentioned it in HPR 4325, and I'm enjoying it as an offline speech to text.
Thanks, Archer72.
And then we had one comment on Living the Tuck's Life, Episode 1 by Al.
Candy Canator says, cheers for taking the plunge.
And congrats on trying out Linux.
It's way more fun over here, smiley face.
For the multiple browser thing, I found using two different profiles and creating a separate desktop link for each is useful.
And there was one comment on the free software interview of Libraphone that I did, and Henrik Hemmerman says, well I posted, it was actually an interview by the Free Software Foundation.
I said, good interview pod, learn more about the Libraphone project.
Free software for phones is very interesting to me.
This conversation gives me an understanding of the Libraphone project after having read news releases earlier.
So that brings us on to the news from the mail list.
Let me call that up for you, Kevin, and I'll send you a link in the thing one second time.
And there was hardly worth our while putting that link in, because there was only one comment, and that was for the community news itself.
But yes, sadly, yeah, just that one.
Some days, some months, there's a lot of stuff, and some months there isn't.
That's just the way, that's how we roll here, folks.
That's how we roll.
But yes, there has been a lot.
Sorry, go on ahead over.
I was just going to say, absolutely.
And, you know, the other thing is, you know, if you're a regular listener to the HPR, please do come along and join us.
Because I was almost very worried I was doing this on my own as of three o'clock UK time.
And, of course, I was getting everything ready, right, okay, because I can't, I don't even have the choice of the luxury of having a delay.
So please do come along and join us.
But I do believe that is the only stipulation, isn't it, well, other than a microphone and an internet connection, is that you've listened to all the shows, yes?
Yeah, that's, and if you've listened to, you know, if there's a few you skipped, that's absolutely fine as well.
I do, I do think we send out the mailing list every month, the reminder that it's happening, and it's happening at a particular time.
But I actually think we should maybe come away from that, so that if you decide that you're going to be recording, you want to join on a particular month, that you tell us.
And then we can schedule around times that suits the people who are available.
So, as you mentioned earlier, if somebody's from the US, it might be a handy time now, but we could maybe find another time that would suit us as individuals.
So, keep that in mind, that we might maybe perhaps change the way we do it, that you, people are welcome to join, but it might be better just to schedule at a more, rather than at a fixed time.
We must do it at this time, and we do it at a time that suits the people who are available for a given month.
What do you think about that, Kevin?
Absolutely, yes.
I mean, at the end of the day, as long as you can make it, I would say, on this day.
I mean, it's always the Friday before the first Monday of the month, so we can't really negotiate that, but certainly the timing could easily be negotiable.
Well, there is a bit of flexibility on the Tuesday to the Thursday to the Saturday, because if you've listened to the Friday episodes before I come out, then we might be able to adjust slightly.
But that's basically it, that's basically it, all the news.
There's been quite a lot of contributions on to the HPR.
I see Dave has submitted the show notes, an update to the show notes, which is good because I need to run it now for the community news.
We had Gordon's comment on the HPR generator script and had some good recommendations for podcast 2.0 namespace specification.
I'd like to get some more clarification on what's useful to use from that.
I've done some work on HPR documentation, which is where we keep the wiki stuff.
We're working on the RSS feeds that are coming from the HPR generator and not dynamically generated from the PHP script.
So that's not urgent, but it's still stuff that we should be doing.
Um, HPR tools, um, uh, utility to check the feeds, uh, Roan, uh, had some stuff is working on the XML parser, uh, archer 72 found a bug on how to record a podcast page.
Uh, I pushed in some episodes updates to, um, uh, oh yeah, that was something I did do.
So up until now we've been getting, when something goes wrong, there's just a random cryptic error code.
So behind each of those error codes, now you get a short synopsis of what has gone wrong, that your IP address may have changed, or we couldn't find your email or your, uh, the show title isn't long enough for every comment.
So I did that for all the, all the episodes, except for the one that we use for the CCDN, because anybody over there is hacking the system.
Um, so they remain cryptic, uh, we changed the, uh, closed some outstanding bugs on the duration table.
Let's see.
Uh, that was, Roan was working on that.
Um, Archer had a new feature request to open, uh, links to the show note tab.
Uh, we did some work on today with a techie as well.
Uh, Roan did an awful lot of work on, on that.
Uh, in fact, the entire page is, is those changes.
He updated the tags.
Um, he modified tag query to return shows up to current date and then older ones.
And this is all just last week, folks, uh, HPR generator.
Uh, uh, uh, we fixed the bug and the layout individual hosts screen page.
Um, there is now an M3U playlist for all shows, all hosts.
So you can take the M3U file and play that and it'll give you all the hosts episodes or
for a series, all the series episodes.
He did, uh, this is Roan again, fixed white spaces and, uh, cosmetic changes to the website.
And this was all last week.
Still all last week, uh, working on the M3U stuff.
I was working on the better explanations two weeks ago.
Uh, scrolling, fix code blocks.
Uh, Roan was fixing comments on the series page and then fixed highlighting for code blocks
and did a fix for replace lane button image with linear gradient, fixed layouts of episode
nav links, remove, restored highlighting, show notes, pre-formatted text.
Whoa, this is still three weeks ago.
Loads of changes.
Add links to the host page for the listing of episodes.
And so, okay, uh, and loads more changes.
So very busy on the, um, with the HPR site.
Um, and I'm going to be, well, I had hoped to finish off the setup of the next node for
the content distribution network to bring it down to my brother-in-law tomorrow.
Uh, but, uh, I had a production outage all day today, so I had to work an extra day that
I hadn't intended.
So that may have to wait for another, another opportunity.
Kevin, do you have anything else?
No, don't think so.
I mean, I think after all that, uh, speaking of beer garden, I think you're actually going
to need a beer.
That was an awful lot of talking.
That was an awful lot of talking, yes.
Uh, but speaking of beer, one thing that is consumed in Scotland, certainly, I love a
lot, uh, around New Year time particularly is, uh, beer.
So if you want to grab your beer or whatever beverage you wish, whether it's alcoholic or
not, we do have a certain event coming up before the next HPR news, don't we?
Do we?
We, the New Year show.
Absolutely, yes.
So what was the length of last year, Swan?
I'm trying to remember now.
Oh, no idea.
But it was fell on the weekend, so it got quite long.
Uh, yeah, it seemed like it was quite a bit longer than last, last time, but I always
seem to be away during New Year.
We'll have to move New Year some other time.
Bye.
I, uh, I, yeah, I should have, uh, sent out a reminder to the mail list.
I did send out a mail list to, um, a email to all the other podcasters.
Uh, that I'm aware of to make them aware of and give them the bumper.
So we need to do some work on that.
Thanks, Kevi, for reminding me that that is coming up.
Oh, is it that time of year already?
It is that time of year.
Uh, yes.
So we've got that coming up.
So, yeah.
So, I mean, it's, there's no set routine or any set thing.
It is literally come along.
Are we doing both Mumble and Jitsi server again this year?
So, um, this is, before I get to answering your question, in case people don't know,
um, we have a 26-hour show.
Um, and this will be the 14th annual time that we've run it.
Uh, it'll start on New Year's Eve at 10, uh, 10 o'clock UTC, which is 5 a.m. Eastern Standard Time.
And we'll be recording along on the Mumble server for anybody who wants to say Happy New Year and talk about whatever they want.
And we will leave the recording going until at least the 1st of January at 12 o'clock UTC, which is 7 a.m. Eastern Standard Time.
And we'll also keep it going until the conversation stops.
So the idea is you, you drop in, you say hi.
If there are people there, you join in the conversation and other listeners and contributors.
And it's, it's usually good crack.
Um, this was originally, um, so this was actually originally suggested by Popey, um, because podcasts tend to be a one-way conversation.
So he thought it would be nice to be able to get, uh, the Floss, Linux, Free Culture, Hackers, whatever, podcasts and listeners in one place to chat in person.
So initially it was planned to be just a few hours long, a bit like the Linux in Tech Show or something like that.
Uh, but people kept missing it because they were in different time zones.
And so it extended to every time zone in the world.
And there are 38 different time zones in the world, which span 26 hours.
There are plenty of YouTube videos out there explaining the intricacies of that, but that's normal.
So we, that's why we record for 26 hours.
And then afterwards we keep the after show going.
Um, so if you don't have mumble, you can join.
And I think they is mostly run by the, um, uh, Linux log guys.
Um, the Linux log cast.
So, um, Hunky Magoo and those guys, uh, come on and do a great job on just running it.
And when they're recording their show, they record and mumble.
So you get the text and mumble and they have a Jitsi, a Jitsi meeting room going as well so that you can visually see the people.
It's not required, but it does help, um, the conversation.
It was quite interesting last year.
So, yes, absolutely.
And I must admit, I've not been able to make it for the past few years.
I'm going to make a point of trying to at least get on even for half an hour or something.
And even if you can just come in and just go, wait, you know, you come in, if nobody's there, uh, or nobody's just talking, just say, hi, this is Kevi.
Just wishing everybody a happy new year.
That's all some ground rules, by the way, that, that have developed over the last, what, 14 years, um, use push to talk and a headset.
Do don't come on thinking, oh, the rules don't apply to me.
They do.
Uh, you're, if you're coming on with, uh, without using push to talk and without using the headset, you're making it, uh, a very difficult editing job for the rest of us.
So please don't do that.
Okay.
So, um, if you have a problem, drop off into the sound booth, which is up there, the audio test sound booth, somebody will follow you and we'll get your audio sorted.
Obviously be polite.
Um, so when you enter the room and there's a conversation in full fledge, um, you know, don't, don't normal rules apply in social situations.
You kind of wait for the conversation to, to, uh, end and stuff.
If you're in a bit of a rush, type it into the channel and say, hi, can I just introduce myself?
And somebody will, uh, hopefully notice that.
And then you can speak.
Yeah.
Um, and be aware that, you know, some random person might come on that you don't know.
Um, but that person might be some good friend that we haven't heard about or seen in years.
So, uh, you know, kind of be, be cognizant of that fact.
Uh, and also do not announce the time zones.
There's no point.
Truncate silence.
We'll get rid of them.
It just, uh, we've had situations where people are in the flow of a conversation and the crack is great.
And then somebody announces the time zone and people go, oh, okay, well, sorry, then I better go.
So just don't announce the time zones.
There's no need to do that.
And the second part of that is don't fill dead air.
So if you're on the show and nobody's talking, that's fine.
There's no need to talk just for the sake of talking.
Um, if you want, if you're on there talking to yourself, then actually don't just record a show with what you would say and release it as a separate episode.
The HPR community thing is about discussions and, uh, uh, you know, don't fill dead air.
Don't fill dead air.
Uh, and also don't monopolize the conversation.
So if you find yourself talking a bit too much, um, particularly if you've had a beverage or two, uh, be, yeah, basically you're a guest.
Be respectful and remember that the attendance of the new year, and this is very important, does not constitute a show.
So there you go.
Yes.
I think that's actually very, very important.
That final one.
That doesn't mean just because you appeared on a new year show does not mean that you are, uh, you have submitted a show for that year.
However, what it will do is, um, make us aware that you exist and, uh, open you up to hour long tirades of why you should do a show.
So be aware of that.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Kevin, I think we've flogged this dead horse as much as we can, and we should stop now and ask people to join us tomorrow for another, perhaps even more exciting episode of Hacker.
Public.
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Episode: 4522
Title: Lee interviews Elsbeth about SL Shop and Hop event
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4522/hpr4522.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:13:12 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4522, for 2025-12-02
Today's show is entitled, "Lee interviews Elsbeth about SL Shop and Hop event"
The host is Elsbeth and the duration is 00:45:44
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "In this episode, Lee asks me questions about a shopping event I was accepted into to sell my product"
Emily and I'm here with Elsworth and today we're going to talk about an aspect of the
three-dimensional world second life which is an event that is called the 2025 holiday
stop and hop and it is a shopping event in world in second life where creators can submit
an application and it's kind of random on whether you get accepted or not
this will be my second shopping hub. To outline the context for this in second life there's a
virtual currency called Linden and people trade in that currency for all sorts of goods and services
that can be consumed mainly within the second life world. So in that virtual 3D world
many of the people who use it or some proportions of people use it are actually creators
who are creating products, be they objects, be they scripts or all sorts of things that they
can sell within that virtual world and if you are a creator you have to look for ways to market
your products. Is that about summarizing? Yeah there's numerous ways to market your products in
second life events like the shop and hop are big ones because well there's there's better
known events and then there's lesser known events. Shop and hop is the one that everybody wants to
get into because it's if you get selected they don't charge you to be a part of the event. There
are event organizers who will have different events where they will charge the creators of the
to be able to have their store displayed in their event. Do you attend these events yourself
like when you as a as a user as a shopper? Oh yeah all the time that's how you find out what the newest
creations in the newest skill set is developed in creations currently when I started second life
like 20 years ago everything was user made with blocks so you had to shape the blocks to create
objects and everything was some derivative of a block. Now it's meshed. Right so what we took
about is something that they call prims which are the most basic sort of object in second life
and by blocks you're meaning like very simple geometric shapes and the mesh is more like a
sculpted shy person like something that has a very natural like look to it. Yeah so I need to
delineate that there is a difference especially if somebody that is a second life user and has
been a person time. So there's the primitives so the the primitives can come in different shapes but
the the the base one is just a cube. Yeah and you can shape that cube or turn it into a
circle or a donut or a any real shape. There's several me and shapes that you can select to
build from. Yeah. That was the original building blocks. Then the next iteration over time
became something called sculpties. Right which was using different sorts of computer programs
to be able to shape those blocks into something that would look a little more natural.
Now when you're sculpting something now you're using mesh like blender or kinkercad or you know
something like that to create a mesh and then you have to have textures to texturize the mesh to
make it look realistic. It's like this the outer skin of it is that for the textures. Yes. I'm
all right in thinking that with more modern ways of displaying graphics textures is not just about
the color and the pattern it's also about how it reflects light, how it seems to have bumps and
so on. Right. Yes. So before PBR. Yeah. And I'm going to be honest I would have to look up what
PBR is exactly the same thing. I've heard it so many times. Yeah. PBR materials is a form of
a physically based rendering. Yes. So basically with the PBR materials
light can reflect off of it to the point where in game you can have an actual mirror that
reflects what's going on around it including the avatar. Right. That was impossible until recently.
So now there's a difference between mesh and PBR mesh. So if it's been textured with PBR it's
going to have the light reflections and when you move the lights going to change. So the material
has to be that is put on at the texture that's put on it has to be developed in a way that light
can refract over that. Because I think we're talking the other day about or you're demonstrating
that in the second life viewer you can have your standard viewing mode or a legacy viewing mode.
But you can also have a viewing mode which is the PBR viewing mode. And when you've got that switched
on suddenly you see a whole new world of visual effects like you see shadows shining for a window
or shining for tree branches and just it just looks so realistic. Yeah. Compared to
I mean it's not necessarily easier to see. I mean you then have troubles like something
some places to shadowy or sometimes your dazzled kind of thing. Oh yeah the visual story telling
that can come from PBR is phenomenal. But it takes a lot of graphic like you have to have a really
really good graphic card to be able to see everything properly. Yeah. But it's amazing. Yeah.
Now you have to have that legacy mode though for people that have computers that the graphic cards
well enough. How is this affected like the products that you sell on shop and how many of
them detail of the PBR and how many of them or do you make sure it will work with both?
All of my current products your PBR because that is the future of second life.
Just to somehow label them as such so that someone coming along and buys it and then
thinks how this looks actually. To be honest I didn't think about it until recently
because I have been dabbling with PBR since it came out and I know a lot of people put
PBR in their descriptions. I didn't even think about doing it in my naming description on the market
place and then the vendors I didn't even consider like you know this is PBR.
For as you use this PBR materials. Yeah. So this shop and hop will actually be my very first
where I have like officially labeled PBR materials. SL Read is actually all textured with PBR material.
Right. That's the book. It's like a physical book that you buy but then it would appear on your
screen as a book that you can read or it can read to you. So that's the product you may have worked on.
So as I'll read the the mesh for it is textured in PBR materials and you can attach it
as a HUD or you can res it in world. I think it works better attached as a head. So it comes
pre-configured so it'll just show up on your screen. That's pretty standard.
What you planning to put on this particular shop and hop and as it compared to what you've
done in the past for saying stuff. Actually so I'm going to be putting out a new collection of SL Read
a holiday collection. Currently what we're able to release on SL Read is all
public domain books. Yeah. So I'm going to try and have a diversified holiday collection of books
that is more than just standard Christianity based aspects of Christmas. I'm not bashing
Christianity at all. It's just I believe that everybody has the right to have a little bit of
diversity. There's a lot that can be learned from learning other people's
other cultures, celebrations and what what the root of them are and all that is. So there's
going to be a collection of public domain books that are released both as audiobooks and
readable books on the SL Read which is kind of like it's an e-book. Like it looks like an e-book.
It scrolls like an e-book. It fills like the physical tangible e-book you'd hold in your hand.
It's just on your screen in the computer. That's going to be the SL Read holiday collection.
Okay. Then I'm going to be releasing that shop in hop. But I'm also making a very
fun new form of reading in the world. Yeah, especially people that are peeing and there's a lot of
family RP and second life and other sorts of RP and our peace stands for role play.
Yes, role play. We're not just talking dungeons, the dragons role play here. We're just talking people
who act out a normal life, but just within the second life. Yeah, because they absolutely do that.
Basically, it's like using second life to have a much more beautifully rendered version of the Sims.
Yeah. I never played the Sims. I mean, I've played Sim City. I've played that theme hospital
and the same park, but maybe we could go on a little deep dive into what the Sims is because
you seem to know something about that. Well, it's a simulation. It's your simulating
developing a character and having them go to work and have a family and have kids and build
a house. It's a real life simulation as what it is. Is it maxis still who the same company that
did Sim City? Who do the Sims? No, I believe Sims is EA. All right. It was kind of a way to get.
Like, I think the Sims was a way to get like acknowledge women in gaming because females don't necessarily
like to always do the whole hack and flash, then. And guys, very much like to play it, too. I know a lot of
guys that play it. It's a multiple type game. Like you can go crazy buildings. Yeah,
didn't create it. Did you choose the first, the virtual current? Did they have the virtual currency
thing as part of it? So as part of the simulians? Yeah. Right. Yeah. And um, did that effort?
Did that ever branch out in the same way that second life did to it having some
money to do? No. No. No. Second life is a metaverse. It is a virtual world. You live.
It's just like real life. You know, you create something you either establish a business or,
you know, there's even churches in the world. You know, there's, and not just
Christian churches. There's all sorts of community. There's like the, the community that you tell
me about, which is called the commune, I think. And the area of land that you kind of occupies,
you've made links between that area of land and the, uh, the community place and this,
kind of, oh, we haven't, yeah. Yeah. We have a teleportation where you can just walk through our land
into their land. Yeah. Which if you look at the virtual map of the world is way, way far away from
each other. And you, you had to, you like forge those links kind of thing. It didn't just happen overnight.
It's like you've got into discussions with people. You said, like, you have this to offer your
following and, you know, that they can contribute to our sort of part of the world as well.
And I think you've had like varying roles with that. And I think what you're telling me is, at the moment,
you're kind of concentrating on reimagining the land that you, that you and your
immediate associates have controlled over kind of, they are very much my family. I have,
I have developed real world relationships with my second life family. Yeah. And that has happened
over the course of 11 years. Yeah. I think I think that's the longest standing regular
interactions that I've had with people in second life. But I, there are people that I've known
superficially longer. But yes, you have to develop those relationships to be able to make those connections.
Yeah. As she is, I've got an interesting question actually. What percentage would you
say is just hanging out what percentage is active role playing, what percentage is like
crafting and what percentage is like playing very specific games like, I don't know, just
hand in foot. I know we've played in the past where you just engage with a very specific game
not rather than just a general role playing game. I don't know that I can give you like consistent
percentages. Yeah. I'd say 90% of it. No, I'd say 100% of it is social. Maybe 95.
Yeah. There are times that I get on like I'm in world right now where there's people that I know
that are on but I don't like actually interact with like on discord and voice and stuff like that
regularly. The commune people are on and I can like interact with them, you know, as I want to.
But I'm up on my build platform working on these items at build platform is sort of a
private space where you're not going to get interrupted while you're crafting stuff.
Yes. Yeah. It's just an area that I have set up that I can work on my items. You know,
just stand there and be separated. So I'm not actually down in the land area where people might
actually interact with or try and interact with me because our region is open to the public.
And since we are connected through that experience where you can just teleport through a tunnel
and arrive into the commune, people can kind of over that way as well. There's my two sisters,
the in-second life. We co-own this island and then we have
boo another one of our second life family who has her island that she owns.
There's a sub island of your island. Really? No, it's her island. It's just connected to ours. Yeah.
Because when you're showing me the other day, it was like it was seamless. It was
no teleportation to get from one to the other. Well, that's because it is in fact,
it is in fact on the map just north of the island. It's adjacent. It's a Jason.
Yeah. You have to get permission from the because this is a private region. You have to get permission
from. So boo had to get permission from a kasha who officially owns our region. But nami and i
kasha all split the cost and we have developed this region together. We have chosen to break it into
quadrants. So we have like a commercial area where because nami and kasha and i all have our own
individual stores that we have things that we sell in world. So kasha has her store little adventures
and it's kind of a tour system for kids and second life because now for the record,
everyone that plays second life is 18 or older. So they're all legal because that's really important
to distinguish when families role play in second life. Some people choose to role play as children.
They are adults controlling the avi and we do not allow and there's very, very strict guidelines
for no inappropriate behavior. So i want to clarify that real quick right up front. But a kasha's
store is a children's store. Basically a toy store where parents can or the kids can come and get
chores and a chore chart and a sticker book and do chores through interacting with an object
and then either sitting on it or clicking and holding or there's different ways you can interact
with objects but each of these chores has some sort of animation or something where if you
complete the chore completely then you get a star that is calculated on a HUD that's on your
screen. It's a whole system but basically they can come in and they can do chores or even adults
can buy them because i use my doll avi to do the chores too and to collect the stickers.
And anyway so kids earn a certain amount of stickers and they can come in and trade 35 stars for
a sticker and then there's collections of stickers that they can collect that go into a sticker book.
It's it's a lot of fun. I mean what range of skills is involved to create something as
a lot for us that and how do you get the stage of having those skills?
You have to want to learn or pay for somebody to assist you. So S.L. Read you and I
developed this together and I came up with the idea and I curate the stories and
you've written the scripting and the code that goes into it and then I set up the HUD so that it
can go through and I also set up each collection and package it and whatnot. So every single thing
that is sold in second life you either have to have all the totality of the skills to either create
the mesh, create the texture or you have to collaborate with people and this is where it comes
down to. This is a social game. You have to collaborate with people to get just like if you want
to crochet something you have to go to the store and you have to get the yarn and the needles
and the the crochet hooks and the needles to thread and all that stuff and then you have to
have a pattern for the project or know what you're doing. There is a process to creating everything.
So like this. Unlike many game I mean there are role playing type games and I'll play the
Witcher as one where they have a crafting element but really that's it's a very kind of pre-determined
way of what you can craft and it's decided by the designers of the game. This seems very different
in that you can almost craft anything or you know have a service for anything and
it's really limited more by the imagination of the people doing it and they're
drive to get it done and they're able to collaborate, they're resources to have currency that they
can expend on these things to have time and energy and it's not limited in the way that you
would imagine crafting in a role playing like a massive role playing game where there is a specific
tech tree of you need these materials and it crafts this object. This is very very of a whole order
level order of magnitude different to that. Absolutely. It's a virtual world and I keep emphasizing
that because the only limitation is your ability to create and collaborate. You can
do anything in second life that you want to do. The only restrictions that you have are essentially
the terms of service so you're not doing anything that's illegal and also they're really strict on
you know not cheating people you know you don't steal other people's creations in that you know
there can be real life legal repercussions to stealing people's material that they've created
there is something called full permit people create measures and you can use those under
certain terms of service yet you have to do specific things to alter it enough to be able to sell it.
Yeah so convers if that is some objects you've just got they've given you the object that's it you've
got it and you cannot use it only as that object of objects you could modify it you could change
the colors you could actually add bits to it you could add scripts to it you couldn't do more things
with it you could even give it to us but I think often they will specify their terms if you're
going to give it to someone else you can't just resell it you have to have actually
quite a lot of creative input into the new thing that you're creating with it because I've always used
everything the guy off. Yeah that's what I'm saying there has to be a noticeable change that's
unique like in my case a lot of my changes if I'm using full perm items is scripting I'm using
the mesh as a visual to allow someone to interact in a way that they couldn't do with just a
mesh itself yeah if that makes sense. So what I was curious about asking was could you explain
kind of give an overview and some of your experiences of what like the economics of the whole thing
is buying and selling the cost of goods the cost you know in the LinkedIn currency what sort
of figures are we talking about what kind of income might you be getting and what you have to bear
in mind with that. Well there isn't any real regulations on how to price things and second life
you kind of have to go to the marketplace and look at what it is that you're selling. What is
something a similar not the exact same obviously because you don't want to you know give the exact
same item as somebody else that would you know be silly but you have a similar product how much
does it cost in world what's the range you know and there is a pretty disparate range in market
place because there is no you know some people will sell stuff for real cheap and they're undercutting
themselves some people sell it for way way way too much which means that if it's not a really high
quality current product nobody's actually going to buy it or people who have and I've experienced
this people that have all sorts of money that they just don't care what they do with it they'll buy
products just because they want to when it comes to like say shop and hop these events they will
have you have to have an item that is a free gift so that anyone that comes to the event can actually
collect items from different vendors and different stores and incentivizes people to come along
in the first place kind of right but shop and hop itself is kind of a a linden expo if you will
the linden's are the people that run second life and create make make certain it's maintained and
let you know they created it and they get the real profits from it as well from the people who
subscribe to well the linden's okay so there's the the linden's that created the game and then
there's the linden's actually work for linden labs right okay and then they have volunteers
who are people that actually work for the public horse like they keep the day to day
land maintenance stuff they keep an eye on stuff and they have events for the linden
you know they're called the malls that's the linden public's works department or l
kdw i think is the acronym that they is but the malls will maintain that so the there are the
people that actually run the back end of things or keep the the world livable and functioning
kind of thinking right right and they're with the technical aspects of it as well and running the
service and all that sort of thing physically the computers that they're making this so happen
well there are also the ones that will investigate issues so if there is a report of somebody
doing something that is against the terms of service they're the ones that will go investigate that
they'll also you know people there are things especially back in the day there used to be a
really really large amount of trolls but linden labs has done a lot to kind of diminish that
but trolls would come in and just harass people they were just there to annoy people
and they wouldn't make or buy items that would just crash people's computers because it was
throwing so many particles out you know too fast cause people to lag whatnot they're just there to
do harm well the bowls will go investigate you know is this person putting stuff up that's
garrish and just it's they're doing it on you know some people don't do it because they're trying
to some people will do it because they bought something off of the marketplace it just wasn't
really good quality and they threw it up really big and on linden land on the mainland which is
that's a whole different conversation yeah in a way people who are paying for a subscription
they might feel entitled I can do whatever I like but I mean the terms of service say no you can't
do whatever you like is certainly it's to that because we have to be nice to each other kind of thing
and keep it a functioning society of sorts right when I first started second life there was a
period of time where I just while I love the idea of it I walked away from it because if you are
playing a female character back then you would just get harassed constantly because second life
and then the labs have tried to let this be a user created world back early on there was and there
are still adult areas in second life but they have since changed that where adult type activities are
restricted to a different continent that is cut off it from people that don't want to be there like
you you don't have to be a part of the adult stuff in second life but everybody knows it's there
that being said they've they've done a good job of minimizing that harassment over time but
it took a while and I think you sometimes had the kind of content moderation rolling that and
it like very volunteering work youth take every community that I've been a part of I've
usually wound up stepping in and are stepping up to the plate and just being one of the people that
would you know help people figure out how to interact in the social community and in the communities
that we're in and you you haven't specifically been paid to do that but no you you you you have to
actually have a successful business to make real world money in in second life
yeah I mean you are not paid work yeah so when you were doing that community these community roles
even then you weren't really been paid in the linden currency either no it's all volunteer yeah
so just do you feel that you've reached some of the rewards of the effort you've put in or it's
uh it's kind of I have spent in a learning experience or just a living experience I treat this as if it's
my hobby I don't some people will you know play golf and they'll buy golf clubs and you know
golf balls and you know a membership to a golf you know a country club or something like that
to play golf you know or if they're gamers they'll invest in games or you know whatnot
in this case I invest in my hobby a lot of my fair funds go to this game because I love playing it and
I love creating and decorating and while like maybe could have eventually chosen to
go down the path of my campusness making decorating yeah okay um and because I'm more creative
I've chosen to go through some you know do something that I love and it's taking longer to be profitable
yeah um in second life but I think you're using you're kind of you're taking a full
part is a part of role in lots of different aspects of of what the world has to offer
of what the simulation however running a business running a you know being part of a community
um and that's like creating crafting and doing social playing games and so I was saying before
I know I'm aware that you've had you've been inspired recently to start really imagining
and you and the and the people you work with there have to kind of reimagine
the area that you're that you inhabit kind of as a different role play setting to what it was originally
I think this is something that's been like in the works for some time it's just been a matter of
all all of us being able to be on the same page at the same time and have the same you know
willingness to invest in time because role play is a
you know it's a it's a time investment but we found a way that we think is going to work pretty well
that will allow role play to take place both in world and out of world
so we're going to use a combination of it so we have the visual aspect where we've we've been
redoing our area to create the environment that we want but you've also been in this story telling
behind that yeah we've been yeah definitely so I know sort of a world back you have
seemed to very heavily invested in like a farming system and is that now taking a back burner
that has taken a back burner just because the amount of money it costs to do it like that if you're
going to do a farming system in second life you're going to spend real world money
regularly on it and we have chosen to prioritize working on our businesses in the land that we're in
so it's fun though yeah should I guess come back to the shop and how is there anything
else about the shop and the hope that you can think that we haven't talked about the thing about
shop and hop and this is for anyone who might actually play second life and be curious about it
shop and hop itself is really really great to get into because it's free but to enter
but it takes several times of getting in and you'd not guarantee getting in every single time so
the last I've applied for the last three including the one coming up the last three shopping hops
I got the first one I applied to I actually did get into which surprised me
the next one I did not get into but my sister did she got her story into the shopping
hop and that was pretty cool let's see so I was just thinking actually you've had some experience
and she's had some experience too so what was the outcome of the shop I mean what was the benefit
to you or at least how did it go basically so the first time it didn't really go real well I
wound up being on a region where there was one I think I missed categorized my store
for one and to the other aspect of it was is I was in a region so there's multiple regions
and shop and hop there's a lot of them so it's a huge huge shopping event you if you don't get
around to all the regions you're not gonna get around to all the stores so most people will look
for the big name stores that they know about and go there because they guaranteed to get a high
quality item or free because in this event you there's a free get so is there a bit of potlock
who you're next to that was exactly what I encountered where I was in a region that
not a lot of people got around to because there was no recognition of names so basically you just
really have to keep trying to get in and keep getting your name out there now I did have
some sales not near as many as I could have hoped for but it was my very first event so I
felt like I did pretty well now last shop and hop a kasha got into it and her store is a little more
well known it has had a bit more success so she had some sales there and part of her store she
has me put children's collections books out for S.L. Read so she had me put out a
an S.L. Read collection there and I did actually get one sale on S.L. Read for that
in her store for the shop and hop the one that you weren't attending the one that she was
yeah her store has a specific collection of children's books that S.L. Read puts out
this makes me wonder is there and it's just me wondering like is there a sort of business
business market the products that you have like you would sell to other businesses and they would
then sell it on and they would maybe brand it and they put their own content or you would specifically
give it to other businesses and I might have better connections for selling the stuff
but you're there on producer there are people that market in second life that way I do not
do that a whole lot unless I actually know the person so like in this case it's kind of a
we had like a collaboration where it's it's S.L. Read it's mine but it's for little adventures
right I can't make sense it is also available in my store as well the children's collections are
so you wouldn't really want a generic middle man sort of selling on your stuff just because they
happen to have a better reach to the market but then you'll look kind of the control of how it's
been distributed really exactly and that's yeah yeah that's why I don't do it that way
there are people that do I do not because I want the autonomy of my store being my brand
actually makes me wonder if there are other like real world business models that exist in
second life like other franchises for example yeah there are franchises you could sell
store based on someone someone else's brand and you just pay them like for the brand and then
you stop the store but because people know that brand they would but I mean does it does the fact
that physical locality is not as important kind of hinder that geographical spreading out of
businesses because obviously someone can in it in effect they can just teleport from anywhere to anywhere
I mean like would you have like a hundred McDonald's so you know spread about in different
parts of second life or is that pointless because you could just go to the one there are businesses
like that it's all about how you want to make your money in second life and I want to be known
for my stuff not selling someone else's stuff if that makes sense like I may buy the rights to use a
mesh yeah but then what comes out that is your own product right exactly because I'm doing something
to change it I'm doing something to you know it's it's kind of like upcycling if you will you know
it's it's taking something that was used for one purpose but is now used for another
you know I see where you're going with the concept but that's definitely not the way I want to
do business in second life sure because I want to be you know I'm branding if that makes sense yeah
so I guess I guess my other thing that I was kind of that I referred to there was the physical
locality so in general can you think about what difference does it make between second life and the
real world that you can just teleport anywhere instantly how does it make it a materially different
existence or the way that the society is structured the fact you can just that there is no form
of transport as it were other than just a role play that you're driving a car role play that you're
in an airplane so well actually on mainland you can drive all sorts of places you can drive
somewhere and then take a ship to another continent or fly a plane to another continent like all
of the basic concepts of transport the only restriction you have as far as travel and second life
is if you're on private regions having the teleport experience that we have that allows us to just
walk through a tunnel into the commune teleportation is is just a way of life and second life just
like flying is yeah yeah of course your your avatar can just type anyone's avatar can just type
off jump 100 feet in the air and just take an overview of what's going on fly back down and that's
just taken for granted there's just one of the mechanics of the world so when you're talking about
there is a shopping hop and it's on certain regions it doesn't matter what region you're in in the
world you can immediately get to the shopping hop you just need to know an address for it
well it's advertised it's advertised all over second life it's going to be on the main page of your
your viewer it'll be on the website you know it's one of those things it's it's very widely
advertised and everybody knows about it yeah and if you don't know about it you haven't been in
second life very long or you don't pay attention you know because you I guess you could choose
not to know stuff on second life but it's very well again I guess geography in second life is a bit
more dominated by reputation than it is by proximity I guess is it is would that be a fact yes
if I think that's very earnest yeah the more place is now and the more accessible it is to get there
yeah well there's also a marketing system and you know you can advertise your land
you can pay to advertise your land to get your land more known yeah it more business there
how much more profit like selling a shopping hop type of thing compared to just having a store in your
little region that people generally have to come to people that don't know about falls haven
yeah we'll learn about falls haven right because the store is located so when you're at shopping
hop we'll have a group joiners so people can learn about the new stuff and then there's also going
to be a landmark where people can teleport to the main store because I'm not going to have
every single one of my products in the shopping hop yeah and of course when you sell up product
you often include a no card with it that says you know if you want to visit our store here's the
here's the link to get there so it's a bit like internet it's better I'm selling on the internet
really it's just it's a has that quality to it yeah absolutely well website it does the internet
yeah yeah exactly so a website it doesn't necessarily matter where you're living you can order
something from that website and get it to you whether it's 100 miles away or a thousand miles away
within reason yeah that's been very informative and I think we've covered not just stuff
about this particular event but so a more insight into the the world second line of matters
into the metaverse yeah be it be it is a kebugs metaverse or or this particular in the
labs metaverse just just to throw you a big loop here not only do they have shopping experience there's
actually universities real life universities yeah okay you have classes and stuff in world
you can get qualifications from it's more like a certification type thing it's basically
it's basically advertising for you know they're university but there's there's all sorts of
real world businesses are actually in world okay they've chosen to just have this as another avenue
for reaching they're using for the people you have to participate in their things yeah okay
anyway thank you very much else with and thanks for asking me the questions that
lets me get the little squirrels out of my brain okay all right so goodbye from me and
bye from hell's death thanks for listening
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording podcast, click on our upload link
to find out how easy it is.
Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by an AnHonestHost.com, the Internet Archive,
rsync.net, and our mirror network.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
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Episode: 4523
Title: Nuclear Reactor Technology - Ep 1 - Nuclear Basics
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4523/hpr4523.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:13:13 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4523, for 2025-12-03
Today's show is entitled, "Nuclear Reactor Technology - Ep 1 - Nuclear Basics"
The host is Whiskeyjack and the duration is 00:11:24
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "This episode is the first in an 8 part series on nuclear reactor technology. - Nuclear Basics"
This episode is the first in an eight-part series on nuclear reactor technology.
What this series will cover?
I'm not a nuclear engineer or physicist, just an amateur with a hobbyist's interest in
the subject.
This is a politics-free series and the focus is on the technology of the reactors.
This series will focus on the civil nuclear industry with a particular focus on electric
power generation reactors.
I will discuss the technology, what it is, how it works, and some of the pros and
cons of different technologies, but I will try to avoid offering too many opinions on what
it's the best or worst of anything.
I won't cover military or naval reactors or nuclear weapons production reactors.
I won't cover fusion power as it is still in the experimental stages and I don't know too
much about it.
I won't cover research or experimental reactors with a few exceptions needed to illustrate
a point.
I also won't cover mining, refining, converting, enrichment or disposal.
I won't cover the parts of an electric generating plant outside of the reactor, such
as turbines, generators, transformers, cooling systems, and everything else that is needed
to make a functioning power plant.
I will instead focus on reactor technologies which are in commercial use today, plus some
of the more interesting samples of things being developed in some of the historical dead
ends.
I'm not interested in discussing any politics, just to nuts and bolts of technology.
I will try to keep explanation simple, and so will skilm over a lot of details, there
is far more that could be discussed on this subject than I have the time to make podcasts
on.
Also, I'm probably not the best version to get into that sort of detail.
Episode 1 will cover nuclear basics, including basic terminology and several versus military
nuclear material.
Episode 2 will cover nuclear fuel, including the different types, recycling of spent fuel,
uranium, and thorium resources, and medical isotopes.
Episode 3 will cover reactor basics, including slow versus fast reactors, moderators,
coolants, steam generation, refueling methods, and the 3 main commercial reactor types.
Episode 4 will cover the less common reactor types, including types which are no longer
used, some historical developmental dead ends, and some types which may be possibly making
a comeback.
Episode 5 will cover fast reactors, including the different types, some of their history,
why they were developed, and why they have so far only seen limited use.
Episode 6 will cover thorium reactors, including what is thorium, and how it differs
from uranium, why there is interest in thorium, what sorts of reactors can use thorium,
and why thorium has not yet seen widespread use.
Episode 7 will cover small modular reactors or SMRs, what the reason is for developing
them, what are the different ways they may be used, and where they are currently being built.
Episode 8 will cover generation 4 reactors, which is a collection of future technologies.
Nuclear basics, first we need to start with the basics.
I won't explain what an atom is, or what a nucleus or proton or neutrons are.
I assume you already learned that in school.
We need to define some basic terms first, however.
Isotopes.
The first is an isotope, an element is defined by the number of protons and electrons
that it has in it, an atom can also have neutrons.
Neutrons do not affect the chemical properties of an element.
To be a bit more precise, they do not affect it in ways that are easy to detect.
The number of neutrons, however, can affect the nuclear properties.
The number of neutrons in the atoms of an element can, in some case, vary,
resulting in multiple forms of each element.
Isotopes of uranium.
Uranium, as it occurs in nature, has two main isotopes.
One isotope of uranium is U235, which makes up approximately 0.7% of natural uranium.
The U is the chemical symbol for uranium, and the number 235 is the number of protons,
plus the number of neutrons in the nucleus of the atom.
Virtually all of the rest is U238.
U235 has the same number of protons as U238, but has three more neutrons.
Nuclear fission.
Nuclear fission is a random atomic nucleus is split, producing energy as a byproduct.
This will normally result in the atom becoming either a different element,
or a different isotope of the same element.
Some radiation is given off in the process in the form of neutrons or other particles, such as
alpha or bedic particles, or electromagnetic radiation, such as gamma rays.
Some small part of the matter is converted into energy in the process of this,
and it is this energy we are mainly interested in obtaining.
This is distinct from nuclear fusion, where two or more atoms or particles are merged
into one, producing a larger element or form of the same element.
Fission may happen spontaneously, or it may be induced by being struck by another particle,
usually a neutron.
Half-life.
Radioactive isotopes which decay spontaneously have what is called a half-life.
Half-life is a term to describe how quickly something spontaneously fissions.
The half-life is a time required for half of the existing material to spontaneously
fission. This can happen repeatedly, so there is no end to the process as long as any of the original material remains.
This half-life could be anywhere from a fraction of a second to billions of years.
An isotope with a very short half-life gives out more radiation in a given period of time than one
that has a very long half-life. For example, the common element potassium 40, which is found in many
rocks such as granite, has a half-life of 1.25 billion years. This means that it will be around for a very long time.
However, that also means that it is not very radioactive as a rate of decay is very slow.
Fisile versus fertile. U235 is fisile. That is, it will take active part in initiating and
contributing to a nuclear reaction. U238 is fertile. It will not initiate a nuclear reaction.
However, if U238 is hit by a neutron, it can be converted into another element which is fisile.
It is very important to understand a remember what isotopes are and the difference between
fisile and fertile in order to understand nuclear power.
Enrichment of isotopes. Enrichment is a complex process which increases the percentage of
U235 isotope in fuel from the natural 0.7% to a higher level. Typically between 3 and 5%
in standard commercial fuel. It does this by extracting some of the U238, leaving behind a mixture
which has a higher proportion of U235. While many nuclear reactors are designed to use and
rich to uranium, it is not strictly necessary in order for them to work and some commercial
reactors use natural uranium. There are a number of different ways that enrichment can be performed,
but it won't be covering them in this series. Civil versus military nuclear material. Under
international convention, nuclear material is divided into civil and military categories.
The difference between the two is based on the proportions of different isotopes.
Military material has many more restrictions on who can have it and how it is accounted for
than civil material. Civil material hover must still be accounted for and tracked under
international treaty. These rules have a direct effect on reactor designs as we shall see.
Uranium. Civil uranium is uranium that has less than 20% U235. Military uranium is 20% or higher
U235. This is why you see so many small reactor designs as state they use fuel and rich to 20%.
It's actually typically 19.75% in order to stand with the limit. This is the highest
taken go in civilian hands. Most civilian nuclear power reactors which use in rich uranium
use 3 to 5% enrichment due to economic reasons. The higher the enrichment level, the more expensive
the fuel. Also, to supply a fuel higher than normal commercial that has 3 to 5% levels,
is very limited and there are very few sources. Plutonium, just like with uranium,
several versus military plutonium, is defined by the ratio of isotopes. Plutonium does not
exist in nature and significant quantities but can be created artificially. In spent fuel
from civilian power reactors, the Bain isotopes are PU238 239 240 240 1 and 2402. Typically in
spent fuel this is 50 to 60% PU239 25 to 30% PU 240 10 to 15% PU241 and a few percent each
of PU238 and PU242. PU239 and PU241 our fizzile will PU242 is fertile. Civil plutonium is defined as
having 20% or more PU242. The PU239 is an is the isotope desired for making weapons,
and PU242 is considered to be a serious contaminant from that perspective. Unlike with enriching
uranium, it is not feasible to separate PU242 from PU239. The only feasible way to create plutonium
with a high level of PU239 and a low level of 240 is to avoid making PU242. Weapons great plutonium
is made in special military reactors, although two of the UK's magnox reactors were designed
as dual use models intended as military reactors but producing electric power as a buy product.
I won't go into how military reactors for producing weapons great plutonium operate
as it is not relevant to our discussion on civil nuclear power plants. It is also not a topic
with very much public information being available or for which I have much personal knowledge.
Conclusion in the first episode of this series we discussed what this series will cover
some of the basic nuclear physics terminology and the differences between civil and military
nuclear material. In the upcoming episodes we will discuss some of the basic engineering
aspects of reactors, the various types of commercial reactors including common and uncommon ones,
nuclear fuel including uranium plutonium and thorium, medical isotopes, small modular reactors,
and the areas of research being conducted into new reactor technologies.
In the next episode, however, we will cover types of nuclear fuel, recycling of nuclear fuel,
uranium and thorium resources and medical isotopes. This concludes the first episode of
an eight-part series, a nuclear reactor technology.
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording podcast, click on our upload link
to find out how easy it is.
Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by an AnHonestHost.com, the Internet Archive,
rsync.net, and our mirror network.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
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Episode: 4524
Title: Living the Tux Life Episode 3 - Automating the Install
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4524/hpr4524.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:13:14 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4524, for 2025-12-04
Today's show is entitled, "Living the Tux Life Episode 2 - Automating the Install"
The host is Al and the duration is 00:06:16
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "How i automate my mint os install "
Hi, I'm on episode 3 of Live in the Tax Life, where I document me, my journey of running
with Linux has my daily driver, since last time I got new laptop, then a new VOT14 as AMD
would stick to thinking around.
I'm recording the episode and I'm still running the experiment, and I'm absolutely loving
it.
I haven't had anything that forces me to use Windows yet, I've been automating my installation
progress, which I'll deep dive into during this episode.
Regarding the TE4S laptop, it's brilliant, it's fast and a battery life is amazing.
Intesting on getting around about 6 to 7 hours of constant use, since I've brought
it second hand, I checked the battery capacity, and it was at 98% and I had an 48 cycles,
so it was unbelievable.
I was going to get new battery, but there's no point.
In future episodes, I want to talk about using something like Perfucius, to monitor the
battery usage and also RAM usage, because I'd really like to have a laptop with 30
kgm, but the problem is that they're very rarely used when you get the memory is sold
on the board.
So I've been automating my setup, pick up and try, and next, I've been on a number of
laptops, I had lying around, I haven't automated the actual installation of it in
the next minute, but actually it's not like this is possible.
As I mentioned before, I like to have my laptop hard drive and cryptid, in case I need
to deal the haste.
I've been a second new option to install Mint with LVM and setting the encrypted drive
part, dives option.
The problem is that I want to have a custom partition setup on my laptop, I put in a
mini, one terabyte m.2 drive into the laptop, I want to have a 100 gigabyte root partition
phase gig, gig, swap partition, a 700 gig, home drive, and a 100 gig as a backup drive
for time shift.
The rest of the space can be used if I want to expand any of the partitions in the future,
I've talked more about time shift they do in the episode.
I want to separate the space out so that if I need to reinstall my home drive wouldn't
be affected.
I looked at how to set up a custom partition with an experiment, but it looks like it's
not possible to do an installation when you're using LVM.
There are two options, setting up the partitions first and installing the instrument on them.
But it is quite in-depth, and if you want to use LVM encrypted drive, I find a guide
that suggests that you select the standard install with LVM and encrypt the drive, then
after the install you can strengthen the drive to create extra partitions.
I'll link in a show next to my guide how I do this.
So after the install while the LVM is still loaded on the system, I shrunk the main
repartition down to 100 gig, as I resize the spot tissue to 30 gig, and then create the
partition home for home at 100 gig and 100 gig for backups.
I then run a number of commands to move the home directly to new partition, I had set
up.
They are mounted to the LVM volume, rebooted, and there it was, or working.
So I wanted to install all my apps, fight, act, and flatback, and restore my configs.
I'll even link again in the show notes where details of all these commands.
Firstly, I wanted to find out what applications I had to install via app, and flatback.
I tried a number of commands, but I found that the one that worked for me, it showed
instance in the show notes, as managed to just show all the application is stored, since
we're including one to sort it when you install the OS.
But I wanted to just list dusting ones and stores into the installing the expense.
I'm using a program called Ansible to auto setup my machine, it's a tool used by default
to people to configure and make machines using SSH.
But by using the connection load collection, it can be used to configure your load
call machine.
You can store Ansible by app, then you need to create a Yamaha, I'll click example in my blog
As you can see, you can store app for repositories and sorts of certificates for them.
Each second is a different part, you can see, I then install the apps, fire app, adding
this, you pulled earlier.
And then you can see, I added a list of all the fat packs I wanted to install too.
You can run the Ansible Highfirm Paybook command, point into the Yamaha, and you'll see
it come back showing what where it is in installing each section, after it run, you can
see all my apps were installed.
I haven't, I have all my Ansible Yamaha's going to just to a private Git repository,
just in case I'll put some sense of information in there.
Next I wanted to list all preferences, like Git configs, the great preferences, either
normally are in the dock config folder in your home directory.
These are the hidden files, so you'd have to normally go to the top and go to view and show
a hidden file to you, or to see them.
At the moment, I manually copy these from a working laptop and commit them to my repo.
I can then go into my Git repo, I can go into Git repo into another podcast.
If anyone is interested in a manual of PC config files on my new install, you can configure
Ansible to check out these repo and copy them to the OECM machine by haven't done
this yet.
Next I'll things like setting up all papers and keyboard shortcuts.
I have configured.
To transfer these over, you need to use decomp, this dump to get a name config to a file.
I have lots of trouble setting this, but if because I was using cd to run decomp, you
don't need to.
You basically export the root of the decomp to a text file on the source OS and then import
it up onto your new OS.
I reviewed by that top and it was all set up.
I reached the conference guide to this, on my blog.
Defining each step, the last thing I wanted to talk about is time shift, which is a backup
tool.
I'll go into more details about my plan to back get my laptop in the future.
What I wanted to do is help with your reddit against a bad update, time shift is installed
by default in the X-Men by default, it's not used to back up your home directory, but
it can be used to back up the root directory.
So if sometimes you can use it to help, you will get restored and get your system working
up again.
I can forget to back up back up to the partition I created earlier, and I can forget
it to back up one to day.
I haven't tried restoring from it yet as a system failure, but I have tested it to restore
file from the back up and that works.
And that's it for this episode.
Thank you for watching.
See you in the next video.
Until next time.
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording podcast, click on our upload link
to find out how easy it is.
Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by an AnHonestHost.com, the Internet Archive,
rsync.net, and our mirror network.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
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Episode: 4525
Title: Using mail merge in thunderbird
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4525/hpr4525.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:13:16 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4525, for 2025-12-05
Today's show is entitled, "Using mail merge in thunderbird"
The host is Ken Fallon and the duration is 00:08:13
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "Use thunderbird to send out multiple emails based on a csv file"
Hi everybody, my name is Ken Falon and you're listening to another episode of Hacker Public Radio and yes, it's that time of year where we're start planning the new year show
Normally I send out the emails to all the hosts and the other podcasters
We're involved in the free labor open source hacking scene Linux scene to invite them and their listeners to join the event
And normally we forget let's face it both this time upward in reminder of my calendar to do that and instead of sending out all the emails one at a time
I wanted to use a mail merge program and I was thinking there's got to be something in Thunderbird to allow me to do this
And there is if you go to the add-on add-ons for Thunderbird.net link in the show notes
You get a link to this mail merge program that was written by Alexander Bergman. I would like Firefox where you can just click and install from there
You need to first download it and then you can go into Thunderbird and I always tend to forget where exactly in Thunderbird.net is so that's why I'm kind of recording the show
So tools add-ons and themes within Thunderbird and then where it says manager extensions
A button, a cog, a cog gear wheel type thing, tool thread-ons and it says install add-on from file and that will allow you to install the mail merge program
So once you've done that if you've ever used a mail merge program before it'll read in from in this case it'll read in from a database or a CSV file or JSON file or a Microsoft Excel
And each column is a different field so it'll go across the row under your like email first name last name
Teleform number or something you could use the delimitor which is squiggly brackets squiggly brackets primary email squiggly brackets where primary email is the field name at the top
Then it will create an email for each row using the values that are in each of the columns
So it's not that complicated. In my case, I'm just using the email address and what I've got is like my email address cannot fall under the head
And then on the very first line I've just got the word primary email
I'm using that as the delimitor so then in my mail program I create a new email, but instead of writing cannot fall under a I put in
Cardi brackets curly bracket also to opening curly brackets primary email with the cases exactly like they are on the first line of my CSV file comma separation of value file
And two closing curly brackets and then I put in my subject low and then the body is world and then I press the mail merge thing and then that mail merge button within Thunderbird is on the email
The image of this and the show notes, but you won't get it you won't you'll be able to get everything from this so the source
It's got four different sections source attachments back and send so the source allows you to select the sources in the dress book see it CSV file JSON file or Excel spreadsheet which I've already told you about
I'm going to browse on the CSV and select its UTFAs and fields and images and automatic so nothing nothing crazy there. I'm not going to be sent on the attachment, but I guess you could
The batch size would be if your email provider wants to is looking for spam and does someone like thousands of emails coming in at the one time
So what I did there was I just added three seconds and set it random and they start on the stop not sure what they do, but it's pretty much worked for me.
Then the send we have three different types of delivery modes save as draft we'll just save the thing as a draft saved later, which is the default and send now which I'm
Which will give you a warning as I'm only using test addresses. I'm just going to send now when I press send I get the our warning message and then I press start and then there is a random
Three second delay as it sends out the six email must just that come in and then the emails just go
Each of them are sent individually as separate, but if I wanted them and I see that I received all the email addresses to myself
Which is fantastic and if I wanted to do the same thing again, I will go open curly brackets and two closing curly brackets and
This time I'm just going to select the same file and instead of actually sending them I'm going to use the save later option and
It makes no sense to have any of the batch options there because they're just going to go into my inbox. So when I do that, it pops up I press start and there in my local box folder and there I can review them and I can right click on them, edit them further
So
Cool utility let's face at this show was more reminder for me that this is what I need to use next year when I forget so for those of you who don't know they
New year show will be running from the first time zone going into the last that's a total of
37 times zones and spanning
26 hours or something something notes like that and what we do is we come together on the mobile chat
Then that gets recorded and released
Laser on was a podcast so
Some of the ground rules you must use push to talk and a headset so please just don't come on and
Run the audio for everybody
There's no way we can fix 26 hours of audio so head says push to talk if you can't that's fine
You're just going to go into listen mode
You got to be polite so when you enter the room
Please don't interrupt an ongoing conversation wait for a pause on the conversation and say hi
It's quite common for people that you might know to join as they wish to speak with other people in the room
They may have been waiting all year for this chance to meet so please give people the space to have their conversations
The next thing is do not introduce the time zones. There are lots of time zones and adjust interrupts the flow of the conversation and would
Put trunk aid silence. It doesn't matter anyway. It's all going to get truncated down. Don't monopolize the conversation
As I said, people lots of people are coming on there
So if you find that you're talking too much just step back
If you're planning on being there the whole time
You know just don't don't bother even talking if the flow is going just wait until it dies down a bit
And then say hi to new people coming in that's your role. Don't fill dead air
Truncate silence will do is there's no need to fill dead air just let it be and there's no need to mention that there's dead air people
What know if you didn't mention it truncate silence would kick in nobody would ever know so be respectful to each other and remember that the attendance of the new year shall
Does not
Constitute issue itself and everything is released under CC by essay
Okay, so that is tune in tomorrow for another exciting episode of hacker public radio
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording podcast, click on our upload link
to find out how easy it is.
Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by an AnHonestHost.com, the Internet Archive,
rsync.net, and our mirror network.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
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Episode: 4526
Title: Baofeng and SDR++
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4526/hpr4526.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:13:18 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4526, for 2025-12-08
Today's show is entitled, "Baofeng and SDR++"
The host is Lee and the duration is 00:09:33
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "Lee tries transmitting and recording on VHF and UHF"
Hello, I'm Lee.
Sturmgren's talk about dipping my turn in the water of Imterradio.
I took the UK Imterradio Foundation license exam in March 2025, for a while I've been
experimenting with software to find Rageau and had been trying to pick up signals such
as commercial FM and DAB Rageau with my SDR dongle on my PC running event too.
But up until now I've not even tried transmitting.
Back in 2024, I'd obtained two handsets that look like walkie talkies.
After Mr. X showed me this type of unit, that old camp, the making model of the ones
I had, is a bow-fing UV-5R, six mobs after taking the exam.
I finally got around to finding out my cool sign, and downloading my license from off-com,
who are the regulators.
I record from my study for that exam, that according to the license terms, is mandatory
to announce your cool sign in the station, which is basically meaning where you're transmitting
from, when commencing a session that includes transmissions on amateur bands, also why
you can transmit live signals and conversing real time.
We've even then coded a bit not encrypted non-voice signals, actual broadcastings such as playing
pieces of music, but commercial radio station is not permitted.
Furthermore, the power of the transmissions should not exceed 10 watts, and a handset
like the ones I have, indeed, does full below this level, even at the highest transmit
power setting.
For this initial experiment transmitting, I wanted to speak a voice message from my handset,
and pick it up on my PC with the real-tech chipset SDR.com, and even record it.
To decide how to transmit and receive my signal, first I need to consider its parameters.
First the distance.
This would be very short, indeed, within another room in the same building, a power much
less than the allowed ten watts would be more than adequate, than the frequency range.
To transmit spoken voice signals clearly, frequencies up to 8 kilohertz need to be accurately
conveyed.
The Vows are low frequency, say, less than 1,000 hertz, consonants in general range up
to around 2,000 hertz, those specific consonants could civilen some more like 4,000 or
more.
So this set my approximate bandwidth I would need to be of the order of magnitude of
10 kilohertz.
Then I wanted to choose what channel and modulation scheme to use.
Frequency modulation seemed most apt, as it's a fairly simple mechanism that offers reasonable
protection against distortion.
Then the two meter wavelength band, with frequency 145.5Mhz, is channel V40, which can
be used for FM.
Alternatively, in the 70 cm band, with frequency 4, 3, 3.5Mhz, those channel U280, which
can also be used for FM.
Both these channels have made bands for UKM to radio, license holder, transmissions.
Channel V40 is apparently what used, so I decided to try U280 at first.
This my transmission was for test purposes, rather than deliberately contact other amateur
radio uses.
While using FM, there is narrow band or wide band FM, wide band as you would expect
uses more bandwidth, and this hence use commercially for music, which tends to need frequencies
up to 44 kilohertz.
For my purpose, it's narrow band was fine, and it's more conservative in its use of
the radio spectrum, hence impacting any other uses less.
What I was aiming for was to communicate in one direction from transmitted to receiver.
This mydi is nine as simplex, with two-way comms, nine as duplex.
I started my experiment setting up STR++, which is some software capable of reading data
from the USB-Dongol, and extracting specific radio signals, then plotting as both a real-time
horizontal spectrum and a vertically scrolling calicoid frequency trace.
It also demodulates the chosen signal, so the actual audio of it can be listened to or
recorded for further processing.
I plan to set the frequency modulation scheme and bandwidth for other receiver, the 433.5
narrow band FM, and a standard 12.5 kilohertz respectively, then on the handset set this
same frequency and try transmitting and see what happened.
So as soon as I told software to start listening, I got a load of white noise coming in.
So options to adjust the gain as well as scale and offset white plot, so the background noise
would be near the bottom, and then he signal near the top of the fluctuating graph.
It seemed to be very little else I was seeing using this part of the spectrum.
As soon as I pressed the push to talk button, my handset, I saw the noise disappear, and
the signal centered on the carrier frequency of 433.5 mHz.
Actually, after zooming in later, I realized it was slightly off-center, but the software
allows the centering to be slightly adjusted for a closer match.
The spike I saw was clearly the carrier wave.
I knew the signal itself would manifest the symmetrical bumps to the left and right of the spike.
What surprised me though, was there were slightly diminishing amplitude, go signals appearing
at regular frequency intervals, falling off an either side of my actual signal.
After a little research I summarized this was to do with eye-strike U imbalance, an artifact
of the signal demodulation process.
Those are setting in the software that's meant to counter this.
For the gain, which is how much the signal will be amplified and diminished to fit the
desired output range, there were options to handle this automatically via the real tech
chip set of either software, or alternatively it could be set manually, so from zero
decibels, meaning a 1 to 1 input to output correspondants up to 48 decibels, that corresponds
to the output being about 150 times the input.
The result of my experiment was I got a very quiet reception of why I spoke into the transmitter.
To the extent I had not noticed it was there until I happened to share the signal with
a naïe, tell me troubleshoot, or surprised when it was able to tell me exactly what I'd
said in the transmission.
After this I realized I could use the compression filter, or amplification filter and
audacity, and did actually see the spoken message was there.
The troubleshooting I went through almost every relevant setting on the transmitter, as well
as receiving software.
I actually even switched band down from UHF to VHF, and was using the 145.5MHz channel called V40,
thinking this would make a material difference.
Also I tried to adjust in the bandwidth for the receiving end, thinking the signal may
be being restricted by sampling to a narrow band.
Offerating the handset menu, meant pressing menu, then up or down or key numerically,
the menu option desired, then pressing menu to edit, up or down to choose the setting
value, then menu again to save, and exit to go back to the frequency display.
There was also an orange key to the top left, this switch between choosing a frequency
numerically, or letting the up and down keys page free set standard channels, the punctuate
the whole spectrum.
One of the things I tried was checking on my handset, if the squelch was set up, which
silence is noise when nothing is being said, or whether there was a transmit tone out
of audible range being said, called CTCS or DTS.
These features are used to signal to a receiver, something is on air, even if that's
something is silence.
This allows automatic activation of squelch, or can help a repeat and note the signal
is there, and the SFTD is another setting that determines the offset frequency to allow
it to be relayed slightly further up or down on the spectrum, while repeat achieving
greater range.
But these settings were all turned off, there was a setting for busy channel lock-out
to stop accidentally transmitting over the top of someone else.
But this was off too, there were a load of other settings in the menu, the related
tenset operation rather than characteristics of the radio signal send.
But I eventually figured out, it's my problem was this, before transmitting there was
a lot of loud white noise, just random radio noise in the air, for picking up my voice
on the recording, I had the recording sensitivity set low, otherwise this white noise
was incredibly loud, but as soon as I transmitted the white noise was gone, replaced
by my signal, however, because the recording level was very low, my voice came through
very, very quietly, while I had to do was counting intuitively, so the recording level
up to their maximum, even though this meant very loud white noise prior to an after transmission,
only then when I did actually transmit was my voice order one recording, I had to cut
out the very loud noisy bit before an after transmission in audacity, before then amplifying
the recording to something I could hear easily, anyway, here's the recording I made of my signal.
So that was my first experience transmitting on nanometer bands, and now now a lot better
how to operate the handset, as well as making the fairly theoretical stuff I learned for the
exam more tangible to me. Anyway, with that I'll sign off from hack public radio, and thank you
for listening, over and out.
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording podcast, click on our upload link
to find out how easy it is.
Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by an AnHonestHost.com, the Internet Archive,
rsync.net, and our mirror network.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
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Episode: 4527
Title: Overly Complicated Media Ripping setup
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4527/hpr4527.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:13:19 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4527, for 2025-12-09
Today's show is entitled, "Overly Complicated Media Ripping setup"
The host is Archer72 and the duration is 00:06:27
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "Archer72 shares a somewhat complicated version of a DVD/Blu-ray ripping setup"
Hello, this is your host, Archer72, for Hacker Public Radio.
In this episode, I share my overly complicated media ripping setup and hope it helps someone.
First of all, I have revised my media ripping setup since HPR 3294.
I've changed my mind about only using a terminal for ripping media, and it was time to make a change.
Now I both start, make MKV and handbrake from a remote GUI, either on my laptop or phone.
I'm using an Intel Mini PC to install my VNC server on, and it's running Debian 12,
so it's only a sudo apt install tigervnc-common from getting the VNC server.
And then to start it, it's VNC server, and I space an ampersand, and then it runs it in the background,
so I can close the terminal from there.
And then for the remote VNC viewer, I used Remina, R-E-M-M-I-N-A, VNC viewer,
and it has tab viewing, which is a nice feature.
And I use it on my Debian 13 desktop on my laptop.
And I've also installed VNC client for Android, which is a VNC, and I'll show the FDroid link in the show notes.
Where I keep the Rift files is on an NFS server on a Raspberry Pi,
because that's where I originally had them, and I didn't want to change anything over.
The NFS server is so that I can have the Intel machine write the files that I ripped to the Raspberry Pi
with a hard drive attached to it.
And that is only a sudo apt install nfs-kernel-server away from installing that.
Then I added symbolic links to the slash srv directory,
and so that points to my mount point for USB drive 12 terabytes for DVD rips and to where I can move movies from there.
On the Intel side, I actually have to use the full path.
I thought I was going to make it easier by using symbolic links in the srv directory on the Raspberry Pi,
but instead I have to write it out as, for example,
192.168.50.20 colon slash mnt slash usb drive dash 12tb dash dvdrip space mnt slash dvdrip.
And then I'll follow the rest of that in the show notes for where you would mount it in your FS tab.
From here, I have a Blu-ray writer and Blu-ray reader
that was meant to go inside a PC.
Instead, I have a SATA adapter going to USB.
And on the Make MKV portion,
I was having trouble having it read the disk completely into Make MKV.
And I found out from one of the forums
that other people had the same problem
and they had to downgrade to a different version.
And that solved the problem.
After I ripped the disk,
then I can graphically add the files to Handbrake.
And I select the Make MKV output format
and output the compressed file into 1080p.
And it still makes a file for a movie under 2GB.
And that's only if I'm starting with a Blu-ray.
Otherwise, the movie is under 1GB once it's compressed with Handbrake.
From here, I scanned the library for both Plex and Jellyfin
because I've been trying out both lately.
And Plex turned out to be a little more useful
on the Roku side
with the Roku app
to be able to play anything
because I had trouble with Jellyfin connecting to Roku.
The last moving part to this setup
is using TailScale
which I'll leave the link to in the show notes
on how to set it up on Debbie and Trixie.
And also, I'll leave a note about
where the app is in the F-Droid store.
TailScale is what I use to remotely access VNC
and it treats the connection like a local connection.
That's all I have.
This has been Archer72.
If you have anything that's of interest to hackers
that you do that's cool
that nobody else gets in the household,
feel free to record a show of your own
or leave a comment on this show.
Thanks.
Goodbye.
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording podcast, click on our upload link
to find out how easy it is.
Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by an AnHonestHost.com, the Internet Archive,
rsync.net, and our mirror network.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
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Episode: 4528
Title: Photography software
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4528/hpr4528.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:13:19 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4528, for 2025-12-10
Today's show is entitled, "Photography software"
The host is Henrik Hemrin and the duration is 00:07:51
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "My software related to photography on my computer."
Welcome to Hacker Public Radio. My name is Henley Cameron and I'm your host today.
Today I will list and talk briefly about software related to photography that I have installed on my computer.
I run them on Linux Mint Debian Edition. Many of them are also available for Windows and Mac OS.
Link to the websites are in the show notes.
Digicam is the center of my photography tools. For me it's very important with a good catalog software,
or in another term digital asset manager, DAEM.
I was a long time user of Adobe, Album and Photoshop elements.
Three years ago I migrated to Digicam. I also consider it specifically dog table.
A major reason for selecting Digicam in favor of a dog table was that Digicam had face tagging, which dog table did not have.
I believe it is still the case for dog table.
Although Digicam has its major strength as a digital asset manager, it can also do most things needed for photography.
For example, I've tested editing and post processing in Digicam, but I have not made up my mind if I will learn it more in detail.
If Digicam is good enough for my needs or how I will continue to also use other tools.
So for now I use several tools where some have overlap on each other.
To develop raw photos I mostly use raw therapy. It is a focus tool for that purpose.
It is in my view a very competent tool and is relatively easy to learn for my basic operations.
Raw therapy stores its record in its unique PP3 side core, which both means it is no risk for conflict with the XMP side core.
I update in Digicam, but it also means I do not change any method from raw therapy.
Dog table should also be possible to use for this purpose if you want to investigate that alternative.
For other editing of photos, I also have GIMP in my toolbox. GIMP is probably the most well known of my tools.
Pix is a photo tool that comes with Linux Mint, is one of Mint's own tools.
I often use it for viewing photos in general, but it is capable of more than that.
To import photos from my camera memory card into my file catalog system for photos, I use rapid photo downloader.
Also this function exists in Digicam itself. I started to explore rapid photo downloader at the time when Digicam had an issue with iPhone or Linux, which rapid photo downloader did not have.
This is not an issue for me anymore because I do not use iPhone anymore, and this you may have been solved as well.
However, I have kept on using rapid photo downloader because it has a good file naming function, and because it can store the photos in two locations in parallel, which means I get one,
photo to my work in directory for photos, and also an untouched photo to a separate backup disk.
A drawback when I use rapid photo downloader is that it adds one step. I must offer the photos are imported, go to Digicam and search for the new objects to add them into Digicam.
Next tool is the use scan. It is the only software in this presentation that is not free and open source. It is developed by a small family business company.
The use scan is a very well known independent scanning software. It is also a good software for advanced uses, and I'm not aware of any scanning software available for Linux that is close in its features, and one of the best for an operating system.
It works for very many scanners from many manufacturers, so when learning to use the use scan it means I can reuse the knowledge for almost any scanner on any platform.
I have an interest in to Digitize analog photos, both my own analog photos, but also all the family photos and other printed material. The use scan is a very useful software to me.
But another method to Digitize analog material is reproph photography. It means to use a digital camera to take a photo of the analog material.
It is also a very good method, and some use this method only. I use both scanner method and reproph photography method currently.
When I use a Digitile camera for reproph photography, I connect the camera to a computer, so I can view the ongoing task on a big monitor, and just the camera settings, trigger the shot, and also store the photo directly to a computer.
This method to use the computer is often called Tethered Shooting. I use a Tangle for this.
And Tangle may not work for all cameras. In that case, dark table has added this feature, so that can be an alternative, alternative, although I have not tested it.
Finally, a software for monitor calibration. I do not calibrate the laptop monitor, but I do calibrate the external monitor.
I use DisplayCell, together with my hardware data call or Spyder 5. DisplayCell relies on RGL CMS. The latest release of DisplayCell is currently from 2019.
It means that maybe if you have a more reason to color emission meant device, it may not work.
Also, the RGL CMS is said not to work on the way land, and it looks as colour management on the way land is a big topic of itself.
That was the software for photography. I wanted to cover in this episode.
Except for dark table, I use all of them to some degree, and except for views can all of free and open source.
If you have any alternative suggestion or feedback as a user of any of them, I spoke about please free to tell in the episode comments or record a show.
Thank you for listening. Take care and goodbye.
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording podcast, click on our upload link
to find out how easy it is.
Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by an AnHonestHost.com, the Internet Archive,
rsync.net, and our mirror network.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
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Episode: 4529
Title: yoga370 review
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4529/hpr4529.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:13:20 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4529, for 2025-12-11
Today's show is entitled, "yoga370 review"
The host is Brian-in-Ohio and the duration is 00:11:16
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "a laptop to rule them all"
Hello, Hacker Public Radio, Brian and Ohio here. I'm out from under my rock and I'm doing a non-fourth show for HPR.
It's great for this show came from episode 442 where I talked about I was looking for a single device to be able to do
fourth work and read documents and do web browsing and be able to take it on the road to have it be one device that does it all.
So the device I ended up using was a pine tab too and I discussed in that episode the ups and downs of using a pine tab too
about how I used flexbox and some scripts to bend the device to my needs.
About the device is underpowered and it had random crashes and I think development might be stopped on it.
So it's just not as good as I thought it would be.
Then in episode 4491 there was an interview with David Revo which I really enjoyed.
David Revo is the artist that does pepper and carrot.
In the episode they mentioned his blog post or his blog site and in that blog of his there's a section for hardware.
I clicked on there and it led me to this the discussion of the device he uses which is a Lenovo Yoba 370 and the different software he's installed on a pretty good blog post.
I had over there and read it.
So with that inspiration and with his words about the device I bought used Yoba 370 a Lenovo Yoba 370.
On eBay cost about $250 which is for the device you get pretty pretty inexpensive.
It's a two in one device so it can be used as a laptop or you can put the screen over and it becomes it.
It can be used as a tablet.
It has a 13 inch IPS touch screen.
Intel Core i7-7600 CPU that's got four cores.
It runs a 2.8 gigahertz.
The one I found on eBay had a 500 gigabyte NVMe 16 gigabytes of RAM and an offer to install Windows 11 audit if you were so desired.
I purchased the device came in a couple days which is still pretty amazing to me and it's.
I took it apart I opened up the back of it surprisingly it's very fixable.
It's got a replaceable battery nothing soldered in like some manufacturers do.
The memories pulls right out if you need to replace the NVMe it's not soldered in.
I've got some pictures of the inside of the device in a picture of it how it folds up if you're not sure what I'm talking about.
So after I bought it I do what I do with all my laptops.
I installed Slackware.
I don't do a boot anymore.
I don't.
And I don't destroy hot.
I've been a Slackware user for years since it's the distribution of choice.
And I quit doing this this time for sure I when the last laptop I purchased had Windows 10 and I and for a while I did dual boot it.
But now it's become such a hassle to dual boot and this one was even funnier when you opened it up and you.
Basically to install Windows 11 you have to log onto your network and then it must in must download the whole Windows system.
Anyway I didn't do any of that and so I just started out and had to get rid of.
The Windows installer essentially on that device which is surprisingly not that easy.
I took a little bit of work I had to stop secure boot in the BIOS which is normal.
And then in the end I had to reformat that hard drive completely.
I used the the Slackware installer as a live installation and it gives you the tools you need.
You need G disk which is a disk partitioner.
You need to use the make mkfs tools to create the.
The be fat partition for the for the boot sector and then the Linux section for the rest of the device.
A swap partition and a regular partition.
Slackware doesn't natively come with grub 2 it uses e-lilo for eFI booting which works fine for me.
You can install grub 2 but I've never have done that I gave up on grub 1 and went to grub 2.
And there's a link in the show notes about how to create an eFI system partition and that's a pretty helpful.
Post about how if you're going to do that with any other distribution.
I did have to reboot between each disk drive change so I've you know created the eFI boot sector reboot create the rest of the device.
That was how in the end I had to do it and that might not be that might be devices.
So if you're not sure but in the end I had a hard drive or an NVMe format or partition correctly and ready to go for the slackware installer which.
Does everything else for you it installs the system and installs the installs e-lilo it does a boot entry for the eFI partition and then the device starts right up.
When I did my normal post slackware install stuff and everything on the device works as normal.
Maybe not the fingerprint reader but I never used that anyway.
So I got slackware installed everything working and then I the next thing I did was I modified the scripts from the pintap 2 that I used to activate laptop and tablet mode.
And what I mean by that is in laptop the screens and landscape mode and tablet mode it's in portrait mode.
Instead of using us maybe a some kind of inertial sensor or something like that to for the device to automatically shift between these.
I for right now I just did it with some buttons that I created that are on the KDE task manager.
And so I with modifying the scripts in these scripts are just using x rander to rotate the screen x input to rotate the touch screen and the keyboard actually is disabled must be in hardware when you flip it in the screen all the way around the keyboard is disabled.
So modify those those scripts so that those x rander commands in x input commands will work for this device.
I created a couple of dot desktop entries added some some icon pictures for the buttons.
Pin them to the task manager and now I have two little buttons that once a tablet picture, once a laptop picture and I can press those and go from laptop to tablet mode really easily.
Well after that started working I was pleasantly surprised with a piece of software that comes with slack or when I come trouble with KDE I think is ocular.
Accular is a great document reader it will open just about anything and allows you to read and and look at different documents.
It just is a great piece of software.
And then I was pleasantly surprised that in tablet mode if you use presentation mode for ocular you can then configure it by going into the ocular configure settings in the presentation mode there's a enable touchscreen navigation and putting the device into tablet mode.
Opening up ocular whatever you want to read and then going to presentation mode it allows you to just tap the screen on the left and right edges to move forward and backwards and to the document that you're reading and then a little swipe down from the top you can get out of presentation mode pretty easily.
And it has a great feel and works just like in a e-reader.
Although it's a little bit bigger than a normal e-reader not tiny by any stretch of imagination but very nice especially if you're reading PDFs, data sheets and stuff like that.
The other kind of cool thing that I've just started playing with in tablet mode is a piece of software called.
It's a external plus plus it's a x-o-u-r-n-a-l plus plus I put a link in the show notes for the repository for that it's basically hand note taking software so.
It opens up it's got a piece of paper you know line piece of paper and then you can use the little stylus that the device comes with and you can draw and and take notes and I get and you can annotate PDFs and things like that.
I'm exploring the use use of this piece of software for doing things like d-charts, d-d-struct charts those were developed way back in the sixties I think by I think his name is letter dixtra who is a very famous famous computer scientist and the d-d-charts are flow charting system that's better than regular flow charts and I'm using it for.
Early forth development for before I start writing code I try to use d-charts to flow out the program that I'm developing.
I've got a link to an archive.org flow charting with d-charts by a guy from NASA, Donald Mayrow, something like that.
Love the device it's working great for me now it's it does it fits the need of being able to have a laptop and an e-reader all in one without having to bring extra devices it's powerful.
I can do all the forth development work in that I'm doing now very easily and just like usual slack where we're in perfect on it so.
With that I'd like to say if you have a piece of hardware a new laptop or something that you want to talk about or that you've just purchased why you'd record a show tell us about it why you love it why you don't love it whatever the case maybe.
If you have any questions or comments just go ahead and ask me and I'll get back to you and I just want to remind people let's all work to stamp out and abolish redundancy bye bye.
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording podcast, click on our upload link
to find out how easy it is.
Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by an AnHonestHost.com, the Internet Archive,
rsync.net, and our mirror network.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
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Episode: 4530
Title: Playing Civilization V, Part 6
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4530/hpr4530.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:13:21 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4530, for 2025-12-12
Today's show is entitled, "Playing Civilization V, Part 6"
The host is Ahuka and the duration is 00:12:39
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "We continue our look at the game mechanics of Civilization V."
Hello, this is a hookah. Welcome to you to Hacker Public Radio and another exciting episode
Inner ongoing series of computer strategy games and we're in the middle of discussing Civilization 5 and
Now I'm gonna get to one that probably a lot of people are gonna want to get into and that is
War and combat crushing your enemies
Making their women weep
All right, so how do you do that in this game?
Well, it's various ways of doing it, of course
And a lot of it depends on terrain and it's things like that. Let's start with land combat
Now
You are gonna have to fight in this game no matter how peaceful you may wish to be early on the barbarians will come after you
And they cannot be reasoned with you either kill them or they kill you. It's as simple as that
And then you may attract the greedy attention of other empires who want what you have
So you have to be ready and that means you have to build military units and learn how to use them effectively
There are three types of military units available in this game land sea and air and they take the stage in that order
When you start out you have a settler unit that can found your first city and a warrior unit
Now, I will generally use my warrior unit to explore for the first 20 or so turns because
Experience tells me that is safe
If it turns out to be a disaster, I'll just restart
And while I'm doing that, I will build at least one and often two scout units to take over the exploration
By turn 30, I've probably discovered a few barbarian encampments
Taking them out is a good idea because clearing them can yield a bit of cash
As long as encampments are left alone, they will turn out barbarian units that will harass you and anyone else in the area
If an encampment is near to a city state
You can earn some increased status with the city state by clearing it out
Now a warrior unit is the earliest military unit available in it is not particularly strong
You might want to be careful to not just charging and maybe lose it
If you can get archery and build an archer
You can stand outside the encampment and fire arrows inside to wipe out the inhabitants
But watch out that the encampment doesn't spawn another unit
The unit inside the encampment will not come out to attack very often
But a newly spawned unit will be outside and will attack
I like to bring a warrior in an archer together, so if anything happens, I have a little muscle to protect the archer
Now one of the big changes in syphive compared to previous versions is that you cannot stack military units together on a tile
This matters a lot for your strategy since each unit has to be on its own tile
This means you have to think about positioning of each unit
And that in turn means taking advantage of terrain features
If you refer back to our discussion of terrain features and I've put a link in the show notes to help with that
You can see that each type of terrain
And each terrain feature came with a defensive bonus
Looking at the terrain types
We see that grassland, plains and desert which are the main terrain types you will be on
All come with a defensive bonus of minus 33 percent
That means you are caught out in the open and therefore have a penalty tier defense
But many of the tiles will have a terrain feature added
Hills forest and jungle all have a defensive bonus of plus 25 percent
So if you are on a tile that is grassland plus forest you only suffer an 8 percent penalty on defense
Same with desert plus hills or plains plus jungle and so on
So if you think you may be attacked moving onto hills or into a forest is good
Also, it is worth noting that attacks across a river penalize the attacker with a 20 percent reduction in their attack strength
So learning how to use the terrain to your advantage is a key skill in combat operations
Now let's see how this works with a warrior the unit you have from the start
It has a combat strength of 8
So in the early game you might encounter a barbarian equivalent called the brute
But which is an identical unit otherwise and also has a combat strength of 8
If you meet each other on grassland tiles with no features you each have the same defensive penalty of minus 33 percent
So you're evenly matched
But the other factor is the health of each unit this is measured is hit points
And you can see the shown in a colored bar next to the unit
If you see no bar at all the unit has all of its hit points and is at a hundred percent health
If the bar is green and is lost a few points
If it's yellow you're starting to get into a danger zone
And if it's red it's very likely to be killed in any combat
So even if the combat strength is equal if one unit has a green bar and the other a red bar
There is an excellent chance that the unit with the red bar will be killed in any combat
Now you can recover your hit points for any unit just by resting it
resting in general recovers 10 percent per turn
But 20 percent per turn if it's in your territory and 25 percent if it's in one of your cities
Now there are other modifiers such as medics and faith healers that can add recovery
And heal your units even faster
Units can also earn promotions
These add to their abilities in various ways
There's a good chart of promotions at the civilization wiki site and I've put a link in the show notes for that
For melee units such as warriors the main ones would be shock which gives bonus an open terrain
Drill which gives a bonus in rough terrain like hills and forest and cover which gives a defensive bonus against ranged attacks such as archers
Now you're in promotions in combat
And if you have a unit that has a few promotions
It's generally a good idea to upgrade it to a new
Unit rather than delete it and build a newer unit because it keeps the promotions
Now you do this by using gold stuff grade the unit so don't neglect your treasury
The first ranged unit is the archer which you get by discovering the archery technology and an building one
They can attack up to two tiles away but they only have a combat strength of five
Now that means a warrior attacking an archer has an advantage
So you'll want to protect your archers
They're well suited to city defense since the city helps protect them and they can drop arrows on an attacker before it can hit the city in many cases
Otherwise it is a good idea to put your warriors on the front lines of combat and station the archers behind them
This is also how you attack cities early on
Use the warriors to absorb any attacks from the city while your archers drop arrows into the city from behind the warriors
Cities themselves also have hit points and you can see how they are being eroded by colored bars above the city using the same green yellow red standard
But note that once the defenses are down you need to use a melee unit to capture the city
Ranged units cannot make the final capture
As the game goes on your units will become better because you'll discover new technology
So instead of warriors you'll get to spearmen and then after spearmen you get to swordsmen and so on
But the principles don't change
Now it's the naval combat which is also fun
When you research the right technologies you'll discover ships and you can start using them in combat
Now the earliest vessels you will get are try reams
They have a combat strength of 10 but are vulnerable to ranged attacks
They can clear barbarians ships from your waters and are good for exploring the coastlines
But they cannot travel on ocean tiles which are a deeper blue than coastal tiles
They can attack cities and as a melee unit could actually capture them
But in practice this is rare since they would probably be bombarded in sunk
Still if you were in some odd circumstance where your archers had reduced the city defenses to nothing
And you had a try ream on the spot it would work
Later on you'll get caravel which is the first ocean going vessel and you should probably use them right away to
Explore the rest of the map as soon as you get them
And the reason that you want to do that is you're going to find other players
You're going to find other city states
You're going to find other
Natural one you know there's
All sorts of things you can do it once you've explored the map so never neglect that option
Now after the caravel you get a private tier which is a powerful ship that is not only good for
Rating coastal cities, but can actually capture enemy ships and add them to your fleet
There are also naval ranged units the first is the galley ass
Followed by the frigate the frigate is a powerful mid game unit
That they are ranged means they can stand off shore and bombarded units or cities on land
If you want a fun game with naval warfare try an archipelago map get your privateers and
frigates and go out and conquer
As with land units you can get promotions for naval vessels and there is a upgrade path as well
The try-ream can upgrade to a caravel which can upgrade to an ironclad
The galley ass can upgrade to a frigate which can upgrade to a battleship
Then there's air combat
This comes along late in the game obviously arriving in the modern era
Your two main unit types or fighters and bombers fighters are mostly for attacking other air units
They can do damage to ground units as well, but that's not really what they're suited to
The first fighter unit is the triplane
It is also useful as a reconnaissance unit since it can see six tiles in every direction
You can station them by a city and set them to intercept mode where they will respond to any air attacks from other players
The other major area unit is the bomber
The first of these is the great war bomber
It is designed to carry a load of bombs and can be very effective in reducing the defenses of a city
It is weaker on defense though
So a good strategy is to send in a few fighters first
Use up any of the city's anti air capabilities then follow up with the bombers
Now air units can also get promotions from combat and they also have hit points just like all other units
And they have an upgrade path
Try planes become fighters become jet fighters
Great war bomber becomes regular bomber become stealth bomber
So in conclusion
This is just a very brief introduction to combat in syphive
You could probably write an entire book on all of the strategies involved, but this will get you started on the basics of the combat system
Now civilization fanatics has a section called the syphive war academy
Where you can go in a much more depth if you really want to master combat and strategies and I have placed a link to that in the show notes
So this is hookah for hacker public radio signing off and is always encouraging you to support free software. Bye. Bye
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording podcast, click on our upload link
to find out how easy it is.
Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by an AnHonestHost.com, the Internet Archive,
rsync.net, and our mirror network.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
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Episode: 4531
Title: HPR Beer Garden 6 - Imperial Stouts
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4531/hpr4531.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:13:22 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4531, for 2025-12-15
Today's show is entitled, "HPR Beer Garden 6 - Imperial Stouts"
The host is Kevie and the duration is 00:45:06
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "Kevie and Dave talk about Imperial Stouts"
Hello and welcome to episode number 6 of the beer garden so you may think yeah we have that familiar
face back or you may think oh no not him again but the bad news dash could use is I'm
back I've recovered but unfortunately that also means we've lost a poll G but we are still joined by Dave
how are you Dave I am very well thank you well that's a I'm just getting over a cold or a
virus or something but you don't want to hear about that well in that case then we have got the absolute
perfect medicine will be for you tonight because in fact this was actually meant to be my choice
but local limitations for you which sounds very odd that's not my problem local limitations for
you mean we're delaying that one but instead we're looking at another fine this could be the first
of our cities of winter ails you know can have very timingly winter we're not going to go into
each individual one just now but we're starting with imperial state which I do believe is one of your
favorites you are not wrong I think I may have revealed this on the first episode of the beer garden
when we were going through and saying what is your favourite beer style and imperial was absolutely
mine people listening to that episode probably came out way from that episode thinking guys I can
that's a peed but no that is that is not what you want to point is that not what we're doing
this show well yes that's not the reason why I like imperial styles which I will definitely
go on to as we explore this variety the style a little bit later um let's just have a quick
exploration is to what an imperial style actually is I have my own opinions but apparently
opinion of fact do not align so imperial if imperial stout actually originated in London for exports to
Russia there was a brewery back in the 18th century called Thrails Anker which I've never heard of
I'm assuming they don't exist anymore they created this style called imperial stout or otherwise
known as a Russian imperial stout and it was brood for export to Catherine the Great of Russia
in 1781 so obviously this was created prior to that the Thrails Anker brewery changed hands
and the beer became Barclay Perkins imperial brown stout that is actually the same family as
you owns Barclay's bank ah biganims big money that is interesting so Barclay's bank started off
as a brewery yeah so it was originally shipped out to Russia by somebody by the name
of Albert von Lecoc who was a Prussian German brewery owner who then became an archaeologist
who knew but the beer that was shipped out this Barclay Perkins imperial brown stout was then
awarded a Russian royal warrant which is where he then became entitled to use the name imperial
and that's where the name come from and analysis of the beer from between the middle of the 19th
and the middle of the 20th century showed that the beer had typically an alcohol content of
a roundabout 10% ABV and during that entire period the ABV didn't really change
Barclay's brew was then taken over in 1955 by the Courage brewery when it was renamed
obviously Courage imperial Russian stout but it wasn't a regular brew it's kind of a sporadic
brew they would do it every so often but the cap on the bottle still said Barclays so obviously
the name has carried through since then imperial stout was also produced in Canada in a
place called Prince Albert in Saskatchewan by somebody by the name of Fritz Sick now I hope that wasn't
as a result of drinking the beer but so whatever but then in Canada it was then taken over by the
Molson brewery in 1958 and in Denmark the weebro brewery launched an imperial stout in 1930
at 8.2% now remember that because we're gonna have a very brief conversation about where we think
the definition of imperial stout actually starts but the first brewery in the US to brew
an imperial stout was the Yakima brewing company which I think was based in Yakima Washington
in 1982 it first opened so Kevin what would you say would be like the minimum standard the
minimum ABV for something you would consider as an imperial stout oh partially I would say 8
I don't think anything lower than 8 as far as the sky's the limit or I mean I've seen them
really high yes I mean yeah things I identified as imperial I think I've seen 15 16
yeah that's what I was thinking about I think I was thinking about 15 to 17 this is how strong
I've seen yeah there are beers that have a higher ABV by which time you don't really care what it's
called anyway but according to the research that I've done apparently imperial stout's typically
started about 9% which is fair enough some of your smith brewery actually brewed a version of
imperial stout for export to the 90 states and the early 1980s and apparently imperial stout
is one of the most popular beer styles with US craft brewers that doesn't surprise me but there you go
yeah but in America they often include additional ingredients such as vanilla chili maple syrup
and of course marshmallows I would say is a regular inspiration for some see I think now we're
kind of getting into the desert stout yeah exactly imperial also is not limited to to stouts of course
even though the origin of the of the word imperial comes from the court of Russia imperial this
has now become to be known as something that is strong of over eight or nine percent because you
can get imperial IPA you can get imperial pills and I'm sure I've seen imperial portus as well
but I know we have this determined previously that there's not really that much in
difference between a porter and a stout it's really interesting given the kebby you said that
anything over eight percent or sorry an imperial stout can be eight percent or more when I went
out to bunny the beard I'm having tonight I also picked up a couple of other lovely strong ones as
well and I've got this one from northern monk called even small death remember I mentioned
marshmallows earlier on yes you've had it before over you no no I I've never heard of them
to last night when a certain person near beer chat posted but I've never seen it on the website
oddly enough I want this is so much exclusive it must be it must be what I like like this one is
as well at the moment yeah yeah it's not going but yeah this some northern monk one
marshmallow and biscuit imperial stout at eight point four percent now eight point four percent
of course as both kebby and I know without looking is also the ABV of northern month monks
bertha but that is a stout not an imperial stout by their labeling I should say I would argue
it probably is an imperial stout based on its strength alone so I was trying to find out weather
imperial stouts actually had their own technique that made them unique from other normal stouts
that were over eight or nine percent I wasn't able to find anything out so I don't know whether
imperial is just given to the strength or whether it is to do with a particular style or mechanism
through brewing as I said before imperial stouts for me is the experience of them the flavor is very
much often sweeter it's very much often a thicker chewy more viscous mouth feel for a stout
and it is also something that I often make huge mistakes with so I do enjoy a beer festival
as I'm sure a lot of our listeners will do as I'm sure you do as well and I always go to a
beer festival with the phrase I will start low and work my way up but I would say in excess of
probably 75 percent of the beer festivals I've been to I've gone and looked around and thought
okay well this is probably a start low it's going to find myself in like a nice session IPA or
something a little bit on the lower maybe appeals nor something just to start with and I'll go
around again oh 13 percent that looks nice I'll take a third of that please and I start
with the imperial stouts and it is not a great thing to do because unfortunately if you have the
appreciation of the flavor and the taste and the style and the feel of an imperial stout everything
from that point onwards is down oh yeah it's funny and you can I mean how I'm assuming you've
had an instant gun beers I have had an instant gun but it's fairly flavorful yeah I remember
my mate gave me a nerd brewing we split up a little between us which was actually quite nice
it was 13 percent splitting the 330 balls it was actually just nice and then he poured on this
and gun and you know there was no flavor of it whatsoever I couldn't get in there I'm like this
is bland there's like water but yet I know this is a flavorful beer it chose you how deadly
can be to start without very strong yes yes but it's not it's not just the strength of it though
no it's not just the strength of it it's it's the flavor and well and that's just natural then
it's so eager you get the bolder flavor that you're paladin just to that and then in the other
schools yeah you know to be honest for our day-to-day comparison it's a bit like us growing up
of a certain age everybody took two two sugars in their tea and coffee growing it was just part of it
and then when you started kind of reducing the sugar when you eventually cut out the sugar and
somebody gave you some with two sugars like oh that's far too sweet you know the taste buds do
you just yes yeah sorry just before we actually go on there was and you do something I had read
and this is we going back to my my bestie for all beer researches this Roger Proads
hmm he now this talk with the the balcly imperial stout they started shipping them from London
to Danzig and then into the Baltic on route to Russia the voyage was hazardous during the
depolyonic wars as they was a blockade and the Baltic ports and spite of these difficulties
supplies did get through and it became a culture in the court of the search cases were sent to
Russian fighting troops in the Crimea in order to cope with demand barkless agent in the region
a Belgian called the cock built a brewery in Tartou Estonia and they moved their imperial
stout brewing to the air oh that makes a lot of sense yes so they I knew I'd read it somewhere
it was when you had said it and I was like I know that name I can't reparate it but they
it was enough my other beer not my beer Bible that one's called the taste of beer
okay excellent the word imperial was intended to signal the recipient of the state
but it had an undisguised double meaning these stouts gorgeous huge aged beers were not
only fit for royalty they became royalty themselves long after the association with the SARS
lapse the word imperial came to donate the beer status other beers I love this tried to co-op this
meaning imperial IPAs are in regular rotation yeah but I've also seen imperial prisoners to imperial
heffir vices never seen that imperial heffir vices yep that's according to this book
the best I look for yet in their power authority imperial stout are the only ones to maintain
their status as the king of beers I like that excellent right well I think it's probably time
to crack these open that so what I've got here this is a really odd shaped can actually it's a
330 but it's tall I was actually good to see is it a vault city one because every
18 years that I've had on deserves to have had from vault city has been that like yeah for for the
benefit of the listeners it's like when you go to the continent and you buy a can of sprite or cook
or something they never had in the dumpy cans we have to tall ones yeah yeah exactly that
it was alongside a number of other really strong hails and it just it looked almost like kind of
lonely studs sat there because it was both slightly shorter and slightly thinner than normal
size 440 mil can and I took pity on it and then looked at it and thought oh I love that so it is
the vault city brewery it's an imperial stout arguably probably getting towards the dessert stout
by puny by name I'll let you know how it tastes when I crack it open but it's a toffee nut
latte now anybody who knows me I do enjoy my coffee as well so toffee and coffee and on an
imperial stout it ticks a lot of boxes it comes in at 11% and this is where I need to get my glasses on
because I've made them a steak and not being fully prepared for this let's have a look at the label
decadent silky and nutty full-bodied seasonal stout showcasing layers of chocolate,
molten oats, smooth toffee and creamy vanilla for a velvety mouthful and a rich nutty finish
that's a big expectation that it's just set for itself and of course false it is um
isn't it gone if I'm mistaken anybody yeah nice so I'm gonna crack this open I'll go to pour it into my
pile of Harris brewery class because if you listen to the last episode where we Paul and I went through
and discussed half a license in a bit more detail you'll know the story of how this mark two
glass came about so here we go this cracker zone oh that sounded nice oh okay so that aroma is quite
quite astounding so here's the oh so if they're in here so you can hear it oh
that Paul's very very smoothly what if I something to do with the size the design of the can
so it didn't kind of bubble out yes just poured so there it is it is absolutely pitch black there's
next to no foam on it a little ringer foam around the outside and it is slightly carbonated
so it is um it is fizzing a little bit and just by swirling it slightly I can't spell it too much
otherwise it'll then pull over my keyboard um it doesn't actually appear to be as as viscous
as I would have expected it to be at 11 percent but I'm gonna stop admiring it I'm gonna try it so here we
go wow that is extraordinary it really is that's a say it looks quite fluid in the glass but actually
it feels really really nice it is smooth it is viscous it has a marginally seripy feel to it
taste wise it is very sweet you're getting everything that it promised so you're getting the
top where you're getting the coffee you're getting the nut as far as the beer itself is concerned
yes you do know you're drinking an imperial stout with this there's no question about that whatsoever
but the obvious characteristics of a stout as in the bitterness the smokiness
none of that comes through probably because it's been completely wiped out by the
disweetness and the intensity of the flavours that are coming through from it and it hangs around for a bit
as well which is really nice that is quite amazing I would be inclined to go to go and get some more of those
actually one thing I will say those you who are fans of all city will know that they made their
name based on service there are server companies that they produce servers so if you like it go
get some because they're short-lived their states I think there's a bit of an irony here you've
gone for a Scottish brewing company you've gone for an English one this company is based in the
leads and it's called Tartara Spears now I can't remember I do apologize if you were the one who
sent to me but I can't remember who on Master Don said try these beers I'm guessing not because
I hadn't heard of them and bearing them on the leads is about 50 miles in my mouth that's what
I was thinking that's what I was quite surprised now I will say be warned if you decide this is
definitely I kind of a lug shitty beer I think I paid about 60 or pound for 96 cans that was
including delivery but yeah everything they had was very high ABV but also price to match so I have this
one I have it is so do I it's the Magical Rain this one is also on the dessert side coconut pistachio
and chocolate and pideal stout at a 12.2% blast so one thing it is probably worth noting is that
pideal stout generally come into styles that either come more dessert like which is what we
generally quite like or they'll do what I don't particularly like and they'll do battle ageing
which the reason I don't like it is because it tends to just dominate I've got like a it just
reminds me of having a stout where somebody has poured in like a brandy or something into it and
it's like it's just too strong it's like it's over time and it's the beer that's my tastes you very
rarely get one that's not either one we are to others so right in shoot right
oh that's fizzy of them my one yeah there's a wee bit of a head no it didn't say in the book
the beer bible that they actually recommended because they were trying to go for the higher quality
that they recommended drinking at a brandy glass so instead I've got my snifter glass which is an
oversized brandy glass okay but as you can see there's no head on that whatever no that's a
full moon candle in that grace of poor oh she weighs oh my lord that is boozy
this if you've ever had no brains imperial stout that's what this reminds me of
very very strong this chocolate this is just on the nose right this is on the nose just on the
nose the chocolate I'm not getting any of the pistachio or coconut though not on the nose
on those it's boozy and it's chocolate oh that's good now I'm getting coconut but not don't
think I hit a bit like a bounty it's just more like a hint of coconut there's coconut there's
a nuttyness would I see pistachio I don't think it's just think to not be pistachio it's nutty
but chocolate not as boozy as the smell nowhere near as boozy as the smell sweet yeah yeah and
literally you could you could have that one I for fuck that is thick oh that that's that's my kind
of smell to really yes in fact don't know how well you're seeing it there that's really
less in quite thickly the side of the glass yeah yeah that is nice yeah I'd recommend that
I might have to try and well the challenge we that I had certainly is where we are we have a
large a number of large supermarkets certainly like the big four here in the UK we have a large
one of near us and I went to two of them earlier on today in search of something that would
fit the profile of what it is we were reviewing tonight and what I walked away with was pretty
much everything they had in the Imperial Stout section well they're isn't a section they're just
dumping anywhere in the end of it I thought I managed to find these by looking at the price of them
oh man and that my I've only got one worry about this it is so thick it is so so thick
I read yoga struggle they are shared that yeah between us and it's only a three thirty can there's
and if you see there's in five hundred please don't be tempted it is you would not finish that I don't
buy a can sailor gives mouth yes what audience it or something buy something or buy or if you've
got a growler poor than the growler well obviously clean it first hopefully actually to be honest
I'm surprised how nice it is because on the nose I was fully expecting this to be tasting
barrel aged it was so strong and boozy on nose and it's not it's so so sweet very rich yeah like I said
if you taste the nerd brewing Imperial Stout that's what it's like that's what reminds me of
right I will definitely have a look at that brewery
to say it's not one I'd heard of before and the fact that they're locally they're local
I may be able to get some from some of the off licenses or something locally so I'll have a look
for those I mean the process is trying to do this episode what I did in the last one which was
to call one of the kids in and to a live off camera tasting I pulled Ethan in last time for him to
try the shop on ho offer the fruit juice if you're not a fan of strong but if you're a
lagger drinker forget it you're not even gonna appreciate that at all you spit it out I think it's also
it's worth noting though if you're gonna have a few beers don't have this one first because
everything else is gonna take pretty blind yes definitely I'm gonna take my time with it that's a
danger though it's sort of sweet and I think you've probably found the same thing it's actually
silky smooth that's dangerous it's very very thick to be chuggle but you could easily drink it
quickly I know exactly what you mean but before we go on to what you were gonna say
towards the end just wanted to revisit the the vault city story that I mentioned
Caroline and I went to the theatre in Sheffield and we went in by public transport because we knew
that we could either pop for a drink before or after the performance I went to the head of steam
which if you're familiar with the Sheffield you've got the crucible and the lyceum
crucible where the sneaker is done and the lyceum almost like opposite each other and then at the
confluence of where the exit of the lyceum and the exit for the crucible is is the head of steam
huge pub loads and loads of proper ails and I can't remember what I had before this
but I said can I try this one it was some kind of IPA and he said yeah yes no problem he just
pulled me some out yeah I'll have a bite of that thank you and then he said don't try this one
and he he pulled it like it's just a tiny amount like a symbol full of this thing out and it
looked like a strawberry yogurt as in it was opaque it was quite a dark almost like a mucky pink
and I'm like oh what's this and I'm like oh my word what is this and apparently
vault city do a range called stupid and the stupid range are all pretty much the same kind of thing
very thick very chewy very viscous not to be alike beers because as you said vault city are
very much known for their hours and they're also celebrating I think it's 70 years since they formed
and I'll just read you what I wrote whilst I was a few beers down the line
it's called the white chocolate raspberry cherry that's a lot of very very strong influences
there and I said oh man this is like a raspberry smoothie out of the gorgeous thick and creamy
with a sharp and tangy flavour with a little more of a hint of acidity it pulls like a drinking
yogurt with a dry feeling in the aftertaste divine and what's it a sour it was supposed to be yes
but I think it was a sour that was sweet enough to take a lot of the back of the jaw
sourness if you're not a mucky out of it so it was very much like you were drinking a smoothie
and I think if somebody if you're given that to somebody without telling them what it was
and this is a 6% brew they may not have known that's how strongly it was
amazing yes just thought I'd share that no just thinking before we actually move on I think we're
bare score of these good grief now this is going to be difficult well I very rarely give five
and that's the way our proper beer drink or should score it should there should be if if you
score everything five then head you know what you genuinely like you know I've see I see plenty
people do this on untapped and it's like everything they have's a five and you're like see the
yes me no I work on the basis that if it's good if it's nice it's not offensive and
you know you're not turned off by it then I would that's a three just to be able to mind
though this is untapped was out of five we're talking here we tend to score in a 10 not sure
yeah so it's just some people think that oh yeah it's yeah it's got to be perfectly going to five
or heck you guys are harsh no so out of the out of 10 which is what we're doing these at
the moment oh hang on a second we are about to have a live on recording but off recording
he's just stuck his nose as loop by the way she's stuck his nose in the wind
that's a no loop look I'm surprised oh I think that was a no which I'm surprised at
because he usually likes the stronger ones oh right yeah I've lost a couple of cans in
Imperial sound to him I said do you want to try this one yeah I'll try it really nice do you want
it yeah okay no I was only being polite I didn't actually mean for you to have it seriously
then out of 10 I would score this a 10 mmm this this is up there it really is I don't think I
have it scored the bertha the five out of five so this is but I think I used to wear the
astonishing earlier um this is astonishing I'm actually struggling to score this one I'll tell you why
I am absolutely loving it but you can see how much I've still got left and I'm almost feeling
like it's enough I've had enough you know it is so so rich you can't let that influence your score
no I have to learn not to finish it I always consider drinkability right and I'm not saying it's
bad I'm not saying I'm going to tell you too much but my general rule is I mean I'll obviously
I'll check my own comments on untapped mm but one of my general rules is if I struggle with
the drinkability then generally I'll score it a bit of four still very good but I know then okay
right it's very good but it's not something you could take much of in saying that that's better
than a four on untapped so I'll go I'm gonna knock a point of it like I said you're almost
in a steak knife to go through this such a meal I'm gonna give this nine out of ten okay that is
better so nine out of ten it's very nice it's very sweet it's rich a boy it's flipping rich
but it's very very nice so I was gonna challenge you if you'd knocked it down to uh to an
eight hour ten purely on the basis that if the only issue you have with it is the fact that you
weren't able to finish it if it was served as a double shot or maybe a third of a pint yeah I think
you may finish this and bond for this yeah your opinion would have been better would have been different
I mean this is why I saw really good fives five has to be a combination of phenomenally
good flavour but also drinkable to the point where I don't want this drink to end
you get what I mean I do but that also suggests that you'll never score an imperial
status as if it was a five possibly but and seeing that nine out of ten I'd still see it's very
very good not to speak in that at all generally my ruling is if it's drinkable but I'm like
me but yeah all except I must admit I am actually going through it there's an absolutely
wheelchair where I would have another one so it's yeah it's a one and done it's treated like a
Christmas prudy but that's the best way to think of it you may think oh that's not much yeah it is
when you when you say you're one and done does that mean you would never have that one again
no no tight like if I'm not right you know we had touch on other one tonight did you happen
other one did you get one no hey are those prices I got one of each what if I didn't like it
no fair no no I would I can't have one yes but not for a few weeks
I'd delay it up it well I've got other five well the reason I've not actually tried any of them
is because they're all different styles and I thought that all styles we haven't covered
so I'm actually leaving some of them for that because there's some which I don't have any others
like they've got I got our Belgian style quadruple oh I'm saying I don't have any quadruples at all so
I'm like right I'm gonna leave that for the shoe and the I think that's triple as well so
you know things are got yeah remind me of the name of the brewery on that one sorry
uh the brewery is I think I'm gonna tell you I'll tell you how to tartar us or tartar us
I just think of tartar sauce tartar us us yeah tartar us beers
well day listeners we have actually completed out our biz
yeah yeah one is enough honestly one is definitely enough and now it's nap time
yes uh hand me my pipe and slippers yes and a co-coat yes
they're right there okay before I forget I did listen to the episode with Paul and
yourself obviously yeah I thoroughly enjoyed it now had I been on I'd it's funny I did actually
find the local one local off licenses now this I'm not talking about ab chains
a very localized one they do stuff from the crommarty brewery and they do jungle hijinks
and they have a heffirvesnt beer brood and crommarty which of course those you had no
the north of Scotland this is inside and we're nice so it's you they're thinking um
actually I must admit I thoroughly enjoyed it it's just got more flavor I had the urging our last
time and I found it to be a wee bit lacking I mean it was okay but I think I think I said it was
six out of ten or something this I would say is an easy eight out of ten so I thoroughly it's just
got more flavor it's got that yeah banana flavor clove e-flavor it's kind of linguri clove e-flavor
uh the one thing I would say if anybody wants to try a crommarty beer if you're interested
buy the stuff as soon as you can because crommarty undertorias for not doing regular beers they do
special runs and then advantages forever and you never get it again so yeah they've recently
released a few different ones and I couldn't eat that they're that exclusive I couldn't get them at
the shop the guy in the shop says to me we can't get that orange online so just yeah to double a
pre-warning actually very good delivery I think I ordered one day I was here the next so very that's
good very good service yeah so yeah good job actually in fact a poll jaded far too good at
job and the last one I was wondering you're going to replace me no I don't think anybody could replace
you they could succeed you they could not replace you um I I I have warned
poll that he it's going to come back at some point in the future because I'm sure you would you
but enjoy the service show with him I'm really gutted he wasn't but in all honesty I didn't
invite him because he was talking about he prefers to continent little style I was thinking
I don't think a period of time it's going to be his style at all probably not oh I'll be honest
I think you're probably right there yes indeed right do do we have anything else well talking of
feedback we have had quite a bit of feedback I'm just looking at the last to I'm just
concentrating on the last couple of episodes obviously we have the most recent one that's not
been released yet has it the one with all the time we're going to know it is not released until next
week and my browser's just crashed and wow why don't you not responding that's weird so
we have had some feedback on episode three which was the porters and that was Archie 72
saying I'm not a beard drinker gasp but this was an interesting history lesson in how
porters are made yes and actually if you're if you enjoy the history part of that then please
do listen for the next episode for the type that we're going because we're actually developing
on that history of porters so there's something for you excellent yes and we also had my word
we had a shedload of responses on the hefford one episode in yeah yeah so we do want we just
do want about so first one was by comment one by folkie hefford vice and is best smiley face no
winky smiley face coming from the northeastern part of Germany from the beginning that means
former GDR I believed I hit beer because we only had pilsner and lager styled
and they all aren't in my taste in any way just disgusting and repulsive bitter but then after
the reunification someone from the southern part of Germany introduced me to hefford vice and
wow beer can taste good herdinger is good but when somebody when you sometime get the chance you
should taste chauffeur hoffard that's what it was was it that was so good chauffeur hoffard
storks head all back at her storker becker or the dark variant of franzis scanner now
I've never seen that actually the only franzis scanner we get is that light one
right and don't believe they all come from the barrier two of those I named aren't from the home of
october fist hmm interesting yes so the second comment we have was actually from pole
who joined us on the last episode and he said great episode thanks Jen's great show some comments
franzis scanner is definitely a half a vice and beer did you chill them no you actually said it
right you said it right for me care visapuris he's not going to chill no I don't know
there should be drunk from the fridge or draft or this of chill great for a summer evening in the
beer garden in my opinion all German vice and beers of this type of heather vison based on my
experience in Germany my wife is German and comes from the south if you ask for a vison beer you will
get a heather heather's heather vison beer often you will get beer from a local brewery and not
from the big brewers that beer doesn't make it to the UK sadly there are actually three types
of heather vison dunkel which is the dark one heather's light which is what we both rank on
their episode and crystal which is and this is the heather's heather vison with the yeast and
wheat proteins proteins filtered out often drunk with a slice of lemon in the top I agree with
your comment about not mixing it I've had many great evenings treating those as a session beer
looking forward to the next episode thank you Paul yes actually that's quite positive a statement
to Louis says sadly it's actually quite a positive statement because if you go into a bad here
and you just say give us a beer then chances are you're going to get a tenons or possibly
something like a carling you know it's just not local in the slightest not I'm not even good
not even good so actually it's good to see that promoting the independent breweries in Germany
right so comment three was by Claudio we both well know from identical days I think
yes you must have done great episodes I can relate to thoroughly enjoyed this episode because
I'm familiar with Franz's scanard and Erdinger beers we have a store here in Miami floated
that called total wine which carries a wide range of alcoholic drinks as well as non-alcoholic
beverages for using an cocktails sorry I'm not familiar with that concept so you love to explain
that one not alcohol beverages yeah yeah total wine is my go to place for getting German beers
like Franz's scanard and Erdinger as well as a variety of warstiner beers to me warstiner
seems to be the most mass produced beer if I've no one actually heard of this one I don't think
maybe I'll see if I see the label but I can't think of it and the first one I've tried
of the German beers as it's the only one I've found in one of the supermarkets here usually the
total wine will carry a variety pack of warstiner that includes person or dunkel and brewers
gold which all of which are pretty good however I find Erdinger and Franz's scanard to taste
much better and you both nailed it on the head with Franz's scanard I've only had Erdinger
dunkel because I do like the darker beers and I find it to be my favourite of the two very eager
to try this Erdinger that was reviewed so I will be paying total wine a visit soon by the way
I chuckled when you poured the Erdinger and described it just from the sound and you what you will
get in but that is somebody who is definitely dedicated to the cause absolutely fantastic
comment number four was from again a him who said scottish bevarian IPW
was that a typo I don't know about three years ago I tasted a fine bottle of broodog
scottland versus Vyhens Stefan from Bavaria Indian Pale India Pale Vyzen that was a real
taste bomb wheat beer sweetness with hoppy bitterness a perfect collaboration so I guess that was not
typo it was IPW but right now then we had one from T.A. Spinner great episode I look forward
to more I thought this was good coverage of my current favourite style I too and constrained by
what I can find in America but sampled and loved both Erdinger and Franz's scanard while
living in Germany they may be mass produced but they are good I look forward to reviews of new
produced to explore mass produced doesn't inherently mean awful it really does depend because
if you they remind though he's from the U.S. which he's probably thinking about Budweiser
yeah so I get that I get that I guess in Scotland tenants would be the one I think of so yeah
yeah no that okay put the one and good point well made and I think one thing is I mean he's talking
I mean we're not focusing so much on the individual BS more the beer styles purely so that
people run the word can more chance of sampling rather than one specific beer yes absolutely awesome
well thank you everybody for your feedback and I'm going to say this it's going to sound a bit
controlling but I'm going to say anyway at least one of those episodes one of those comments
could have been an episode absolutely yes yes support Hacker Public Radio people
absolutely most definitely yes so right I think that is so if you would actually like to
us to try any specific style then please do actually mention it in a comment and we will try
we do have the next few months sorted because we are focusing on our favourite styles both
myself and they will tend to like the winter beers yeah so we're probably sorted but if you
actually have a favourite style winter beer please mention it and we'll try our bass to actually
fit it in yeah I'm sure the arms can be twisted oh yeah well yeah with a bit of effort I'm sure
yes so please do comment support the support Hacker Public Radio please post a show
and join in tomorrow for another exciting episode of Hacker Public Radio
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Episode: 4532
Title: Cheap Yellow Display Project Part 5: Graphical User Interface
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4532/hpr4532.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:13:22 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4532, for 2025-12-16
Today's show is entitled, "Cheap Yellow Display Project Part 5: Graphical User Interface "
The host is Trey and the duration is 00:13:11
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "Trey experiments with Squareline Studio to build a GUI for this project"
Hello again, this is Tray. Welcome to Part 5 in my cheap yellow display project series.
If you are still listening to me ramble on about this project, thank you. I really do appreciate
you. If you wish to catch up on earlier episodes, you can find them on my HDR profile page
and there's a link in the show notes. To review, my project is to build a portable
Morris code, cure memory, which can be connected to any of my HF Transsever radios
by simply plugging it into the code key input port. Then, I could transmit stored messages
by simply touching their specific icon on the touch screen. I also want to be able to
program each macro individually from within the graphical user interface.
And as you can probably tell from the background noise, we are in my office where I'm
surrounded by clocks that all seem to want to strike or kuku or chime all at the same
time, so please forgive the extra noise. Where was I? Right. To accomplish this project,
I need to learn how to build a graphical user interface for the cheap yellow display.
Most of the cheap yellow display resources I have been referencing recommend using a product
called SquareLine Studio for GUI development on the cheap yellow display. By the way, throughout
this, I made interchangeably use the term GUI GUI or GUI or graphic user interface. I just
I may use them interchangeably, so be aware of that. Anyways, SquareLine Studio. Sadly,
it is not open source. If any of you have experience with a good open source alternative
to SquareLine Studio, please record a show to help the rest of us or at least send me an
email. SquareLine does have a free trial with a free single user single computer license,
which I am using for this project. It will run on Windows or Linux or Mac, so it's very
very versatile. So, after watching several videos about using the cheap yellow display with
SquareLine, I started to outline the functionality I needed. SquareLine provides a wide range
of pre-configured boards and interfaces to choose from, in addition to widgets and controls,
you can drag onto your screens and it will automatically generate the supporting code
in the background. The initial page for my project needs to have macro buttons with labels
for the message that they will send when they are pressed. There also need to be navigation
buttons to move from one page to another. Another important page will be the configuration
page where the user can store the contents of each macro and set the speed at which code
will be sent. I would like to have a keyboard page where the user can type in a custom
message and send it to. I made a few GUI sketches on post-it notes, then I scratch them
out and made more because my drawing skills are even worse than my GUI coding skills.
Then I went ahead and installed SquareLine Studio on my Ubuntu laptop to start designing.
I do use Ubuntu for my daily driver. It's what sets out my desk, it's what I use all
the time. For those of you who may be paying attention, that is for telling. So, I installed
SquareLine Studio, there is a bit of a learning curve, even with the guide videos that
I found online. The user experience within SquareLine is challenging. Their own graphically
user interface leaves much to be desired. It is not designed to run on the laptops screen
size screen resolution that I had it running on. I had to switch to a much higher resolution
monitor and rearrange frames within the app itself in order to see many of the controls
that were just hidden and I couldn't get to them. Then, as I'm building the GUI itself,
button size adjustments, alignments and label text did not work quite as I expected. For
instance, a label text item is not part of something like a button. So, the text that
displayed on the button is actually a separate object completely from the button itself.
So, I had to put much more thought into the object naming so that I could write code
that will change button labels dynamically. I'm also including some screenshots from the
user interface that I designed within SquareLine and you'll see those in the show notes.
One great feature is that you can define actions and conditions for objects in your project.
For example, there are buttons on the left which will navigate to specific screens,
like the send screen or the config screen or the keyboard screen. I defined actions within
SquareLine such that when a specific navigation button is pressed, it will change the
buttons appearance to look like it has been pressed and will then scroll left or right to
the specified screen. Actions were also valuable as I was working on this speed word
per minute slider in the config screen. When the slider is moved left or right, the GUI
will change the actual number which represents the word per minute and is seen to the
right of the slider on the screen. Next, there is a simulator function which can be used
to test how well the GUI works. It took me some trial and error but I was able to build
and successfully test navigational actions and the word per minute slider. As I was working
on building the aforementioned word per minute slider and thinking about the default words
per minute of Morse code to use, my ADHD interrupted me as it usually does. I decided to change the default
speed that I use for the Arduino Nano-based Morse code practice here that I keep on my desk. You
can learn more about this here in episode 3 of the series. We will also discuss Morse code
speed in a future episode of this series. The original code, as is found on a link that
I'll include in the show notes, specified 12 words per minute as the default speed, with
buttons to increase and decrease this. However, I am practicing it 20 words per minute. Every
time I turn on the practice set I need to turn up the speed and guess if I'm close to 20 words
per minute. I went ahead and opened the practice oscillator project in our Arduino IDE and
updated the words WPM variable that represents words per minute in the code to a value of 20.
No, you will not see this change reflected in my GitHub repo. Why? Well, A, I wanted to test it locally
first. B, 20 words per minute may be a little bit fast for default for people that are just
getting started with it. C, confession. I do not use get the way it was meant to be used or the
way it should be used for that matter with pull requests and all that stuff. Bad tray. D, I was
distracted. The reason I bring all this up is this is the first time I've used the Arduino IDE to
program a board with this system since I upgraded it from a boom to 20.04 to a boom to 22.04. Well,
now, try as I might. I was not able to get the Arduino Nano's USB port to be recognized in
Linux so that I could update the key or code. I spent several days troubleshooting using other
Arduino devices different USB ports different cables all to no avail. None of them would be
recognized within Linux or within the Arduino IDE. If anyone has any recommendations, I'm open to
suggestions. What did I do? Well, I dug out my son's old Windows 10 PC which should slow down
to the point where he couldn't use it and I wiped it and started all over again with a new fresh
clean install of Windows and all the chaos that comes with that removed and then I went ahead
and installed the Arduino IDE and loaded up all the necessary dry libraries and the code from my
GitHub which I had to manually change once again because I do not fully get Git. Finally, I was able
to update the Arduino Nano with its new code and it works perfectly. But this revealed the same
problem for the cheap yellow display. I also could not get it to connect over USB to my Ubuntu system.
Time to migrate the entire project to Windows. My next step was to go ahead and install
Square Line Studio on Windows. Here, I ran into another snag because my trial license was only
for one system. So I had to uninstall Square Line from Linux before I could activate the
license on Windows. Did I mention that I would love to find an open source free software product
that I could use instead? If you know of one, please ping me or post a comment or something.
I wasted more time trying to get the GUI project which I had written on the Linux machine
imported to Square Line on Windows. All the while thinking of improvements I could make if I just
started over again from scratch. It would not load. It would not load. It would not load.
In the end, I started all over again from scratch. After much blood, sweat, and tears. My GUI code
was working again. And this time in Windows, I was able to run it in the simulation mode and move
from page to page successfully and also use my word per minute slider. I exported the UI from
Square Line and loaded the code it generated into a new project within the Arduino IDE.
Now was a moment of truth. I followed the instructions found in the Pang YouTube channel
video that I've posted within the show notes. I connected the Chipila display and uploaded
the code success. You can see in the picture in the show notes, my send screen loaded perfectly.
Now to try the other screens. Wait, draught. It does not seem that my navigation buttons work.
Actually, it does not appear that the touch screen is responding at all.
I spent the next several days trying to figure out what went wrong. I checked and double-checked
interrupt and configuration settings such as those that are described in another of Pang's videos
which I'll post a link to in the show notes. Nothing worked. I came to realize that I had
bit off more than I could chew and I should not have started with such an ambitious project.
Instead, I should have started with a simple equivalence of hello world where I could build and
test simple functionality to make sure I knew exactly what I was doing and then expand on it.
Lessons learned and a good stopping point for this episode. I'm open to your feedback on what
you would recommend what I should do differently, etc. You can post simple feedback as a comment or
send me an email using the address in my HPR profile. As usual, if your feedback is more than a
sentence or two, you might want to record it as an episode so that other listeners can profit from it as
well. Time for an espresso. Maybe I'll make it a double or even a triple.
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording podcast, click on our upload link
to find out how easy it is.
Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by an AnHonestHost.com, the Internet Archive,
rsync.net, and our mirror network.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
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Episode: 4533
Title: Nuclear Reactor Technology - Ep 2 Nuclear Fuel
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4533/hpr4533.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:13:23 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4533, for 2025-12-17
Today's show is entitled, "Nuclear Reactor Technology - Ep 2 Nuclear Fuel"
The host is Whiskeyjack and the duration is 00:19:05
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "Types of nuclear fuel, recycling of fuel, uranium and thorium resources, and medical isotopes."
This episode is the second in an eight-part series on nuclear reactor technology.
This episode will cover types of nuclear fuel, recycling of nuclear fuel, uranium and
thorium resources, and medical isotopes.
Types of nuclear fuel, natural uranium.
This is the simplest of nuclear fuels that use purified natural uranium that has not been
enriched.
The enrichment is not necessary if you use an efficient moderator and reactor design.
Natural uranium is the least expensive of nuclear fuels.
It also allows countries to have an independent fuel cycle without having to build a uranium
enrichment industry.
It has been in use in numerous large-scale commercial power reactors around the world
for decades, with more due ones recently announced to be built.
An enriched uranium.
This is the most familiar to many people.
And rich uranium is more expensive than natural uranium, but it allows for more compact
reactors and less efficient but cheaper moderator.
It has a disadvantage that you need access to uranium enrichment facilities, which are
very large and expensive industrial plants.
Most commercial enriched uranium fuel has between 3 and 5% you to 35.
Some reactors have been designed to use fuel enriched to only around 1.2%.
This is commonly referred to as slightly enriched uranium.
Some reactor designs require a fuel and rich to just below 20%.
Mixed oxide fuel or marks.
Mixed oxide fuel is a blend of plutonium and natural depleted or recovered uranium.
Recovered uranium is extracted from used nuclear fuel.
The plutonium is extracted from used nuclear fuel and takes the place of the U235
in a reactors that use enriched uranium.
Plutonium is produced when U238 interacts with neutrons, producing a variety of different plutonium
isotopes.
Using mox fuel allows for spent fuel to be recycled, reducing the amount of fresh uranium
required, and also reducing the amount of stored space required for spent fuel.
8% plutonium content is roughly equivalent to 5% enriched uranium.
France uses mox fuel extensively and mox fuel constitutes about 10% of their fuel usage.
Thorium fuel.
Thorium is not nuclear fuel when used by itself.
It is almost entirely thorium 232 which is not a fizzile isotope.
Instead, thorium can be used in a mixed oxide or mox fuel where it takes place of U238.
This is added either in rich uranium or plutonium with most studies indicating that plutonium
is the most feasible.
While in the reactor, some of the TH232 is converted to U233.
U233 is a fizzile isotope and can take the place of the U235 in reactor fuel.
Some of the U233 will be consumed in the reactor, but the rest will come out in a spent
fuel and can be recycled to make new fuel taking the place of some of the plutonium.
Even with the reuse of the re-covered U233, it general opinions seems to indicate that
he studies supply of plutonium from uranium cycle reactors will still be deated to keep
the cycle going.
No new reactor technology is required to use thorium fuel.
Existing reactors based on natural uranium designs that have been in large-scale commercial
operation for decades can use thorium fuel either as is or with mitermotification.
Natural uranium reactors are suitable for this because they make very efficient use of
neutrons that is they have good neutron economy, something that is important for thorium.
Thorium is not used now because thorium-based mox fuel is more expensive to make than
the natural uranium that the reactors which could use thorium normally run on.
The main advantage of thorium is for countries that have large thorium reserves but much
less uranium.
India in particular has a long-interm interest in thorium fuel due to their abundant reserves
of it and they also use natural uranium reactors whose design can be changed to use thorium
fuel.
Plutonium in uranium cycle reactors, in uranium cycle reactors plutonium is produced as part
of the reaction.
Some of that plutonium is then consumed while still in the reactor.
This actually constitutes a significant share of the total energy output.
In typical light water reactors we'll get to reactor types later.
About a third of the total energy output comes from plutonium that was created and then
consumed while still in the reactor.
For heavy water natural uranium reactors it's actually about 60% of the total energy.
Plutonium is strictly speaking not a type of fuel by itself.
Rather it is what is left over after most of the U-235 has been extracted from fresh
uranium in order to make enriched uranium.
To put it in another way in order to get U-235 to make enriched uranium you must extract
it from other uranium.
What is left over is mainly U-238 with a small amount of left over U-235.
This is called depleted uranium.
But cannot be used directly as nuclear fuel itself.
It can be used to make dew fuel by adding plutonium to make mixed oxide or mox fuel.
There are currently very large stock piles of depleted uranium.
If fast reactors become commercially viable these stock piles of depleted uranium could
be used to make fuel for them.
Oxide or ceramic versus metallic fuel.
Nuclear fuel is usually in the form of a ceramic pellet.
That is it is a uranium oxide powder pressed into a small cylindrical pellet and then
heated to a high temperature to form a ceramic.
This is known as sintering.
In ceramic form it is very durable and with a high melting point.
Some reactors use uranium in metallic form but these are quite rare.
Metal has a higher heat conductivity than ceramic but is less durable and more prone to corrosion
or other chemical influences.
In oxide form the fuel pellets are normally inserted into hollow metal tubes which hold
the fuel in place.
Multiple tubes may then be assembled into bundles for handling purposes.
The size and length of these bundles will vary depending on the reactor type.
Some unusual reactor designs use completely different fuel designs.
I will cover these in episodes where I talk about the reactors themselves.
Recycling spent fuel.
Once fuel has been used up it is considered to be spent.
However there are ways of recycling or reusing spent fuel.
Once through fuel cycles both commercial reactors run in a once-through fuel cycle.
They load fresh fuel in the form of enriched natural uranium in the reactors.
Use it until it is spent and then put it in the storage or disposal.
Many countries consider this to be the cheapest option as fresh uranium is relatively inexpensive
and no reprocessing facilities required to be built or operated.
Reprocessing spent uranium fuel into mixed oxide or mocks fuel.
However some countries with France being the best known example reprocessors spent fuel so they
can use it again.
Spent nuclear fuel contains elements and isotopes that were created in the nuclear
act reaction that interfere with the reaction by absorbing neutrons without contributing
to further fission.
Processing fuel is basically a chemical process to extract uranium and plutotium from
the spent fuel and leaves the undesired elements behind.
These undesired elements become waste.
The recovered uranium still contains a fair bit of fizzile U235.
In the case of reactors that use enriched uranium the amount of leftover U235 is typically
higher than is found in natural uranium.
This recovered uranium can then be put back through the enrichment process to be turned
into a regular enriched fuel.
The plutonium however contains the greatest amount of unused energy.
This plutonium is mixed in with natural uranium recovered uranium or depleted uranium and made
it to mix oxide or mocks fuel.
This mocks fuel can then be used in the reactor.
Apparently in France mocks fuel amounts to 30% of the fuel they use.
The spent mocks fuel cannot be used again because too much of the fizzile isotope of plutonium
have been used up, leaving the non-fizzile isotopes and it is not practical to separate
the two.
Fast reactors do not face this limitation but that is a subject for later episode.
Reprocessing and thorium fuel.
With thorium fuel reprocessing is inherent to an indifuel cycle that I am aware of.
Actually the process is similar to reprocessing uranium fuel except that U233 takes
a place of plutonium and thorium takes place of U238.
Direct reuse of spent light water fuel and heavy water moderated reactors.
We haven't covered heavy water moderated reactors yet that will come in a later episode.
However at this point just accept that there are reactors that use fuel more efficiently
than the common light water reactors.
These reactors can use natural uranium without any enrichment at all.
As a result of this what is used up fuel from a light water reactor is equivalent to high
grade fuel for these more efficient reactors.
This means you can use a fuel twice once in a light water moderated reactor and again
in a heavy water moderated reactor.
Work has been done on two processes which take advantage of this.
To pick direct use of used PWR fuel and can do.
This is a process for reusing spent fuel from common light water moderated pressurized
water reactors or PWR and using them in a type of heavy water reactor don't as can
do.
I will cover both types of reactors in more detail in a later episode.
At this point you just need to know that these are two of the three most commonly used
commercial nuclear reactors.
The third common type may be compatible with this as well but I don't know if it has
been tested.
The fuel rods in a PWR are longer than those in a can do fuel bundle.
The PWR rods are therefore cut to the correct length.
The ends are sealed and they are assembled into a can do compatible bundle.
This fuel bundle is now ready to use as fuel in a can do style reactor.
The do pick process destroys a lot of the actinized plutonium in the spent PWR fuel.
It extracts up to 25% more energy from the fuel compared to other PWR use fuel recycling
technologies.
It reduces a deed for PWR fuel disposal by up to 70%.
It reduces fresh uranium requirements by 30%.
This was jointly developed by South Korea and Canada.
So far as I'm aware, South Korea, who have both PWR and can do reactors, have not put
this into commercial operation.
The major problem is that these re-manufactured fuel bundles are as radioactive as spent
fuel and so are more difficult to handle and load into a reactor than fresh fuel.
Repue reprocess uranium fuel and can do.
This is similar to the do pick process except instead of simply cutting the fuel rods
at the correct length, they are opened up and the fuel pellets are crushed and blended
with fresh uranium additive necessary and then re-centered.
This gives a more consistent product than do pick process but they at the expense of additional
manufacturing steps.
However, this is still less involved than making traditional mocks fuel which includes
chemical processes to separate different elements.
This process has been demonstrated in China who also use PWR and can do reactors.
Uranium and Thorium resources start with uranium.
The top six producers of uranium are in order, Australia, Kazakhstan, Canada, Namibia,
Russia and Niger.
Between them they produce roughly two-thirds of total world output.
However, uranium production is driven by market forces and other supplies can be brought
online at its higher cost.
Since the cost of uranium is a very small proportion of the cost of the electricity produced
by a nuclear reactor, prices can increase substantially without increasing the cost of
electricity significantly.
Uranium and sea water.
Uranium is soluble in sea water and there is estimated to be 1,000 times as much uranium
in the sea as this found in commercial deposits on land.
Successful experiments have been done on extracting uranium from sea water.
If uranium were to be extracted from sea water, it would be replenished by natural erosion
of minerals from rocks at a faster pace than humans could extract it from the sea so it
can't be used up.
With current technology extracting uranium from sea water is about 3 to 20 times the cost
of mining it on land.
Thorium is not currently used as nuclear fuel in a significant amount, so it's not
meaningful to talk about production.
The top 3 countries though in terms of thorium deposits are India, Brazil, and Australia.
However, if thorium were to be a valuable nuclear fuel, exploration would undoubtedly turn
up far more in places where nobody has bothered to look.
Medical isotopes, medical isotopes are an important part of modern medicine.
Most of you will be familiar with their use in the treatment cancer and in medical diagnostics.
However, they are also used to sterilize single-use medical instruments such as syringes.
Most of you listening to this have therefore probably benefited from medical isotopes even
if you didn't encounter them directly.
Examples of comemetical isotopes, some examples of comemetical isotopes are, molabdenum 99,
or chemical symbol M099.
This decays into Technitium 99, TC99, and is extensively used in medical diagnostics.
The TTM177, which is LU177, this is used for prostate cancer therapy.
Yetrium 90, which is a chemical symbol Y90, this is used to treat several types of cancer.
A colbalt 60, which is CO60, this is extensively used to sterilize single-use medical
instruments.
It is also used for some types of cancer treatments such as gamma-niphrate radiotherapy.
I-dine 131, this is used to treat thyroid cancer.
How medical isotopes are made?
The typical way that the above isotopes are made is to bombard a source material with
neutrons in a reactor and transmuted into the desired isotopes.
A material known as a target is made from a specific isotope or element.
It is in place in a reactor and bombarded with neutrons, sometimes for years.
At the appropriate time it is removed from the reactor and process further into medical
grade material.
For isotopes with short half-lives, what follows then is a very tightly coordinated logistics
operation to get the isotopes into the customer quickly and reliably to ensure they
are still useful when they arrive.
Using isotopes and research reactors, the traditional way of manufacturing medical isotopes
is to make them a what are called research reactors.
I won't be speaking much about this type of reactor because I will focus on power generation.
Research reactors do not normally generate electric power.
Instead they are used as a source of neutrons.
They usually fairly small if you megawatts in thermal output.
As they don't require high temperatures, they are usually not required to be pressurized
and so operate at or near atmospheric pressure.
They are usually what are called pool-type reactors.
These are basically very large pots filled with lighter heavy water with a lid that can
be removed to access the interior.
Material, whether fuel, test samples or isotope targets are added and removed through
the top or inserted in a removed through dedicated tubes which penetrate your reactor walls
for this purpose.
Using isotopes and power reactors, in recent years medical isotopes have begun to be made
in large commercial power reactors as a byproduct alongside of generating electricity.
Since the medical isotopes are a byproduct of electricity production, overall costs are much
lower than operating a dedicated research reactor for this purpose.
Many power reactor types, however, are not suited to this role as they do not allow
material to be readily added or removed from the reactor except by shutting it down and
opening it up.
However, pressurized heavy water reactors such as can do have a large, un-pressurized
Kalandria holding the moderator and it is a relatively simple matter to add or remove
target material from locations where the target will receive appropriate neutron radiation.
Cool-Balt 60 is mainly made in can-do reactors in Canada, Argentina, China, and South
Korea.
It is also made using RBMK reactors in Russia.
Other isotopes such as the Malebton 99, Dutitium 177, and Itrium 90 are also made in
can-do reactors in Canada.
Romania are building additional can-do power generation reactors and they intend to equip
them with isotope production gear for medical isotopes.
The ability to produce medical isotopes at a large scale, low cost, and routine availability
has sparked more interest in developing still more types of medical isotopes for
additional treatments.
The basis of nuclear fission is nuclear fuel.
There are three main types of nuclear fuel and commercial use today.
These are natural uranium and rich uranium and mixed oxide or mox uranium plutonium mixtures.
It is possible to use thorium in a sort of thorium plutonium or thorium uranium mox fuel,
but this is not currently economically viable at this time when uranium is so cheap and abundant.
Fuel can be recycled in use in a reactor again.
Medical isotopes are an important byproduct of the nuclear industry and a large share of
the world's population has benefited from this at one time or another.
Conclusion.
In the next episode, I will describe the basic features and characteristics of reactors
together with descriptions of the most widely used commercial reactor types.
This concludes the second episode of an eight-part series on nuclear reactor technology.
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording podcast, click on our upload link
to find out how easy it is.
Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by an AnHonestHost.com, the Internet Archive,
rsync.net, and our mirror network.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
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Episode: 4534
Title: Reviving My Kawai K4 Synthesizer
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4534/hpr4534.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:13:25 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4534, for 2025-12-18
Today's show is entitled, "Reviving My Kawai K4 Synthesizer"
The host is Claudio Miranda and the duration is 00:12:03
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "Claudio describes how he revived his old Kawai K4 synthesizer after years of dormancy."
Hey, Hacker Public Radio, this is Claudio Miranda, and I'm recording this episode on how I revive my Kawaii K4 digital synthesizer.
So this is made by Kawaii, and it came out in 1989.
I purchased this supposedly brand new in the early 90s.
So it's quite a bit old. You could say it's a vintage synthesizer.
It's a digital synth. It's not an analog synth, but it does have digital samples of different samples, and you can actually program them.
And it was, like I said, it was my main synth for a good while I used it for sequencing with Kawaii K8i tabletop sequencer that I purchased used some couple of years afterwards.
And that was before I migrated to using software on the computer for sequencing.
So around 2005, I purchased another synth, which eventually became my main synth, and this one was kind of put to pasture for some time.
And in my constant moves throughout the years, it's been sitting unused or stored away either in storage or my dad's garage or different places,
but it has been used until recently that I decided to set everything up and kind of set up my own digital studio with using QTractors to record everything mini tracks.
So I decided to buy a power adapter for this, and for some other Kawaii devices I have, which I may talk about in QTractors.
But this one, I went ahead and I ordered a generic one on Amazon, it meant the requirements for power, and it was just hopeful that it would turn on and work.
So the, once the adapter arrived that went ahead and plugged it in, you know, prayed to the midi gods and lowly hold it came to life.
However, it did give me a message saying there's to check the internal battery.
Now, I, this kind of what I was expecting from when I had been reading online, and based on an experience I had with a Corg M1.
That, I remember it was at a school that I used to work at, and they had it, and they decided to power it on because they were going to get rid of it.
And it also said that it was having issues with the battery.
So checking online, I found this page called Neil Beard and his machines, and he talks about, he has a blog post, actually, of how to replace the battery on the Kawaii.
Now he's talking about the Kawaii K4R, which is the Rack Mountain version of this synthesizer.
Basically, meaning it goes on a rack and it doesn't have keyboard, it's controlled via MIDI.
And he goes through the steps and everything and provides a few links there.
So I went ahead and took this Thanksgiving break that we had here in the US.
I went ahead and I decided to open up the Kawaii save.
Now, I didn't do this without following some instructions.
I actually, ironically enough, I found a video on how to tear down how to open up the Kawaii and get to the battery.
Now, even though the video wasn't Japanese, I kind of got to just the what he was talking about because if he was tearing down and trying to get into the part with the battery.
Thankfully, it's very easy to get into.
So I went ahead and took all the screws off from the bottom.
And I looked at the battery, looked for the battery.
Thankfully, it's a CR2032 battery, which goes on any computer you can find in any store as relatively cheap.
So I went ahead and I bought a pack of two and I went ahead and I replaced that battery.
And once I put it all together, I went plugged it back in, turned it on.
And thankfully, the message was gone.
So, but the problem was that every sound for every patch, every patch that the synthesizer had was the same.
And even the drum sounds were the same.
So I had to find a way to get the original default factory sounds back into this device.
So thankfully, Neil Beard on his blog post about replacing the battery, provides some links that show you where you can actually still get the original sounds for the K4.
And the K4R.
You know, you can talk, like I said, he talks about the K4R, but this also pertains to the K4.
Same device, just one has a keyboard and sound effects and the other one does.
And thankfully, Kawai has all of their patches and documentation and everything for their musical instruments on their downloads page.
And I'm going to find this along with information about the K4R in the show notes.
Now, the way to do this is, once you download the sound sets, there's two ways to install them.
Either through standard mini file, which you would play as a mini file and it would transfer over to the synthesizer, depending on what mini channel it's in.
Or using what's called MIDI system exclusive messages, or SISX, MIDI SISX.
So I've dealt with this in the past using some older software, but I had never done it on minutes or BSD.
Since I was working with my Slackware installations for my music stuff, I decided to do it on there.
So I went ahead and downloaded the patch set, the system X.
It's a zip file if I'm not mistaken.
For the K4, I went ahead and I downloaded that.
And then I had to configure my, I had to configure the synth to receive MIDI system exclusive messages.
So I had to unprotect the internal bank so that I can be written.
And then I used a MIDI, which is spelled A and IDI.
It's a command line tool, and I'll provide the link for that in the show, as well, along with what MIDI system exclusive messages are.
And I used that to actually transmit the MIDI system exclusive messages from the Slackware box to the K5K4.
And it does that because I've got a MIDI interface connected to the computer that goes to the synthesizer.
So doing that, I was able to get the patch sounds back in.
I decided to do a test by powering it off and then powering it on again, and thankfully the sounds were still there.
So the battery's working, everything's working.
However, I did notice, and I had forgotten about this, that one of the black keys had,
had broken.
So the way that key works actually is that there's, and there's a spring on the inside to give it that, that, that, that, that.
You know, it's just to give it that, that feel of a piano key work, you know, it goes down, comes up.
So the problem was that one of the tabs, the notches, and the back of the black key, that keeps it in place.
So the spring is causing it to lean to, the, the, the force of the spring is causing the key to lean to a side and rub against the other key.
So it gets stuck.
So I'm saying to myself, how am I going to fix this? Because I've got to find some place where I can actually get a replacement.
Now, I could probably 3D print it, which is a suggestion from a friend of mine on, master it on, but I don't have a 3D printer, nor do I know of anyone that has a 3D printer.
So I decided to look in the eBay and a few other places.
Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find it there, and if I did, it was very expensive, but I did find this one website that specializes in parts for synthesizers and keyboards.
As well as accessories. And the name of the company, and this is not to, you know, they're not promoting them or anything.
But, you know, it's just in case any body needs a replacement part for a synthesizer in the US, it's a company called Sintar.
So like Sintar, like a Sintar, but Sintar, so SYNTA, you are keyboard parts and accessories, and I'll provide the link in the show notes for that.
They actually have the key that I needed, and only cost me the key itself was about a little over $10 US, including shipping and taxes, came out to about 20 in change US dollars, which is not bad.
So that one I'm going to save for a future HPR episode on how I went about and replaced that, and it's going to be a little more involved because I have to actually remove the board that has the keys to get to the battery.
It was much easier because there's just one board on top, and just replacing the coin battery.
It's a solder room because I've heard situations where other synthesizers have that battery soldered on, but this sits in a receptacle that's there, and you just replace the battery.
So thankfully it was that easy. I am able to use it. I can't use that one key until I replace it, but I can still use it as a sound module, and I can control it from my Yamaha S08 through MIDI.
So, not all is lost, you know, it's still usable, and I'm just glad that it's functioning, and there are no other issues with it, and I pray it stays that way.
So anyway, that's how I revived my K4, and I've already recorded some tracks on something that I'm working on, so we'll see if I close it up here.
Anyway, if you haven't shown that you'd like to record, be sure to do so, send it up, grab an audio recorder, or grab your computer, and microphone, and record something that would be of interest to hackers, and HPR, the HPR website talks about that, what would be of interest to hackers, and go ahead and record it, upload it, and that should be your first show.
Do anything that interests you, or it can be how you got into particular technology, or how you resolve this problem, or anything, but be sure to upload an episode, as we are always in these shows, because everyone's in a while, especially during the holidays, and during the summer, the queue gets pretty low, and we have to dip into the reserve queue.
So that's going to do it for me today, hopefully I'll be able to record some more before the end of the year, I have one that I'm still promised I'm just going to do it.
So yeah, this is going to be it for me, and tune in tomorrow for another exciting episode of Hacker Public Radio.
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording podcast, click on our upload link
to find out how easy it is.
Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by an AnHonestHost.com, the Internet Archive,
rsync.net, and our mirror network.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
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Episode: 4535
Title: Living the Tux Life Episode 4 - Various software I have been using
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4535/hpr4535.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:13:26 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4535, for 2025-12-19
Today's show is entitled, "Living the Tux Life Episode 4 - Various software I have been using"
The host is Al and the duration is 00:09:13
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "Al goes over the Various software he have been using"
Welcome to Episode 4 of Live in the TechSife.
A podcast series where I document my journey of using Linux so that you drive up.
So I still haven't needed to go back to Windows recently. I had to join a single.
When I looked in a software's end of the experiment, there was no CMotch in Twinstall.
No problem, I just went to the same website, downloaded the dev package, clicked on it,
and it installed perfectly, connected to the meeting with no problems at all.
I'm still really happy with this experiment. I like that so far.
Every time I have a problem, it's already been answered and it's been formed.
I was looking forward to the beta version of the next experiment, which is 22.3,
which is coming back at the end of the December.
Can we mention that I was brave starting on that laptop and should have started with a desktop?
The thing is, I don't actually have a desktop. I main desktop for work has two monitors
clicked to a docking station. At the end of the day, I'm probably worked at that top,
like in my thing, and I plug in this sync pad, and it works like a treat.
I've been deep diving into monitoring the uses of my laptop,
especially memory usage and practical usage. One thing I was looking was trying to do is to pick
an idea of that laptop that would last me next couple of years. As I mentioned before, the
sync pad T14S has built in memory, that is solid on. So you can't replace it.
My laptop has a six-sinking around, and I was wondering if I needed to look at it,
and that to with more memory, the T14S comes with more memory, can come with more memory,
but the very rarely on eBay. The L3 does come with two sorts of supporting DDR, or DDR5, depending
on the model. But looking at the current RAM prices, did AI requirements and data trends.
How does the recording in December 26, RAM prices have gone through the roof?
So I started, okay, the X and I sat with the monitoring solution. I'm not very good at saying this
name, it's Perifius. So I serve a Docker container for one of the servers using Perifius,
which is a time-see monitoring tool. This Docker container was set up and scraped the
host to get matrix. On my laptop, I installed the no-lix water, which exposed metrics like RAM,
use, and battery, battery performances. And then the service scraped these data every few
minutes and stores them in a database. And you can use a cool tool like Grafana, which draws nice
graphs, using a data clicked by the Perifius. Again, you can install a disbar Docker
and run it in the container. You then point Grafana to Perifius again, and then you can see
the nice graphs. I will clear the link in the show notes for the graphs and diagrams I'm using,
or the dashboard I'm using. As I'm running tail scales on my devices, this is a message
VPN network, meaning that all the devices with tail scan and scores, even if I'm a separate
network, different IP address range, can speak to each other using host name until DNS. It means
I don't have to open up ports on my phone. So whenever my laptop has internet tests, it can be queries.
I can see that my daily users are back for gigabytes, and when I record a podcast, it spikes
up to between 8 and 12 because of the using audacity and telegram. So I don't think I need to
worry about getting more RAM at the moment. I probably would, if the current prices weren't so high,
and so I need to go find a you can pick free defined dashboards, and then where you can see
things like RAM and disc usage. I also have one that shows battery metrics like photoshoot
numbers, the cycles, the percentages. I'll leave the link again in the show notes to the dashboards.
I've been looking at a way to say battery power in the next, giving more me to a package
called TLP, with optimization system when I'm battery, like turning things off when I not need
also with the firm on live on batteries to make them last on you shouldn't charge them all
way to 100% as this makes more sure, more energy to fill, the last dream is an anchor destroyer
battery life. So tools like TPL set of values, so when they stop battery charging, I have set
mine to 9% to test. All the monitoring I have done on a battery didn't quite satisfy well
and intended to do, like when you put the mouse over the battery icon it showed you had four
hours left, but when I went to actually know how many hours I actually got, per charge, like a stop
port. So I wrote a script with the Helicopite which worked pretty well, it puts our put link in the
show notes. It's basically a basket that rent every minute and write details to a log file,
and then checks as a laptop is on battery or plugged in. When it detects it is unplugged, it
records the time, records the time has happened and starts the timer, it records battery percentage
and then when it detects the next time it plugged in it will work out, how long it's battery, it's
being on battery. Next problem I wanted to solve was, what happens when it goes to sleep, I had
the function show that it has it if the script text at last time ran was great then two minutes,
it notes laptop has been asleep, it then subtracts the sleep time from the battery runtime.
However, observation suggests that TPL might actually be causing words about life and having it
installed, I've removed TPL because I was only getting about three hours compared to six
eight hours glad it, but I still need to wait to find to limit the battery charge to 90%.
You can use U-Path to this, you have to edit a file, but I couldn't do this for a reach,
which is very odd, didn't have the permission, even though if you looked at the permissions on
the file, you should have. You had to do an echo, a lot of the echo 90 piping it to the T-command,
which seemed to sound as you just set the value. I also came across a problem called caffeine when I was
testing, which in an application that stopped your laptop going to sleep. I wanted to test how long
my laptop would run the battery without power settings interfering. Now I think I came across when
my testing with a local send, which is a great way to send Trant for a file between devices.
It's like airdrop from Apple. I had to find this my phone and wanted to
transfer to my laptop. The local send was easy to install on a laptop for the software sender,
and both my iPhone and Android apps have the nearest headset tentative app store.
You just set, start the app on both devices, on the laptop I left it to receive mode and then
displayed a couple of random words, and on my phone you select what you want to send and
click send, it's cant network for devices. You select where you want to send it to, and you
confirm the random words match. You can save devices as favourites so you don't have to deal with
them in the future. I also used it to send far between Linux laptops. It worked quite well.
I wanted to skip out a shout to Teamux. I heard of it before, but I thought it was
complicated to set up. Actually, it's surprising easy. Here's a problem, it solves.
If you SSH into a remote machine, say you want to train in the connection, keep stopping.
When you get to scan any command running on the remote server, get killed. That's really frustrating.
With Teamux, you just SSH into the box, run the command, Teamux, and you get
connected to a virtual terminal session. The beauty is, you just connect from that session,
it keeps running in the background. When you reconnect for SSH, you
can type T-Max LS to list your sessions. Mine, this is one called zero.
Which shows you where the sessions are open. You can then run T-Max I-F and T-Zero,
and it reconnects to the terminal zero. You're right back where you left off. So,
and so cool, and there's no extra setup on the S-H side, it just works.
The last thing I want to power cover is the way back up, so track the T.
I'm trying to keep in mind that everything on my laptop, I shouldn't,
but I should be happy to lose. If I'm working on things like photos or something,
I don't want to lose, I'll make sure I have a copy of them somewhere else.
Anything I'm working on like well-exiled documents is stored in the cloud,
and then it says we'll buy our web browser, and these are backed up from TeclerBuy,
never workflow. As I'm going to go for, I've used time shift to backup the OS files in the
route partition to separate volume. However, these don't back up my home directory. For this,
I've chosen a U-D-U-B-D-U-B. Backing up to my one drive one today. This is quite easy to set up
for the software centers. Part of this is an installation U-Q to the encryption password.
Thanks to your one drive you can take to remote share or Google Drive,
but I've got one terabyte for my one drive, I've just backed up to there.
And then to the fill backup, then takes it, I told it to an exclusive thing like my
download folder, VM files, because I've got a couple of virtual machines that are running
home on your backup and cash files, and after good cut browse, it backed up successfully.
I tested the restore process by doing a fresh install of the X-Men.
A son, D-G, began on this machine, taken into my one drive, and I entered my
decryption password, and now I was able to restore my files.
The other thing I had about the other day was think of the Fox clone, which is like
cloned to there, but it's got a GUI, which is a beautiful eye, so it means that you can use
to take backups of entire void or a drive. This gives you a full image backup of your system.
Doing something like a big upgrade, I might use this, but I might do not have a podcast on this
once I've tested that. But this is it for this episode, tune in tomorrow for another exciting
episode of Pack Up Public Radio!
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording podcast, click on our upload link
to find out how easy it is.
Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by an AnHonestHost.com, the Internet Archive,
rsync.net, and our mirror network.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
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Episode: 4536
Title: Welcome to the Linux Community
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4536/hpr4536.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:13:26 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4536, for 2025-12-22
Today's show is entitled, "Welcome to the Linux Community"
The host is Deltaray and the duration is 00:30:27
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "I invite you to participate in the Free Linux Open Source Community"
Hi, I wanted to welcome you to the Free Linux Open Source BSD software community that we're
all part of.
We're glad that you're here.
You might be here recently because some operating system or piece of software has made
you frustrated, maybe it's invader privacy, changed its policies, caused your system to
not be supported anymore or whatever.
You want more control over your system, you want to have more privacy and maybe you want
something free.
Our community is vast and multifaceted and has a lot to offer and things like Linux can
feel confusing it first.
I'm mostly because it's based on a different system.
It's based around Unix and not around maybe being super user-friendly at first, but it's
gotten there over the years.
It expects the users to be a bit more self-guided and self-motivated and trying to figure
out their own problems, you know, there's not like a support number that you can call
or a genius bar that you can go to in major cities.
There's going to be a lot less hand-holding, you know, you're going to have to do some
of the stuff on your own.
But honestly, all that has improved quite a bit over the decades and we've all been
through the stage, you know, as everyone was a beginner once for myself, you know, I've
been using Linux for almost 30 years and in the beginning when I tried to use it as a
desktop, I was able to install Linux, but it took six months before I had a working graphical
interface because, you know, my video card wasn't supported or something like that.
But now it's gotten much easier, there's a lot more support for all the different hardware
out there.
So it's likely that you're going to be able to, you know, use it almost immediately.
If not, it might be because you're using like some, you know, piece of hardware that just
hasn't had its drivers written for it in the Linux community.
But you don't have to prove anything to anyone to belong, you know, you, you don't have
to learn everything either, like there's, it can feel overwhelming at first and you might
be thrown a lot of documentation that seems irrelevant and that's fine, it's there for
you when you need it and it gives you the opportunity to explore different things.
And if you're wondering if Linux can do something, run some piece of software or some
piece of functionality, the answer is very likely yes, but it's going to be in a different
way, you know, you're going to not have, for instance, Adobe Photoshop, you're going to
have the GNU Image Manipulation Program or Critta or Inkscape or Blender or, you know,
one of these programs that does the same functionality, but just as a different software
package, whether it be web browsing, you know, there's web browsing as a huge part of daily
life these days and oftentimes we're running a lot of cloud applications through our web
browsers and the web browsers almost become an operating system itself, but, you know, Linux
has several options for different web browsers that you can use, whether it's Firefox or Brave
or Conqueror or Chromium and then the commercial options like Chrome and Opera have Linux versions
that you can use. Audio production, you know, there's, there's lots of different audio production
applications. In fact, I would say that a lot of people don't really explore the incredible array
of music production applications that the open source community has. I've only recently started
to discover how much is there and I've been using Linux for a long time, but there's like
these digital audio workstation software that you can use to do all kinds of music production
and some people are actually preferring to use Linux for music production because it's a bit more
stable or offers some things that the other platforms don't and also with the window management
capabilities that Linux has it, it makes it sometimes easier to lay things out and so on.
And games, games have long been a concern for people moving to Linux, they want to be able to
that they can play the games that they want but that has come an a long way over the past 30
years. It used to be that mostly we were just using games playing games that had been made for Linux
natively but with the advent of software like wine that has really matured and then has forked
off into a few different varieties of software emulation that make it possible for roughly about,
I don't know, 80, maybe even 90% of the games on Windows now work under Linux.
I regularly play games through Steam, the Steam environment on Linux that normally only run on
Windows or we're only made for Windows but actually can work on Linux through
through proton and wine emulation. And then of course there's a wide variety of options for programming,
you can do office work and that works fine for the most part. I use Linux, I'm like a cyber
security professional but I work in office environment and I have to collaborate with different
people and I'm able to interact and do things with them without significant issues, you know,
no problem. Video conferencing works, stuff like Zoom and Teams work under Linux. So I mean there's
a lot of different things that you can do. A lot of people think of Linux as being a server
operating system and that's, you know, that's maybe what, well I won't even want to say that's
what it's best at. I mean it does, it does that stuff and that's what, you know, a lot of the
internet infrastructure is running on Linux and BSD operating systems and I'm kind of lumping
everything into, you know, just saying Linux and kind of meaning like the entire free and
open source community but, you know, it's a shorthand way of saying it but there's lots of different
possibilities out there for you to get involved in and I don't want to just welcome you to the
community. I want to invite you into the community and the reason why I say invite is because
the open source Linux BSD community what it needs most is people. It needs people to participate
in it, you know, and not just writing code, writing code is just one aspect of developing open source
software. You can participate in forums and ask questions and that's actually helping to develop the
community because you never know when your question might end up with an answer that other people
end up referencing later. So it's important to ask the questions that are on your mind or, you know,
when you're having some kind of issue to try to help figure them out. Chat with other users.
There's user groups out there. There might be like a local Linux users group in your area
then you can connect with and you might make new friends and be able to solve some of your
problems that you have and so on. Show your friends and colleagues what's about, you know, just
maybe say, hey, I'm exploring this Linux stuff. You want me to show you or whatever, maybe they
end up using, you know, maybe they'll end up using Linux or maybe they already do and they can help you.
Submitting bug reports. If you find a problem in a piece of software, something doesn't
seem to be working the way it's supposed to find the place where that software is actually hosted
and where they would want bug reports to be submitted and then give them a good bug report,
including details about the problem, what version you're running, what distribution of Linux you're
running and so on. You can help out with the user experience and UI design of, you know, of both
command line software and GUI software, command line software has a user experience to it that
sometimes needs to be refined and, you know, GUI software, sometimes isn't laid out the best way
or whatever, maybe it takes too many steps to accomplish a task. And so if you have experience
in these types of things, you can help out in that regard. One great example of this is Blender,
Blender 3D is this 3D modeling and animation package that is widely used now and has had this
great story of its development over three decades where it's greatly improved and some of the
those improvements came about through a user that had ideas for how the user experience and the UI
could be improved and made up a thoughtful, you know, demonstration and mock-up of what those things
could be and then the leadership of that project was receptive to it, you know, and they were
the coders there were receptive to the ideas and were willing to slowly work towards those goals
and now Blender is, you know, better than ever it's this amazing piece of software and there's
no reason why that can't happen to some other programs. Maybe you have a talent for making
artwork or, you know, sounds or media or something like that. There's always a need for, you know,
themes or refinements to themes like in the GUI, making icons, maybe it's making graphics for
websites that are needed or splash screens for programs as they load up. Also, having example documents,
that can give new users an idea of what's possible or how to do something, that kind of stuff
can be very useful and very helpful for new users and so you can help out new users in that regard.
You can make tutorials, you know, whether it's using a blog format or, you know, a YouTube video
or TikTok video, a mastodon poster or social media post of some kind, maybe you make a get hub page
or whatever that kind of explains how things work. You could write up documentation officially
for the software or improve the documentation that's there. Maybe you find that the documentation
doesn't explain something well and you can reach out to that project and say, how can I
improve this documentation? And that's a great way to help new users that are coming to that software.
And then, you know, you can also, these software projects, they, they actually have services
that they have to pay for like hosting and supportive the project in various different ways or
they might even have legal fees and so on. So sometimes they have a way of contributing monetary
funds to them so that you can help them or maybe you actually can offer services of your own,
like maybe you run a web hosting provider or maybe you're a lawyer or maybe, you know, you can
help be a community leader in some way. There's all kinds of ways to help out.
The community needs people to survive is long and short of it. So I really would like you to
invite you to participate in the community, not just be a consumer of the software.
And one of the great things about open source and our community that we've created over the decades
is that it offers unlike a lot of commercial software. It offers you the ability to control your
own destiny. You can do, you know, what you want with the operating system with the software and
nobody's going to really tell you no, you know, you can't do that unless it's illegal. But for the
most part, you know, if you want to have your computer boot up into just the command line mode
or maybe you want to make everything pink or something like that, you can, you know, it can
become a form of self-expression for you. And it's unlikely that down the line, the, you know, the
software that you're using is going to start restricting what you can do. Maybe sometimes that happens
but usually there's so many options out there that you can just switch to another distribution
or another desktop or something that does give you those abilities. I've, I've actually switched
distributions of Linux probably six times over my career. I started out on Red Hat. Back
when it was Red Hat Linux, the original Red Hat Linux and then I switched to Gen 2 which was, you know,
more for having the ability to get down and dirty with the operating system compile your own software
and make everything run just a little bit faster. It was like having a hot rod and it was great
that I had that ability to continue to develop my Linux skills in the same community but just a
different sub-community but in a new way, you know, with, with another operating system that just
might not be possible. It might be a one-size-fits-all situation and they'll say, well, tough or,
our operating system doesn't do those things. But with the Linux community, you have the choice.
You have the choice to do what you want to do and find a distribution that fits your needs as a
professional or as a user and customize it the way you want. Linux and the, you know, the
dust tops and the the window managers which is kind of a new concept for people coming to Linux.
Everything is kind of modular so it can be switched out. So, you know, whereas on Windows or Mac,
you just have the set, you have one GUI and you don't think of like how the Windows are decorated
and stuff like that. You can actually change the way Windows are decorated. You can make it so that
instead of having to click on a window to focus it so that it has the, you know, the cursor and the
keyboard and mouse input. You can actually make it so just moving your mouse between Windows
actually gives them focus without you having to click on it. That's called focus follows mouse.
There's also sloppy focus. You know, I mean, there's all kinds of different interesting
concepts that you can do. And virtual desktops, Mac has this now, but this has been a part of X
Windows and Unix and Linux since the beginning, you know, it's like it's been around forever.
The ability to have different desktops that you can switch between and keep your applications
kind of organized on these different desktops. This is one of the concepts that keeps me on
Linux. You know, it's like, I mean, I have no real reason to switch away from Linux, but it's one of the
things that, you know, if it went away, I'd have to really think about it because I love the ability
to switch between virtual desktops and you can like stick Windows to the different desktops to
to move them around or you can make it so that Windows is always on top of other Windows or
always below, you know, you can do all these different kinds of interesting things that aren't built
into the other operating systems. And then, you know, there's the different desktops themselves.
You might start out with something like GNOME or KDE, but then there's other options like
Mate or XFCE or, you know, the different tiling window managers and many other options.
And these all function in slightly different ways and give you different options, but mostly the
same options. But they're targeted at people who want to accomplish different things. So you may
find that you don't like the way GNOME works. And so before you just give up on Linux all together,
you might try out the different distributions or the distant, different desktops. You don't have to
try a different distribution, but a lot of times certain distributions have been tailored for a specific
desktop experience. But you can still switch between them. You know, I mean, you can run Fedora
and then if you don't like the GNOME environment that comes with it, you can install KDE on Fedora
and then switch to that or install XFCE and switch to that. You can even do it between different
users. You know, it's like each user can have their own desktop environment or you can change it by the
day. You know, it's like on Mondays or on No on Tuesdays or on KDE or whatever. And so, you know,
there's nothing stopping you from doing that. And a lot of people seem probably think that Linux
is all about the terminal and that, you know, we live and breathe and stuff in the terminal. And some
of us do, you know, it's like we're still using the GUI, but we're using the command line quite a bit,
but you don't have to. You know, a lot of the functionality that you will need to
use a link system. You don't have to use the command line for it. There'll be some stuff that you do,
you know, to like fix something or install driver or something. But usually, when every
you encounter this, you're following some tutorial to explain how to do it. So I wouldn't sweat that too much.
And then there's lots of different editors out there for editing, you know, VI, EMAX, Nano,
Kate, whatever you want to use. You know, there's no right answer. There's just what you prefer.
And in the end, I think it's about having fun, you know, you get to take around your system a lot
more to discover new options and possibilities and new ways of using your computer. And when you
do figure stuff out, you can take pride in that aha moment that made you progress and
learning something new and doing something different with your system. And you might change those
preferences later and so on. So yeah, in the community, you're probably going to find that there's
a lot of people with strong opinions on things. And some of that comes with people's ability to
choose and they stand by their choice and so on. And don't, you know, don't worry about that too much.
If you are one of those people who, like, gate keeps or something, try not to do that. Remember,
the ability to choose your platform is what makes free Linux open source great.
Or at least it's one of the things that makes a great. So you shouldn't try to
oppress somebody for, you know, for their ability to choose what software they want to use.
You're also building a lot of skills that are in demand, you know, a lot of cloud environment and
internet services and like the top 500 super computers and science research and stuff is based on
around Linux systems. You know, a lot of the virtual private servers that you can set up or servers
on stuff like Amazon web service or Azure or whatever is running Linux by default. And so
getting down and dirty with it and like learning how to do things is going to give you skills that
might land you a job or make new connections or something or give you new abilities to do stuff
that lands you new job or whatever. And also, I mean, people have been using Linux for a long time.
I'm one of those old people that, you know, is close to getting closer to retirement, not quite
at retirement. But, you know, as the old guard retires, there's going to be new positions opening
up and those positions opening up and so on. That's going to demand those skills. So working at it now
may help you to land a job later. The other thing is, E-Waste. E-Waste is a big problem in our
world. You know, we're becoming too much of like a throw away society that has created toxic
things that don't sit well and land fills and so on and isn't good for the environment. And the
commercial community really thrives on forcing users to retire hardware that's just, you know,
like a couple years old, operating systems that no longer support a computer that's only
three or four or five years old is is kind of unacceptable. You know, it's like we're causing people
to constantly have to upgrade and throw away their old computers. Hopefully you're taking it to an
E-Waste or cycling center, but some people aren't. And so on. And so Linux offers the ability to
bring new life into those old pieces of hardware because oftentimes, you know, unlike something like
windows or Mac, which says, you can't run, you know, or lay a top ring system. It's like, well,
first of all, they force you to upgrade. They say, like, you have to upgrade to this new operating system.
But then they say, well, your old computer won't run our new operating system. So you have to upgrade
your computer. And so what are you supposed to do then? Run an old insecure operating system that
opens the door for viruses and malware and stuff? Well, Linux can often run on much older hardware
and, you know, a lot of people, they're refreshing their computers every, you know, three years,
or something. You'll find that Linux users often are running their same hardware for as much as a
decade or even more than that. I once ran a piece of hardware like my home desktop computer
for something like 12 years. And I did a few upgrades to it and stuff. But in the end, in the end,
when I went to go replace the motherboard, I still kept the case, you know, and I still kept like
the drives and stuff like that. So, you know, the modular way of doing things on a desktop computer
allows you to not have to cause things to go obsolete faster. And the same can be true with laptops,
too. Wow, it's hard to replace, you know, the motherboard and a laptop. There are laptop
makers out there like framework that allow you to treat a laptop more like a desktop computer
and that it makes it kind of modular. So, you might consider things like that. And I wanted to
close by just talking about how, you know, open source matters and how much of a difference it's
made in the world. So, back in the 90s, it was becoming common for commercial software vendors
to force you to upgrade to some costly upgrade. Maybe it costs a hundred dollars, $200,
maybe even $500 to upgrade to the next major version of a piece of software. But then that new
version would hardly have anything really new in it. They might move the icons around and update
the graphics and stuff like that of the icons. But people would be waiting for certain features
to come along and they wouldn't make it into a new version, they get frustrated. And that's because
the commercial vendors wanted to keep pulling you along, you know, putting a carrot in front of
you and having you follow the carrot. But with open source, there's no reason to do that, right?
If you want to feature, just, you know, build it in if it's possible if it makes sense to and so on.
And so people do that. You find that oftentimes open source software is far more
featureful than the commercial software. Sometimes there's stuff that can't do easily because,
you know, it takes time for the open source developers to do it because it's a tough thing to do
when you're working for, you know, for free. But for the most part, we've pretty much accomplished
most of the major things that you expect to be able to use your computer for. The developers
and the community that makes the software cares a lot more. You know, they're, they're making it
for their own use, but they're, they're really make, you know, they're trying to make something
that is quality, that is stable, that is secure, because they want their reputation is on the line.
It's not just that like a company's reputation. It's like their own personal reputation is on the line.
So they have a lot more skin in the game to get it right. We care a lot about privacy and we
don't want to see ads on everything. And so that's one, I mean, that's one major difference
in just the user experience. When you, when you sit down at stuff like windows, you're bombarded
with ads everywhere and stuff like that. And that's just not the way we operate in the Linux world.
You know, it's like, if we see an ads somewhere, we're like, kill it, kill it from, from orbit,
or whatever. You know, it's like we don't want that kind of system. If any of the distribution
start going down that road, then, you know, new distributions pop up that say, well, we're going
to do the same thing, but we're not going to do it with ads. Or we're going to make sure that,
you know, your privacy is preserved and we're not sending telemetry data back to some central
repository that's keeping track of what you're doing or something like that. Or, you know,
Microsoft's recent delve into taking screenshots of your desktop and stuff like that. What's that
all about? So a lot of this stuff really, you know, from a free software, Linux, open source
software point view, it's just like it doesn't make any sense. You hear me talking about free software
and open source. These are two different terms for mostly the same thing. It just depends on who you
ask. But essentially, the reason why open source software matters is because as Red Hat's founder
Bob Young said, he said, close source software is like buying a car with the hood welded shut.
You know, it's like, who would buy that? Why would, you know, but yet consumers more and more are
being forced to buy stuff that's like this, where you don't have the ability to open it up and fix
it yourself and see what the actual hardware product is doing. And so you don't know, you know,
it's like what it essentially becomes a black box and you don't know what it's doing. You have to
like put sensors around it to try to figure out what's doing. But with open source software,
you can actually open up the code and look and be sure that it's not sending your data away
or it's not like scanning your hard drive to find stuff or and send it back to the author or whatever.
And it gives you the privilege to change the software. One of the problems that comes up a lot
with commercial software is that eventually, you know, a company might go out of business or stop
making a piece of software. But there were people that were depending on being able to use that software.
A great example of this in my life is a family tree and genealogy software. My dad
once put a whole bunch of information into some family tree software and then the vendor went away
and that software no longer works or more modern versions of windows. You know, what what do you
to do? You can't open up this file format anymore. Fortunately, I'm able to, you know, run
older versions of it in like a virtual machine that runs older version of windows or something like that.
And then I can export the data. With open source, you can just port the software to work on
the new operating system or work on a new architecture or whatever. You know, you have that ability
to to keep that software alive and keep it going so that the next generation has that ability
and passes it along. Security bugs can be discovered faster. Although if people aren't looking,
they might not get discovered for a long time. But in general, you know, you'll see a lot more
bug reports on open source software and a big part of that is simply because you can look directly
at the code. But that ideally causes it to have less vulnerabilities over time. And also,
the vulnerability is tend to be fixed a lot faster. They get fixed quickly and patches get sent out.
And since we're all trying to help each other, you know, there's no reason to like hold them back
or whatever. So, yeah, let me just, I just want to say again, welcome to our community and I invite
you to participate in it. If this is your first time listening to a hacker public radio podcast,
I encourage you to also participate in this community. There's thousands of episodes out there
covering all kinds of topics, you know, Linux, relate, open source stuff, but a broader range than that.
And you might consider recording your own episode. So, thanks, take care.
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
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Episode: 4537
Title: “Elsbeth in IT: Since ’97” (Part 1)
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4537/hpr4537.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:13:27 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4537, for 2025-12-23
Today's show is entitled, "“Elsbeth in IT: Since ’97” (Part 1)"
The host is Elsbeth and the duration is 00:43:07
The flag is Explicit, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "Elsbeth talks to Lee about what it has been like since approx 1997 working in different parts of IT."
Hi, I'm Lee, I'm joined today with Elzbeth and we're going to talk a bit about her experiences in the IT field and some of the larger issues around that subject
So let's start here. What first drew you into the IT field back in the early 2000s and what did the industry look like for women at that time?
My first computer that I have was shared with my ex husband who had decided that that was something that he wanted to get into. He wanted to learn how to fix and repair computers
Which at that point in time you didn't have to have a degree just had to have some experience and practice and usually in a plus certification
That could get your foot in the door somewhere like geek squat or best buyer somewhere to help 10 people's computers
Or even work independently
As he started pittling around with computers and what not that was my introduction to
The idea that maybe I could do that because I would help him learn how to do what he was doing and I would
I would build along with him and tear apart and you know what not
It was kind of like being the only female in a D&D group
Right, where it was really cool that you wanted to be a part of it, but you know, no, you're a place
I wouldn't say that he necessarily had that mentality but over time as we both were learning to
Build our own computers and repair other people's computers and learning a little bit about software and just communications and whatnot
It became more and more apparent that
While it was nice to have a female that could talk the talk
When it got to the point of where I could walk the walk and maybe just a little better than some of the guys
That's when it became kind of a shut down thing all you if it's really isn't
This isn't your niche, you should be looking for something more, you know, something different to do
And it didn't come all at once, it wasn't like a
I'd probably say between like 90s
95, 96 to probably about
2005 and I'm going further than that first marriage because that's where I got introduced to this
But when I moved on and I was in another relationship with somebody who was also in the software side of IT
That mentality was still there of
It's nice, it's cute that you know the girl can do something but leave it to the voice
Right, so we working with other people at that point
It was all independent in 2000 I started working as tech support
It a call center so basically people would call that was 2000 was when everybody wanted to have their own ISP for their business
So that it would draw people to their business
Every store would have a dial up ISP that people could get for free and they could get on to the internet and explore this new world
And it was, it was a new experience
And it was like being able to be in that and it was I only worked there for six months
Because there was a lot of sexism in that industry
And like there was her sexual harassment and other things that were going on that was just not addressed whatsoever
You know inappropriate comments made by co-workers
And people trying to like inner office affairs and other people trying to push affairs and whatnot
It was kind of like females entering the military a few years before account about five or ten years before
Men could not handle women being in the industry that they wanted to dominate
And I know that that's not a popular thing to hear but that's what was going on
Guys trying to in the call center that we're doing tech support way way more poorly than you were as a female
Would sexually harass you to get you to quit so that they could get the promotion within the corporation
And I was actually the first one in our little my ex husband and his little core group of friends to actually get a job in IT at all
And I mean core group there were other people that we knew that worked in different aspects of IT
But I didn't realize it back then, but I realized now that my getting that job actually was an ego blow
Right to and it was kind of the final nail in the coffin of my marriage at that time because
My working in that industry and my doing well even though I was being sexually harassed and bullied in the workplace
By both co-workers and managers of the opposite sex
That was a confidence boost because I was like oh I can do this
Yeah, and maybe I did get bullied out of that position, but I never fully got out of IT
Until about
Two two years ago
Okay, so actually over the years and that span that whole period
What kind of roles did you hold so throughout your IT career and how did your responsibilities above over those years
Well after that particular position until I went into QA in a call center
Every single other position or any sort of work that I did in IT was under the table
And part of startup companies where I would do quality assurance work through
Basically, I worked for a startup company that someone started and had hired and gave my ex-husband
Ownership shares of the company because of the amount of work that he did that so it isn't actually charged for
This was the OSecond husband. Yes, yes, I will not name names. I'm not doing that
But it was great. I loved I learned how to do QA with minimal guidance
At the time I think he was trying to show me that I could actually do something in the IT industry
The problem was during the time that I worked for him to the point in time that I wasn't working for him anymore
It became
The so many people had gotten into IT and so many people were getting degrees in IT that it became
Standard to request that you had at least a bachelor's degree in computer science
To get any role that I had already been doing without any education
How was it being self-taught and how are you treated being someone who was self-taught
Might be like running your career versus someone who'd gone through the degree route
Well, the degree route pot people a standardized version just like most education systems
Teach a standardized way to do things
And because this was IT software developers would create the next big software program or methodology that would
Be the industry standard of quality assurance
Sigma six is what's that and that started in the manufacturing industry
And I have actually done the Sigma six training I worked as a quality assurance analyst or assistant
Associate analyst in a call-centered environment for a company that had I love this company
I think they're really really good
I think as all companies do they make some poor choices and they have to deal with the consequences of them
And I unfortunately because I was contract and was an on full-time permanent not I was working full-time
But I was still contracting and I lost my contract because of a an error in a different department
It's put that way that affected the entire company
But they had a great education suite for their employees
And when you had time off the clock
Or not off the clock but on the clock, but if you had time you could use your lunch break or something to do some studies
And I went through the entire Sigma six training through them
The only thing I didn't do was didn't get certified because that costs a crap ton of money
Here's the thing though
Sigma six is a great quality assurance training for the manufacturing industry
And software that deals with manufacturing that would be great too
But when you're talking about software development and QA and testing and sources and whatnot, there are other options
That I think are just as valuable to be self taught in that
You have to have an element of logic, you have to have an element of tracking your data
There are aspects to that but to be able to get in the quality assurance software industry now
You have to have a degree and you have to have Sigma six training
Okay, so actually back then, would you say my colleagues had an advantage even if they were self taught and didn't have a degree?
Absolutely
I want to keep this a moderate rating for this podcast, but I cannot emphasize enough
But a self taught man could walk in with a resume and what they had experienced
And I could have even better qualifications and that man would still get the job
Okay, so whether moments when you thought that what you contributed to the companies you were at or the situations you were kind of overlooked or minimized at all
Just like every other industry including let's go back to aid a love life
Who gets credited for creating the first computer?
Wasn't it Charles Babbage?
Except for it was aid a love life
Yeah, right did she mail that this is now Mike or so that night she might be invented programming techniques
Where is Babbage was putting the gaze together?
Except for he gets all the credit for it
Right in the geek community, especially within the female geek community
I mean, it's known it's it's put out there, but common knowledge is going to I would almost but if I looked it up on chat GPT right now
Before hers, it would be mentioned, but his name would come up before hers
Right, right, yeah, goes what good is it light of coax unless you can write a program for it?
Exactly. Yeah, my experiences in IT in role plane and anything that was traditionally a male dominated role or
We're not have been taken and put under somebody else's name. I have no way to prove that I have done what I've done in the IT industry
Because it's all been under a man's name
Like I told you that I did 15 years in QA and start up software development company
Yeah, I did all the QA. My name is
No where they are other than a minor portion of ownership shares to a company where that software is not even used anymore
Yeah, actually I'm just thinking and I've got a little smile on my face, but I'm just thinking about those buttons that we worked on for the website for this podcast
And the graphical design for it and
What you did was instrumental, but then I kind of versioned it with CSS or whatever
And you weren't too happy with my version of it and so I ended up
No, I liked your version of it, but it was directly, they say imitation is of the most sincerest form of flattery
As an artist and as a writer in this case, it was a
Direct inspiration of what I created, but it wasn't what I created. Yeah, yeah, if that makes sense
And I'm not mad about it. It looks great
The point I was coming to is if you look at the githy repository, it's got my name when it doesn't have your name at all
The original thing, so it's almost like history repeating itself
You've done the thing that actually was quite the thing is, I don't necessarily need credit for it
But I believe that I should be able to work in an industry that I can prove myself that if you just let me do my job
Yeah, you know
And I think maybe my feelings on that are a little heightened because of my neurodivergence
Because I'm currently sitting in a position where I can't work in that industry and receive a salary that will help support me
And there's a lot of consequences to that, like I can't get in health insurance, I can't get
I can't even work in a job where I'm not physically in pain because I don't qualify
Yeah, I remember when I back in the 90s I worked fairly well known software company
I mean they've changed their name, but then now more well known
Most of the managers were actually female
There was a pretty much a 50-50 mix of men and women working in
I mean more of the programming side of things were maybe favourite being male
But more engagement side of things favourite being female in the mid 90s
Okay
Do you think that and this was in the UK basis in the international company
Do you acknowledge is there a difference in this in the culture of the things between the different countries?
Well, there's a distinction there that you are probably missing
They worked as managers
Were they actually software developers?
Were they actually QA or were they just the people that were the person that could be bullied
Into getting somebody else to do something that they wanted them to do
I think they were managing the projects and the part of their role might have been software development as well
Some of the software as you'd hands on software developers were female
I'm asking this because it's a communications thing
So let's say one of these project managers really wanted to be in the IT industry
They had the IT knowledge
But they couldn't get on as a developer
Right
But they would get hired on as a project manager because the project manager is the person
The person that is the the glue between the stakeholders and what they want financially
But they also want put into the system
And the developers who are like, dude, I'm trying to make what you're telling me you want
But this isn't going to work
The project manager is that communications connoisseur
Who will let the stakeholders know that the developers are doing the best that they can do
And the expectations that they have, however they need a deadline extension
So that they can complete the extra items that you have asked them to put into something they've already developed
And then they have to go back to the developers and be like, the stakeholders want you to, you know, this is a communications thing
It's about somebody who can manage their emotions and not lose their ever living minds
When two distinctly different personalities are disagreeing on how something should be done
The developers look at the world a certain way and the stakeholders look at things a certain way
I'm getting there with this because the stakeholders are mostly men
And the developers are mostly men
If there was a male project manager and any one of those individuals had a bad day or was in their ego
That could cause some serious conflict and it could cause days if not weeks of delay and development
Okay, I've probably there right there repeated one
So what other stereotypes about women in tech that you encounter most often
And how did they sharpen daily work life
stereotypes
In no way could I be more intelligent or more capable than any other man
Like it didn't matter if I did something that was just innovative
That innovation would either be stolen and credited to somebody else that was a male
Or it would be like there's no way you got that from somebody else
What they would you know what forum you know or what you know where did you get that information from that had to have been some guy
It couldn't possibly have been I observed the situation analyzed it
And realized that if we looked at it from a different perspective and tweaked
This by the certain way to make it look a different way it could be more cohesive that way
And any more productive
I think that the other stereotype is and this is something that's
I don't think it's talked about enough is that technology isn't just for the coder
The developers can make amazing things happen
But if they don't make it visually
Accessible
And pleasing to the user who is not a developer
Their code isn't worth anything but to themselves
I've heard it actually said more than once recently that the term user is a bit of a
And if he term and this is something I've thought about
Because you have you have drug users and certainly in my past I've been called a service use a bit of use
Like to health services
Or autism services I've been called a service use and there's always seems to be there's a power imbalance between the user who's forced the use the system
And the developer of the creator who creates the system
Can you think of a better way of framing that that is not just changing terminology but is actually
Generally re-empowering the people who are actually the part of the software being there in the first place
I love the term end user
Because it's the person beyond the developer and the stakeholders that are creating something
So the person is actually going to use it's the end of the line that's the last person that's going to use the software
Or the system or whatever
User isn't a negative term if it's used with the correct definition
You know it's not a user somebody who abuses
The system it's not you know that's not what the term user means
User means the person is interacting
You know if I have a radio a physical radio like we had back in the 80s and 90s and early 2000s
If I had that radio I am the user that turns the knob on that turns the music but then I also tune it
That's not a negative connotation and that's exactly what I mean when you're talking about user in software in hardware
So on and so forth
So I like the term end user because that's the last person in the development process
It's going to use this and that could be multiple people
And the reason I like that is that end user isn't the exact same
It's going to be whoever actually is using the product at any given time
So part of and just to go on to my some of my interests a little bit in this a little bit more
This is perhaps why like things like Linux systems where you're not just assumed to be a user in quotes
You have an equal part and maybe it's because I'm in a privileged position because I understand
I have the ability to actually
Technically tune reengineer even what's in front of me
I'm not just rely and in fact if I'm in it if I'm presented with something where I have no opportunity to customize and reengineer it
I feel like I'm disempowered
I mean is that how you see things or do you think there is a place for just software to be a black box that you just does what it's supposed to
And there's and it doesn't have this openness that you can actually reach open the box reach inside and tinker around with it
I'm trying to formulate a response here because I never considered
Software being static if you will
Like once it's done it's done
Because I don't think that that's how software is
Software is a continual work and progress
So it's hard work for that matter. I mean look how fast new the new latest greatest thing comes in
It seems of it seems a bit paradoxical
Doesn't it that you'd think a proper specific problem could be just solved once and for all solved
And yet we in the world where the problem has to be resolved over and over again by countless
Well, if you were solving for just one user
Then there is an end
There is an end
Software
Incorporates like the accessibility to multiple users multiple individuals who are different ways of thinking ways of learning ways of putting things into practice
So software is an ultimately is an ever changing ever developing thing
At some point in time
It may become antiquated and there's a new development and a new piece of software works better
So in that sense then yes, but then it just doesn't get used
Do you think actually software would be better or would have been better or has become better because there are more
There's more input from that there's to have more gender equality in software production
Actually improves the software in numerous ways
I think that while a younger generation than me of females have and other
Diversity's have gone into education that has taught them
In a sense that gets them into a degree that would allow them to be hired by these
You know companies as a whole because right now self-taught people are not being hired
Unless they have a resume that is consistent and when you are a female who has chosen to prioritize raising your kids
And yet still has worked under the table as QA you don't get that
So these younger women that have come up they have become more vocal about the inequalities
And yet until there is a change how corporate politics are done
That doesn't make it easy to cover up the inequalities
And until we have made more progress in that regard
It will not be fully equal between men and women in the industry
I guess what I'm trying to say is there isn't equality in the industry now
Even though we've come a long way
Okay, so to talk with you, you mentioned there other types of diversity
So for example, how did you balance your neurodivergence with the expectations in the culture of the early 2000s?
I didn't know I was neurodivergent until 2000s
18 or 19
So I think that's a valid question to ask though because I would not when I was working in the call center that I mentioned earlier on
Doing tech support
There were
Triggering to me in that environment
But I think the work from home for call centers things that started in COVID was the best possible thing ever
Because I think that people that work in call centers should be able to be at home
Well, I know that comes with a bunch of other aspects of what if they're not doing their drag ride
There's some issues there that I can expand upon
But I will say that because of the neurodivergence aspect, there are aspects that people that are neurodivergent that could profit from working from home
And that was not something that was even on my radar
Even when my second husband was regularly doing software development jobs from home
It would have never been on my radar that I could have worked from home
With what I had learned and whatnot
And I think a lot of that comes from the aspect of I didn't have the degree
So I kind of let that be the hang up
But the elements that working from home would have allowed me to prosper in the industry
Would have been I could have kept the lights at the level that were comfortable to me
I could have got a blue screen in front of my monitor and what not to be able to be more productive
And not have my eyes weary from staring at a screen all the time
I could stem without causing other people to make comments about my stemming
There's a lot of aspects that
Not knowing I was neurodivergent if I'd had known that maybe I could have been more successful
Because I would have already been able to know how to communicate my different abilities in the way I think and process
And how that manifests where I could have maybe self-advocated that I could prove better
That I was able to do these things
Whether it be QA or even building computers or without having the pressure of being forced to mask in a corporate environment
So if I wanted to work at Best Buy I would have had to be able to work on a computer in an open space where people
Customers could see me working on the computers and I would have felt like I had to
When I'm working on a computer, I'm talking to myself, I'm doing this that and the other
I'm not trying to perform like a corporate stage
That's not how I best build a computer or work with the software or test software
The industry as I started working in building computers and repairing them
My neurodivergence would not have allowed me to be successful in that industry as far as in a store
And that's maybe why it never happened
Yeah
All right, let's move on a little bit
What was the main thing that pushed you to leave the IT space
I couldn't get a QA position
I had been working for 15 years
Yes, I know 15 years is a long time, but it was a startup company
Back company was in the process of restructuring as another company
And I had been doing the software testing and quality assurance
Kind of being kind of go between
I would not label myself as project
Being a position that I performed some project manager role
It's actually just taking a step back
So you were working an IT as you described your working for an internet service provider
And
No
Blue, was it blue space
Who's like.com?
I worked for a call center that did the tech support for BlueLight.com
I think I can say that now because that's long been sent shut down
Yeah, yeah
Like that was back in 2000
Dial up ISPs aren't a thing anymore
Yeah, I mean, I think the telecom providers like would set up as ISPs
But then even you had like supermarkets itself as an ISP
And that's like that
Yeah, that's what I'm saying
Everybody in their dog wanted their own dialogue to get some advertising for their own business
And you also mentioned it's trying to piece these bits to give you also mentioned your building computers
So what context was that?
I mean what who were your customers
At friends
Right people you knew
Friends and friends of friends
It was all mostly under my first husbands
You know, he would build I would build you know
Yeah, so it's like almost like a micro business
Yeah, I was a mom though
Like I was a young mom, you know, I could do all that stuff
And I could do it as a young mom, but I you know
And I'm very I'm very genuine when I say that
I am not bashing him for taking credit for it at this point in time that's so long passed
But I probably did just as much computer builds as he did
For stuff that he had done for other people
It does kind of fall under the I didn't get credit for it aspect of it
But that was the way the industry was at the time
Then you ended up transitioning to you mentioned so tech support was this like first line support or second line support
Or the or you mentioned QA was like like QA within a tech support role
Well the next
role that I had after doing that because I was a stay at home mom and just building computers and studying for my A plus and all that
Was as the tech support for blue light calm
Right that was through a call center
It wasn't directly paid through blue light just clarifying there
So that course into that course into the due when you with calls to do then progress
Did you the escalate calls to another department after handling the call or you had to be like hands on of
Self in the problem self in the technical problems as as they kind as with any call center even today
They want the first line of
You know the first person that takes the call to solve the issue. Yeah, that is the goal
You have to have people that are very very empathetic
And yet able to set very very firm boundaries that you can help take care of their issue
And make them feel confident
You're always going to get somebody that wants to speak to a supervisor or the manager or whatever
My job was to
Help the customer feel confident enough that they didn't need to be escalated to a supervisor
So were you overseeing yeah, so were you overseeing other
Cool handlers or you were handing the calls yourself
Well, when I was speaking earlier about the whole
Sexual harassment in the workplace
Yeah, I never got to that point because I was good. I should have been promoted
But I wasn't because there were other people that were trying to
I was being sexually harassed by different individuals
To make me feel like they were trying to make me seem crazy and erratic in the worst place
So I wouldn't get promoted
Because I was reporting these issues to HR
Okay
Once you get HR involved back then it was a mess
So I never was able to be promoted because of that
Okay, so what your job was to take a call
And tell the customer what they needed to do to solve their specific problem
Okay, so wouldn't
Okay, so an example would be
Best murderals and says
Something's wrong with my cup holder and he helped me fix it
And yes, I know this is a big you know old school geek joke
But it happened
I'm not kidding
And I have to explain to that individual that that was not in fact a cup holder
But if they pulled their cup out of it
And it was still not sliding in and out
Then they would need to take it to get their computer repaired
That was not an issue with the ISP
That wasn't an issue
They needed to actually use that
But the disk in to dial up to the ISP
Yeah, so it's like it was a bit difficult
Because you're not just hand holding people through you dialing up on the modem
You're like basically providing the complete sweet of support
The people need to use the computer in the first place
Because that people just don't distinguish between that
And the technicalities of putting it in the password and a phone number
So you love a particular show
And we watched it together when I was there
And he says, well did you turn it off and turn it back on again?
Yes, Roy says that
That
That was probably the phrase I used the most
During that job
Because you're dealing with a time period when the average individual
If they had enough money to have a computer
And have a phone line could get on to the internet
If they knew how to do it
You know how to use the equipment
And my job mostly was teaching people how to use the computer
So when I was talking about escalating
I wasn't necessarily mean reporting to your manager
About a complaint, I just mean that they were...
Oh, you mean escalating in the call
Yeah, they might have actually been a genuine problem
I mean I noticed unlikely
I actually have been a genuine problem that wasn't just the customer
Not knowing how to do things
But then might actually be a problem with the ISP
I was hoping
Probably clarify you that my job was also to make the customer
Not realize there was a problem
Right, okay
So let's say the ISP was having a glitch and just was not working
It was my job
In three minutes or less by the way
To convince the customer that it was their computers problem
Right, okay
That is what we instructed to do
You're temporarily out of RAM
It's not that we're having a power case that you're temporarily out of RAM
You just have to wait till the RAM subsides a little bit
And then you'll be after dialing
Yeah
Yeah, that was a fun time
Trying to convince people that
I, that's exactly it was a big issue for me
So I would just basically explain to the customer that
They needed to turn their computer off
And let it set for ten minutes and then come back and try
I would say something like that, you know
In ten minutes somebody's going to scroll and do something else
Look it back to it when they get it back to it
And hopefully by then the ISP was back up and they could use it
Yeah, realistically if you have somebody
They'll offer a period of time to do something else away from the computer
They're going to get just at that point in time
They're going to get distracted enough
That the computer can wait
But that was also a time period when
We didn't have a computer being held in our hands
Yeah
Yeah, so you'd been doing that textbook role
That wasn't necessarily QA
So how did that evolve into doing quality assurance?
Well that was a job that I got out of necessity
The call center job was a job I got out of necessity
But trying to be in the IT industry to some degree
My time period of that call center came to an end
Because I literally could not, I want I could not get to work
Because I did not have a vehicle
Two I was also like mentally dealing with the other issues
That I had spoken about before when I misunderstood your comment about escalation
And at that point in time all of that came to a head
And I suddenly found myself in the middle of a separation and divorce
I needed to get a job that I could actually get to
And because I didn't have a car because of the separation
I had to choose to do something else for work
Yeah, I had it QA come about
QA came about when my second husband who
He was a suffered developer when I met him
And had been for quite some time
He was asked by you know I'm trying to remember how he and the creator of the company
Interacted somehow or another he got connected with this gentleman
That had an idea for software but was not a developer himself
And it was for something all I'm going to say is it was for something in the health care wellness bubble
And he started decoding that software for him
And over time they needed somebody my ex husband needed somebody to test the software for him
But they didn't have the funds to pay somebody that had a degree
Or had more experience so he asked me to look at it
And he had been asking me to look at it and trying things out
And eventually he realized I'm pretty good at this because I have
An act of seeing things from different angles and trying things different ways
And he ultimately wound up having me do the QA portion
He would send a bill for his software development stuff
But then there would be a QA invoice as well
And that was just the work I did
It was never officially under my name
And that's how I got into QA
I taught myself how to effectively
Look at every aspect of the software from both a usability and a practicality standpoint
And do test studies and keep data records and whatnot
Okay
We'll continue with this chat in the future episode
Thanks for listening
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording podcast, click on our upload link
to find out how easy it is.
Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by an AnHonestHost.com, the Internet Archive,
rsync.net, and our mirror network.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
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Episode: 4538
Title: HPR Branding
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4538/hpr4538.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:13:28 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4538, for 2025-12-24
Today's show is entitled, "HPR Branding"
The host is Ken Fallon and the duration is 00:09:53
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "Ken explains why the intro and outro are as they are"
Hi everybody, my name is Ken Fallon and you're listening to another episode of Hacker Public Radio.
Today I want to talk to you about the HPR branding because there was a comment on Mastodon where somebody was getting irate over the intro and outro.
Not 100% sure it was related to the intro and outro as we make it or whether somebody else had added on an additional wrapper on top of that.
I tried contacting the person in various different ways and I'm still waiting on them to get back to me.
But if you're listening to this on a platform that is adding additional information other than what is described in this episode,
can you please get in touch with me or any of the other janitors here at HPR with the email address admin at hackerpublicradio.org
or even put a comment here on this episode with a link to the platform and RSS feed.
So first of all, let me explain about the HPR branding, what it is, why we do it.
So the branding itself has got an intro and an outro and mostly I think people are worried about the intro.
So let's talk about the duration.
It'll always be 30 seconds long and in some edge cases it might be slightly longer.
The following table is going to help you put some context on that and it gives the percentage of each show related to the intro length related to the length of the show itself.
So an average show of 29 minutes 30 seconds, it comprises 1.7% of the show.
Of our longest show, 7 hours and 27 minutes, it comprised 0.1% of the show.
And of our shortest show, which is 16 seconds long, it comprised 187.5% of the episode.
But I think keeping it around the 30 seconds is not too bad.
So the generation of the intro is done using the process underscore episode script, which is on our GitLab repository and it pulls down information from the database using the say.php file, which is also on our repository.
The text is created using the Piper text-to-speech engine and we previously used eSpeak and Mary TTS and we're always open to suggestions and how to improve it.
The text is played over the HPR theme music and the theme music is provided by SlickZero without a copyright requirement.
And the arrangement that we're currently using is by Mastiasio.
Apologise for getting that wrong.
And it's released under a Creative Commons share like 4.0 international license.
And the text message itself conforms to the who, what, when, where and why are the five W's as Wikipedia refers to it.
The five W's is a checklist used in journalism to ensure that the lead contains all the essential story points.
As far back as 1913, reporters were thought that the lead should answer these questions about the situation being reported.
So I'll break down each of the components that make up the message that we deliver in the intro and explain which of those that we're addressing.
So with the first sentence, we address what, when and where.
And the first sentence is always, this is hacker public radio episode with the show ID for like Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, then the day, number of the month and the month of the year.
Saying the name of the show at the beginning of an episode is called Establishing Brand Recognition.
It's standard for podcasts, TV, radio shows, as well as broadcast mentions, not to mention pre-rolls in a movie.
We started to do it because some of our visually impaired users appreciated knowing what show is playing.
Now, the same reason can be applied to everyone as the use of visual controlled user interfaces has diminished.
With most people controlling their playlists via headsets, voice controls or just automatic playlists.
Saying the show ID and date is common where there are a lot of episodes, for example, a news or a weather show.
But it is often skipped over in places where the content is sufficient to identify the episode.
For example, the last episode of the Foo Bar podcast or last week's Saturday Night Live.
We include the show ID and date to allow the listener to reference an episode easily.
As we have literally thousands of shows, we need to help people identify which show they're listening to so that it can be easily shared and commented on.
The next sentence is always today's show is entitled and then the title of the episode.
And if the episode is part of a series, we will say it is part of a series and we will always include this show synopsis.
And that covers the what and the why aspect.
This tells the listener what the show is about.
It allows them to skip the episode if they wish.
And they may wish to do that for many reasons.
For example, because they're not interested in the topic,
they may wish to listen to it while they're in front of a computer so that they can reference the accompanying show note.
They might be listening in public and the topic might not be appropriate for general public consumption.
The next part then will either be this is the first show of our new host with the host name,
or this is the multiple of 10 show of host name.
So this is the 10th, 20th, 100th show of host name,
or simply it is hosted by and the person's name.
And that covers the who aspect of the five W's.
We are required by the Creative Commons Attribution Share,
like International CC by SA Licence that we use,
to credit our hosts.
And this is where we do that.
We also think it's important to highlight new hosts especially,
so our community will encourage them to continue to contribute more.
And it is also nice to call out hosts that are contributing a lot
by highlighting each 10th show that they send in.
We continue then saying that,
and it is about so many minutes long.
And this covers the where aspect,
more, yeah, like giving people an idea of the duration.
This tells people how long the show is.
Now, normal broadcasters fit neatly into a standard TV and radio schedule.
They have to do it.
And many podcasters follow the same tradition
of having episode of a predictable length,
30 minutes and an hour.
But there's never been a reason in podcasting to do that.
And HPR places no restriction on them.
That is the effect though, that as we saw earlier,
the shows can range from 16 seconds up to seven and a half hours.
So, depending on the length of your commute,
you do really need to know how long the show is going.
We do include a warning.
Additionally, the six Ws, to be honest.
And we include, it carries a clean flag
or it carries an explicit tag.
And this is common with broadcasters
when dealing with a topic that might be disturbing to some people.
Quite often they'll give a phone number of a support line
that you can contact if it troubles you.
And then back to the what again,
we include the summary saying the summary is,
and we read out the summary.
This also tells the listener what the show is about.
And then finally, we close off in the event
that the show is not released under a Creative Commons CC by SA license.
We say today's show is licensed under a,
maybe a FreeBSD license or something else,
whatever is appropriate.
And that is required by the licensing terms we're releasing episodes.
So, that covers the intro.
There's been lots of discussion about it, as I said.
And then we have the outro.
Same theme music, same length.
Arrangement by Slick Zero and Maestrasio.
So, the voiceover text is recorded by Manon
and there's no copyright applied.
And it goes,
you have been listening to Hacker Public Radio
at hackerpublicradio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
Again, we are saying what you have been listening to
and we're plugging the fact that this is a community podcast
where the shows are recorded by community volunteers.
If you ever thought of recording a podcast, we continue,
then click on the contribute link to find out how easy it really is.
Here we are trying to get hosts in,
trying to keep new episodes,
trying to keep the community alive.
And then we go on to hosting for HPR
has been kindly provided by anhonesthost.com,
the Internet Archive and rsync.net.
And there we're thanking the people who provide
the hosting for our platform,
without which we could not distribute our media.
And then the final de facto,
unless otherwise stated,
today's show is released under a Creative Commons CC by SA license.
Now, a lot of people on other platforms
may not even know what that is.
And this, listening to the Hacker Public Radio podcast,
may be the first introduction to what Creative Commons is,
what free culture is, licensing and they.
So thank you very much for listening
and tune in tomorrow for another exciting episode of Hacker Public.
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording podcast, click on our upload link
to find out how easy it is.
Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by an AnHonestHost.com, the Internet Archive,
rsync.net, and our mirror network.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
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Episode: 4539
Title: YouTube Subscriptions 2025 #11
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4539/hpr4539.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:13:30 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4539, for 2025-12-25
Today's show is entitled, "YouTube Subscriptions 2025 #11"
The host is Ahuka and the duration is 00:18:33
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "Part eleven of my list of subscribed channels"
You are listening to a show from the Reserve Q. We are airing it now because we had free slots that were not filled. This is a community project that needs listeners to contribute shows in order to survive. Please consider recording a show for Hacker Public Radio.
Hello, this is Ahuka. Welcome you to Hacker Public Radio and another exciting episode. And this is coming to you from the Reserve Q. You know what that means. There aren't enough shows being submitted.
Hacker Public Radio is a community project that relies on shows being recorded and submitted by members of the community. And it can only continue to exist as long as that happens.
So, you know, when shows are down, and that's been happening more lately, you know, that's a sign that maybe the community doesn't really want to do this anymore.
Now, if you would like Hacker Public Radio to continue, you need to record some shows and submit them.
So, enough of the public service announcement. I'm continuing with my discussion of the YouTube,
channels that I'm going to do this.
And the next one I'm going to go to is Professor of Rock.
These are generally 20 to 30 minute long videos.
And they come out every day.
Now, that doesn't mean I necessarily listen to or watch each one of these.
But, you know, frequently he's telling a story about something that happened in rock history.
You know, like, one of them was,
Catchy Hit was so happy it irritated the hell out of the band whenever they played it.
Well, okay.
Is that something you want to hear more about?
Rebuked his cheating wife in 1981's song.
It became a classic.
What the hell does this song mean?
Song was so popular MTV quit playing it to give other bands a chance.
Now, a lot of what he does in this is just his own analysis.
But, frequently, he will interview some of the people involved.
And so, he's interviewed a whole lot of musicians.
Primarily musicians.
Sometimes writers and other things.
So, if you're interested in that sort of thing.
If you like knowing about music.
Good.
The next one is Prog Axia.
Now, this is also a music channel.
Devoted, really, just to progressive rock.
And things like that.
So, it's going to be talking about Yes.
And, gentle giant.
King Crimson.
All of those kinds of things.
I happen to love progressive rock.
So, this is a channel that I enjoy subscribing to.
And I enjoy the videos.
Then, there's Quill 18.
This is another one of those channels that is someone who is a gamer.
And does a lot of Civ stuff.
Does other things.
So, in addition to Civ.
You know, he's done things like Disco Elysium.
Path of Exile 2.
Stellaris.
He's been doing a lot of Stellaris lately.
So, then there's Rachel Flowers' music.
Now, Rachel Flowers is a blind musician.
Very good musician.
It's not unusual for a blind person to be a really good musician.
Because, generally, what happens is they are more focused on what they can hear, since they can't see anything.
And, that tends to make them really good musicians.
And, so, she has a channel.
And, you can subscribe to it and listen to the music.
I think she's done a lot with things like Emerson Lake and Palmer and those kinds of things.
She did one video on Little Arabella, which is a song by The Nice.
Now, if you don't know about your history in these things, The Nice is the band that Keith Emerson was in before he formed Emerson Lake and Palmer.
And, so, obviously, she knows that history.
And, then there was a video that she did playing with Dweezil Zappa on one of Zappa's songs.
One of Frank Zappa's songs.
So, I like her stuff.
Then, there is Radio Free Scarro.
Now, Radio Free Scarro is a YouTube channel.
It's also a podcast.
And, the podcast is really just the audio from the YouTube channel.
Now, sometimes they will actually be on camera.
It's three people from Canada who are Doctor Who fans.
And, so, they will do a weekly program.
Generally, an hour or so long.
Sometimes longer.
And, it might be a review.
If there's been a recent episode of Doctor Who for them to review, they'll do that.
Otherwise, they might talk about a topic of some kind.
For instance, one of the older Doctor Who shows, a Patrick Troughton thing called The War Games.
They recently put out a new version that has been edited down to not last as long, but also colorized.
Because, those was done in the days when it was all black and white.
And, so, they did an hour-long program reviewing that.
And, next is the Ralph Towner's channel.
Now, Ralph Towner is a really excellent guitar player, among other things.
Also plays piano.
He's pretty good with that, too.
And, he was in a band called the Paul Winter Consort, going back decades ago.
Then, with three other gentlemen, who were also in the Paul Winter Consort,
they split out and created a group called Oregon,
which was their own and one of my favorite groups.
And, then, Ralph Towner has been doing solo work and recording with other musicians.
For instance, he did an album recently, you know, with Eddie Gomez and Jack Dejeanette.
And, he's recorded with, you know, a number of jazz musicians, you know,
that you would probably recognize.
Andy Middleton, Dave Holland, stuff like that.
And, so, he's got two channels.
One is sort of, you know, about what's going on in his life.
And, the other is the music channel.
And, that puts out videos that were taken of him performing in various places and times.
So, those are usually just little clips.
So, they might range anywhere from five minutes to 15 minutes, depending on how long a piece it is.
The next one is Randy Rainbow.
This is a comedy channel.
And, Randy is pretty outrageous.
I think flamboyantly gay would not be a false description.
And, he does these musical videos.
He does these songs that poke fun at people.
I like it.
Now, the next one is a channel called Real Fast Spanish.
And, this is another one of those channels that helps me with my Spanish.
And, videos are not terribly long.
Generally speaking, you know, 8 to 10 minutes.
Sometimes, as high as 15.
And, it's on a particular topic of some kind.
Like, K versus Qual.
When to use each of those.
They're similar, but they're not identical.
So, knowing when to know which can help.
How to think in Spanish and stop translating in your head.
Este versus esta versus esto.
What is the best translation in each case.
Tener versus haber.
Three ways to use to have verbs in Spanish.
So, you know, if you want to learn Spanish, there might be one to pick up.
Now, the next one is real-time history.
I first found out about these guys when they did, basically, a series on World War I.
And, what happened was, they looked at the calendar and realized, okay, the 100th anniversary is coming up.
So, when I say coming up, they started working on this stuff back in the years prior to 2014.
World War I started in 2014.
But, they started producing ahead of time to get ready.
And, the idea was that what they would do is, they would each week produce, they would each week air a video that covered that specific week in the history of World War I.
So, you know, in August of 1914, as armies were mobilizing.
Well, in the video for that same week in 2014, they would present it like a newscast of, well, here's what's going on.
And, it was really good.
And, what happened was, they finished World War I.
And, then, the group sort of split into two.
Real-time history is one of the offshoots.
And, the other one is Time Ghost.
And, I'm subscribed to both of them.
And, they're both fantastic.
So, real-time history, once they finished that, they started looking at some other things, like the Vietnam War, the Franco-Prussian War, stuff like that.
As well as, just individual videos about a particular topic, like, in World War II, the Battle of the Atlantic.
Or, how the U.S. turned Iran into a dictatorship.
So, very interesting.
They did a long one on Napoleon's invasion of Russia.
Well, the next channel I want to talk about is called Real Life Lore.
And, this is, these videos are generally more than a half hour, but less than an hour.
So, in the 40, 40 to 50 minute range.
And, just takes a particular topic and gives this person's slant on it.
So, why did NATO expand?
And, in the subtitle, what Russia doesn't want you to know about your history.
Another one, why Afghanistan is headed to war with all its neighbors.
Now, occasionally, this channel puts out a short video.
But, those were generally older ones.
They seem to be doing the long form ones now.
Why this part of Africa is erased on every map you see.
And, it's talking about the Western Sahara.
And, it's basically because it's in dispute about who actually controls that and owns it.
So, that's an interesting channel for me.
Next one is Rich Hudson.
And, this is another Doctor Who channel.
Rich was originally on the What Culture Network doing Who Culture.
And, then left and now has his own channel.
Doing much the same thing.
Talking about episodes of Doctor Who.
And, reviewing or analyzing them in various ways.
Then, there's Richie Castellano.
He's a musician.
And, he plays guitar for Blue Oyster Cult.
And, has done some other things as well.
He did some things with the band Geeks.
And, they've done some covers of Yes.
Or, of Bohemian Rhapsody.
So, it's fun.
It's a music channel.
Another music channel.
Rick Beato.
Rick does analysis.
He's had a series on, you know, what are the Spotify, you know, top ten songs on Spotify.
And, he'll play each one of them and comment about whether he thinks they're good or not.
He has been a record producer.
He is a musician himself.
He has a lot of knowledge about music.
And, also, he set up a second channel called Rick Beato 2.
And, that has focused more on interviews with musicians.
So, Steely Dan, in their own words.
An interview with Warren Haynes.
An interview with Rick Rubin about producing Johnny Cash's masterpiece.
He's interviewed all of the members of the police, individually.
So, Andy Summers, Sting, Stuart Copeland.
He's interviewed all of them.
And, so on.
So, and it's very interesting.
He's interviewed a number of jazz musicians.
Like Ron Carter, who is a great jazz bassist.
Or, Brad Meldow, a pianist.
And, because he knows their music, he can start talking technically about what's going on.
You know, to the point of sometimes, you know, talking about the chord changes that they used.
And, I like that kind of music geek.
So, that's Rick Beato.
And, that sounds like enough for another episode.
So, I'll stop it here.
So, this is Ahuka for Hacker Public Radio.
Signing off and encouraging you to support free software.
Bye-bye.
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording podcast, click on our upload link
to find out how easy it is.
Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by an AnHonestHost.com, the Internet Archive,
rsync.net, and our mirror network.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
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Episode: 4540
Title: Arthur C. Clarke: Other Novels, Part 1
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4540/hpr4540.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:13:30 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4540, for 2025-12-26
Today's show is entitled, "Arthur C. Clarke: Other Novels, Part 1"
The host is Ahuka and the duration is 00:14:20
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "A look at some of Arthur C. Clarke's other novels."
Hello, this is Huka welcome you to Hacker Public Radio and another exciting episode in our ongoing
series on science fiction and fantasy and we've been working through some of the works of Arthur
Seek Clark. We looked at two of his big series. Now I want to get back to some of his
other novels of interest. We might get several shows on those and there's just one more series that I can
talk about. But the first thing I want to do is just kind of slip this in as a footnote
so to speak to all of this. Something called the Clark Azimov Treaty. Now this is kind of a in-joke
sort of thing. But the fact is that both Clark and Azimov were well-known for writing both science fiction
and science fact and there was a good nature rivalry between them as result. Now they eventually
settled on something called the Clark Azimov Treaty which explained that if either of them was
ever asked who was the best, they would agree to say that Clark was the best science fiction writer
and that Azimov was the best science fact writer. Of course they were both aware that this was a joke.
They both lost out to Ray Bradbury for the rich row Hugo and of course Robert A. Heinlein was
very active as a writer at this time. But it's a footnote worthy of mentioning and inject a little
humor into the discussion so to speak. So the first novel I want to talk about in this episode is
called the Sands of Mars published in 1951 and it's an early novel of Clark since the date would
suggest. This was later collected in an anonymous omnibus volume called the space trilogy
along with two other novels. Islands in the sky written in 1952 which is a juvenile
is what they call it back then. Now today we would call these young adults and that's a story
about a boy getting to visit a space station and the other novel is Earthlight from 1955 a story
about a spy on a moon observatory. Now the three novels are not in any way related and the title
of the collection can be confusing because there's a much better known space trilogy being that
written by CS Lewis. We may talk about that at some point I don't know. But you know you might see
that you know if you're hunting a used bookstore you might see that space trilogy and now that you
know what's in it you can decide if it's something you'd want to pick up. Now this novel the
Sands of Mars is to me another example of the careful use of the best science of the time though
things have changed since it was written. Now by the time Clark was writing this we had figured out
there weren't any canals on Mars so you don't see any Mars canals appear in the story.
We did see color changes that looked to be seasonal and vegetation was a plausible explanation
for this so we do see vegetation in the novel. The protagonist of the story is a famous science
fixture author named Martin Gibson. He's been invited to travel to Mars as a guest of the crew of
the spaceship Aries and of course Aries is the name of the Greek god equivalent to the Roman god Mars
so it's a natural name for a ship that is devoted to traveling between Earth and Mars.
Now Gibson starts his journey by heading for the space station orbiting Earth before transferring
to the Aries and this is another good example that even in the 1950s Clark had figured out that this
made a lot more sense than trying to lift off directly from the Earth and indeed it is how NASA
plans to move forward though they're looking at a space station orbiting the moon as the gateway to both
the moon and Mars. Now back to the story the most junior member of the crew who is still
training to be an astronaut is assigned to Gibson to answer any of his questions and this provides
an opportunity for what's essentially a flashback of Gibson when he was at university but it plays out
his you know conversations between him and this junior crew member. Well when he was at university
had a relationship with the lady and they broke up and what we find out is of course this young
astronaut trainee is actually Gibson's son from those days. Then they land on Mars and Gibson meets
with the people on Mars. They go exploring outside the colony and meet some native wildlife
which they find munching on vegetation. Now later we discovered that these plants are part of a
secret project that Earth does not know about to add oxygen to the atmosphere of Mars.
Then we learn that the scientists on Mars have a plan to ignite photos and turn it into a second
son to help warm Mars. Now this can be done using a mason resonance reaction which frankly is just
plausible sounding techno babble and if you think hey wait a minute this sounds just like what he did
with Jupiter in 2001 well you can give yourself a gold star. The Gibson is very attracted by what
he has learned on Mars and applies to be a permanent resident he's accepted and has given the
job of selling Mars to the people of Earth pretty much a director of public relations for the planet
which is something a famous science fiction writer should be well qualified to do.
This novel is a good example of a mostly plausible hard science fiction novel of its time.
Some of its extrapolations would be disproved later but when they were written they were plausible
that was put in was definitely impossible. Now the next novel I wanted to discuss here is
the deep range which was published in 1957. Now earlier when we gave a little biographical
information on Clark we mentioned he was very interested in the ocean and in scuba diving.
He in fact moved to Sri Lanka and made some underwater archaeology discoveries there
and it should not be surprising that this interest would show up in his writing.
As has been pointed out by marine scientists we know more about the surface of Mars than we do
about the ocean floor of our own planet. Of course in some sense it's easier to get to Mars
than to get to the ocean floor so perhaps this isn't surprising.
Now the protagonist of this novel is a former astronaut named Walter Franklin.
The reason he is a former astronaut is that an accident happened during a spacewalk that left him
floating and isolated for a long time and the resulting psychic stress gave him the severe case
of aquifobia. This washes him out of any further spacework and permanently separates him from
his family on Mars. On Earth he transfers to the marine division which is responsible for feeding
a major part of the world's population through the farming of plankton and the hurting and slaughter
of whales. Now that last plot would not go over well now in the 21st century from a lot of people
and in the novel it does become a controversial point which Clark takes on directly.
Now the book follows Walter's journey in three parts. The first shows him as a trainee adapting
to his new career choice and in this section he meets a woman who will become his second life
since he's cut off from his first life on Mars. In the second section he has risen from being a
trainee to being a veteran warden and you should think of warden as in game warden.
His job is protecting the whale herds from predators. Mostly these are orchids and sharks
and the wardens patrolled in their single person's subs to manage the herds and protect them.
Then it gets a bit more interesting when a giant squid seems to be praying on the whales
and then there is the giant sea serpent. In the third section of the book Walter is now the
director of the Bureau of Whales and he has to deal with the usual administrative
details you would expect for a director. But then a challenge appears that threatens the very
existence of the Bureau. A Buddhist monk has started a campaign to stop completely the harvesting of
whales even though this represents an eighth of the world's food supply. As this campaign goes on
Walter finds he's starting to come around to agreement with the monk. In the last chapter
Walter and his second wife say goodbye to their son who is going to space where he will meet
up with the family that Walter had to leave behind on Mars. Now this book illustrates the point
that science fiction is about the future and not necessarily space travel and you know they say
you should write what you know and Clark's love of the sea made this the kind of book he had to write.
It's not the only one. Other novels with an ocean setting include Dolphin Island from 1964
which is another juvenile slash young adult novel and the ghost from the Grand Banks 1990 which is
about the Titanic. Now the last one I wanted to discuss in this episode is called The Fountains of Paradise.
1979. This book is about the construction of the first space elevator. The idea is that you could build
a massive structure going from the earth to space and use it to bring materials from the bottom of the
gravity well into space without needing to use rockets. Now Clark puts the other end of this elevator
in a space station located in geosynchronous orbit about 36,000 kilometers above the earth's surface.
One of the prerequisites for this is a new fiber material that is immensely strong and light.
And the opening of the book is in fact a demonstration of such a material which he calls hyperfilament
and described as an I quote continuous pseudo one dimensional diamond crystal.
Now in later interviews he suggested it was more likely to be some kind of carbon tubes
made out of something like Buckminster Fullerry. At present this is perhaps more likely
but most scientists do not see this as practical in any near term way.
And the development of reusable rockets has already reduced the cost for sending materials into space
to the degree that the economic incentive for space elevators has been greatly reduced.
Now the book is mostly concerned with all of the challenges involved in getting this project done.
Some of them are technical but others are more political and social.
This in some ways relates this book to Heinlein's story the man who sold the moon 1950.
The engineering concerns suggest a location on the equator as the earth end of this elevator
and Clark had Sri Lanka in mind for this but in the book he creates a fictionalized version
of Sri Lanka and island he called taprobane. The deals, the details of this fictional island match up
mostly with those of Sri Lanka. There are also two other stories that frame the main story.
One is set in the past and concerns a fictional king Khalidasa and this is based on the stories
of the Sri Lankan King Kashpaya the first. The other story is set in the future and tells
of the first contact with an extraterrestrial civilization. By now there is a circular structure
surrounding the earth and six space elevators connect to it. And in the middle of the story
an uncrewed robotic ship of alien origin passes through the solar system. If this reminds you of
rendezvous with Rama, give yourself another gold star. Now this novel, a fountain's paradise won
the Nebula Award for Best Nothel in 1979 and the Hugo Award for Best Nothel in 1980. I explained this
before but I'll do it again. The Nebula Award is voted on by other science fiction writers.
It's an award by the science fiction writers of the America organization.
And the Hugo Award is voted on by the fans. And the Nebula Award comes out first and Hugo
Award comes out later. So that's why frequently you'll see two different years for these awards.
So anyway that is the story of some of these other novels from Arthur C. Clark.
And this is a hookah for Hacker Public Radio signing off and encouraging you to support
pre-software. Bye-bye!
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording podcast, click on our upload link
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Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by an AnHonestHost.com, the Internet Archive,
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Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
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Episode: 4541
Title: HPR Beer Garden 7 - UK Christmas Ales
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4541/hpr4541.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:13:31 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4541, for 2025-12-29
Today's show is entitled, "HPR Beer Garden 7 - UK Christmas Ales"
The host is Kevie and the duration is 00:22:08
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "Dave, Kevie and Paul talk about UK Christmas beers."
Hello and welcome to Episode 7 of the Beer Garden.
Now you can't expect us to approach Christmas without giving us a great chance to get
some festive beers in.
So I'm really looking forward to this episode.
In fact, it's maybe as a secret, I'm gonna let the cat to the bag, we're gonna have
not one but two Christmas beer episodes.
But before we actually want to talk about this, let us introduce my co-hosts because
it's not just co-host, it is co-hosts.
Dave, how are you tonight?
I am very well thank you, after the slight panic this morning of thinking my car was
there.
It is now back up and running.
But no, I'm doing very well indeed, thank you very much indeed.
Good, good.
No.
I'll tell California, you can try and check out but you can never leave.
So we have drag back Paul for this, how are you tonight Paul?
I'm fantastic, thank you very much, Kelly and good to see you, because last time I was
here, you weren't able to join us sadly.
Yes, I was absolutely full of the cold, yeah, good to see you.
Yes, thank you and welcome back once again to the show.
Thank you very much.
We split this up into two different countries more or less, so tonight we are going to
look at Christmas ails from the UK.
Actually, I found this one really interesting, researching it.
So I found out that for our actual style of British Christmas ails, we've got Charles Dickens
to thanks and in particular the novel, a Christmas carol which was published at first in 1843.
The Victorians only got into the swing of Christmas, and the way we know it now after Charles
Dickens actually gave them his rendition of Christmas through his well-known festive
novel.
Prior to this, Christmas in the UK had not been considered up for always for particularly
pious time for Christian reflection.
However, Dickens had borrowed the lavish feasts from mostly Germanic and Scandinavian
cultures, and of course, and that's where we get the tables full of meat, the rich
buildings, the plum puddings, all of the fantastic vegetables that we're also known
to love, and that thing that always makes us a bit extra at Christmas, the plates are
piled up at higher, and of course, what comes with that, but are lovely beer.
And this beer was a design specifically to cut through the rich food that the season
brought.
And the beer was specifically designed to be strong, it was designed to be spiced, it was
always dark, and it was always at the time, we'd want to say at the time, aim to be stronger
than 10%.
So this is the one that you thought you liked as snooze on Christmas Day.
You have one of this for Christmas dinner, you're going to be snoozing by the fire.
It is also worth noting that at this time, the vast majority of Britons did not touch
wine at all, so the beer was brought in because it was a more British style of drink.
Although this is classed as the Christmas beers of Britain, this was the original birth,
it wasn't actually until the 1980s that the term Christmas beer came into popular use.
That's relatively recent for this style to be called that.
And thankfully it hadn't, but the style almost died of completely following the first
word, where beer taxation laws and brewers were basically forced to water these down
from the post 10% to the sub 3% levels, and this led to a huge lack in popularity because
of these bold, rich flavors were essentially watered down, and it is a bit sad to see when
you think that today, unless you go to a specific beer shop or maybe a special of license
that specializes in craft beer, then realistically the most strongest you're going to get,
is really just going to range between five and seven percent ABV. We have the micro breweries
over the past kind of 30 years rising up, who are actually to thank for actually bringing back
the more traditional style of ale's, let's see. Right, so that is what my research came up with.
Does anybody have anything to add to that? Not from my side, Kerry. It sounds like you've
done a pretty good job in looking into that. Yeah, likewise, I'm not that OFA or up to speed with
Christmas Isles anyway, so I think it's going to be a more of an education for me than the
thing else. Right in, so I've spoken for a long enough, I think. I think it's about time we start
cracking some of these beers open. Now, I think given we've forced them back, I think it's only
right Paul can actually go first here. So Paul, what do you have as your Christmas ale? Well,
I can tell you a story about my Christmas ale because when you invited me last week, I went down
to the supermarket to have a look. Not the supermarket is necessarily the best place to buy craft beer,
but I thought I would try and there was nothing there. So I tried bargain booze and they told me
that they would be having a delivery in a week or two. So I thought, well, that's no good. So I contacted
my daughter who lives in Manchester and she said, oh, I know where I can get Christmas ale from
and she's come back with a selection of over half a dozen. Anyway, while she was doing that,
I was over in Ritham, which is another town quite close to where I live here in Mold. And I was in a
shop there and they actually did have a Christmas ale called Mary X-Mousse from Purple Mousse Brewery
who are based in Port Maddox. So it's a Welsh beer. It's a strong winter ale. They say it's
deep red, has a multi-hoppy winter fruit nose and rich warm molasses taste and it's 5%
a by volume. So yeah, so it's a nice looking beer. I do like the Purple Mousse beers. I
have been entering some of their other varieties as well. So I'm going to crack this open and see what we
have. I'm not sure if you'll get a sound effect, but we'll give it a hand. Yeah, got that. Yeah.
So it isn't pouring out the bottle, which is a good sign. Very nice. So I should hold that up
so they're my colleagues and see it. So it's quite dark. Oh, yes. Probably it looks dark on the
picture actually than it isn't real. But it is a dark red. It does have a very nice nose.
Well that's very nice. I could definitely sit down in front of the fire and have one or two of
those. They're very nice indeed. So I would definitely recommend that and you can buy them online as
well. So Purple Mousse Brewery do have a shop. So I'd definitely recommend giving them a go.
What did you bring Dave? Well, if I show you the bottom of the bottle, you should recognize the
brewery immediately. Yeah. It's in Beadish. It's some peaters. Now I looked around for a number of
different beer pavayers. It is worth pointing out. Forget the supermarket. Particularly this time of
year. There is nothing available in any of the major supermarket at this time of year at all.
Even as we were talking earlier about the delirium, they had delirium on the shelves, but it wasn't
a Christmas one. So I had to resort to Amazon to get this in available in time. Now I actually ordered
two batches. I ordered some from the the Keltel Brewery, which is down in Cornwall. But I ordered
these ones as well because these are the ones I actually wanted to try because it sounded really
nice. So I read the label. Toffee and caramel aromas with rich Christmas spice flavour. And I'm like
that really appealed to me. I have a love hate relationship with a St. Peter's brewery. They look
nice. They smell nice. The bottles look great. But very often they tend not to deliver. Particularly
the plum portal, which is the first one I've ever had and I thought, oh, this is going to be amazing.
Yeah, that definitely goes for one of the most disappointing beers I think I've ever had. It looked
smell of everything and then it was all. Yeah, precisely. So there's some openness. It's a
site say it's a Peter's Christmas aisle. It's 7% which isn't anywhere near the 10 plus that you
mentioned earlier. But hopefully this will, or didn't hear it, here's on the hotel. Oh, smells
boozy. So we get some sound effect. That is an amber ale. No question at all. You can't see that.
That's more of my money from airport interview. No, it's definitely there. Yeah, you can't
kind of see through it. Yeah. You can see my face. They all are a little woo. It looks nice. It's a
little bit of a head on the top. I can smell the spices, but I can't smell much else. Unfortunately,
in the glasses is, is relying even less than the, um, a different the bottle. So let's give this a bit of a
sweet and see. Oh, that is nice. Oh, good. What did I say to that? Topping caramel aromas with rich
Christmas spice flavour. Well, the aromas don't deliver. It doesn't smell of anything at all.
Um, maybe I have COVID. I don't know. But in terms of the flavours of it, there's a lot of spice
in there. And I can't necessarily articulate anything specific. It does a taste Christmasy.
Would you see? Kind of. Does that work? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, kind of. It's not unpleasant at all.
It is actually quite a nice, uh, a nice beer, which I think coming from some Peter's,
they would have to take that as an accolade. But I'm, I'm not getting the topping caramel,
which is a wing. Maybe they're maybe I'm getting the topping caramel, but from the flavour
rather than from the aroma. But yeah, it's, it's very pleasant. Very pleasant. I'm glad I bought
three of them now. I bought three to just to be, to make myself happy that it was as bad as I was
expecting it to be. And on that, on that scope, I've been disappointed. This is quite nice.
Right then. So I've gone, I must admit, I've actually got a few different Christmas
deals. The problem is the vast majority of them aren't what you would call a Christmas sale.
You know, there, there's theme. They're like, I've got a few stouts and a Christmas themed. I've
got barley wines and a Christmas themed. But I actually wanted some of the Christmas deals. So I
kind of went boarding. And that's the reason I asked you Dave, where was yours from? Because I have
gone with a very well-known brewery. Oh, it's life, yeah, it's time to smith. So this one says,
the seasonal beer is a limited edition brew for the short days and long nights of winter. The
full body resulting from fermentation and stone Yorkshire squares and the luxurious multi-character,
which will appeal to a broad range of drinkers, is balanced against a whole dried
fuggle and golden hoops with nuances and complexities that should be contemplated before an open fire.
And I like this. I like this part. I'm sick of all these dirt beers in,
best served chilled nonsense. They served at 11 degrees C. That is better. Do not chill at
a dark beer. I don't chill any beer in my mouth. Don't chill any air. Don't chill your hair
for vids and I kept it cool, right? Not chilled. Right, so let's get this one open. No, okay,
I've got our red ball loop and a bit of a Christmas one, so this is actually my porpy one.
Right, so let's see. Oh, no, no, we're in here as dark as I was expecting.
There we go. This is more than kind of umberial. Nice, decent size head on it.
Quite a lovely quality. No, actually like I said, not what I was expecting at all, but
lovely clarity, decent size head quite a lively yield by the looks of it. So, oh, that reminds me of
something from the nose. Not heavily spice and getting a very well balanced nose. There's
maldiness, barley, and there's hops. There's maybe a faint, very, very faint spice on the
back end. Give me a sec, I'm going to sniff the ball, it'll actually help give me a better one to the
spices. There's more of a toffee node coming through when you sniff the bottle. Definitely a sweet
or no one from the bottle compared to the glass. Oh, that's nice. Yes, I do like that. There's
maldiness to it. I've been scored. There's some half-expecting that burnt caramel to come through.
There's no burnt caramel. But there is a mild caramely taste to it, and then there's a mildly
peppery mildly. I think it's more nutmeg more than cinnamon. And then you could have hoppy
lingeringness on the back end. It's, yeah, that's actually quite, that's not what I was expecting,
but it's very nice. That's deceptively drinkable. I think I could knock that back, would you
what is me? What percentage is this? 6%. So about the average of what is expected, these days
for a Christmas sale. So yes, yeah, I'm certainly going to be finishing off this one. This is not,
no I'm going to end up going down the drain. Good. Is it? But is it what I would consider
Christmas sale? There's spices in it. I'd say it's bordering. To me, it's more like a Christmas
bitter, rather than what I think of a Christmas sale. Which probably does the extent
come in the fact that it's English. They've probably taken a base bitter to start with. Interesting.
Actually, Dave, that's how you think I'm just taking the picture and you're looking directly at the
ball. I'll close that. That's actually really funny.
How would you say it measures up to your expectation of a summer you'll Smith Bear? For a summer you'll
be the quality is there. I mean, I generally like Samuel Smith. The quality is definitely there.
Like I said, just from again, it's probably me being a fan of the Belgians, a fan of the
Scottish Christmas sales. I was expecting a bit more multi-via, a bit more caramelty for me. That's
just my purse. But that was me. It doesn't say that anywhere on the actual bordel.
There's a nice link getting spicy, hopiness in the back end. I actually think this would
actually be really good, I think, with Christmas dinner. Because it wouldn't dominate your dinner,
but it would complement, especially with being Turkey, which isn't overly flavorful. I think it
would complement it quite well. So I would say, especially if you could somebody in the family
who people always tend to bring balls of wine and things like Christmas, if somebody's not a
wine drink and they're a beer drinker, give them this for Christmas dinner. I think they would
really, really be a police to be that. Is that not the test for a Christmas
sales to whether it goes well with a Christmas dinner? I wouldn't say so. No, okay.
Purely because I tend to find Christmas here, they don't go well with anything.
They're so bold and flavorful, after the time. Okay, partially. That means they're more
I kind of, to me, that if you want an equivalent, I would say Christmas sale would be more
equivalent of a port. You'd have it before or after, you know, that kind of beside the fire,
you know, something nice and warm. That kind of idea. That's just me. I don't know. That's 100% right.
You actually preempted me on something I was going to say because having Luke tried this by the way,
actually quite like it. Couldn't explain why. It tasted like an ale, but he couldn't necessarily
pick anything specifically Christmasy out of it. But just poking my nose in now, this given a
chance to settle, I'm getting port. I'm getting the aroma and the back of the throat
flavours of port, which I wasn't expecting. But actually, I'm pleased with it. Yes, I'm so, so
right. So Paul, if you're going to score this out of 10, what would you score? Oh my word, that's terrible.
What's your new, what's your beer's name again? Experts. Mary, ex-muse.
Mary, ex-muse. That's what it was. Yes. 100s or thousands of years ago, when most used to
roam whales, apparently in the summer they would eat, they had them, and that would make them
give them a purple sheen, hence the purple mousse name. I don't know. I mean, obviously,
it was no one around to prove that, so it's a good story, isn't it? You never let the truth
get in the way of a good story. Exactly, you know. Yeah, I would probably give it. I'd
probably give it 9 out of 10. I mean, obviously, as a relative newcomer to untapped and scoring,
but I would buy this again and drink it, definitely. I think it's a very nice beer. Like you say,
how much of it's Christmas-y or how much of it's just a nice, well good-bodied, tasty ale,
because I tend to prefer that type of ale rather than the lighter, you know, kind of honey-ails
and so on, while I will drink them. So this is kind of up my street. I quite like this. So yeah,
I'll give it a good mine at 10, I think. Good, good, good. Dave, what would you score the
Saint Peter's Festival? It's good. I'm enjoying it, so it's at least a three. For me, I'm sorry,
that I'm an untouched farmer, I guess. So it's okay, so it'll get a three.
I just double my in-tapsicles, but a four is a good solid decent beer. What I would actually go
back to. It doesn't quite reach that. So I'm going to rate this on untapped. Three and three quarter,
3.75. So that's come down to about 7.5. Yeah, so 7.5. 7.5. Right, actually, I think that's
what I am on this one roughly. It's, I think this has got the problem in that if I was reviewing
this purely as a beer, any beer subline tasting, I may actually give it a bit more, but the fact
it's called a winter warmer. No, sorry, winter welcome, winter welcome is what it's called.
I've expecting a bit more from it. Is that maybe unfair on my part? And it's not bad. It just
falls short of, I mean, to me, on untapped, four is very, very good, but there's room for improvement,
but it is still very good. Five is just something I really give out. I mean, it has to, I have
going to end the pass, but it has to be something I absolutely love. And three is something I'll say.
That's okay. Two and a half is I didn't pour down the sink, but I didn't particularly enjoy anything
if I thought it's below two and a half. So, you know, going on that, I think this is somewhere
in between, it's okay and it's good. It's, it's neither, it's kind of, in between, it's better than
okay. It's not quite up to the good standard. So I would go that kind of 7.5-ish range as well.
Would I recommend it? Yes, would I recommend you hunt it down and go and pay quite a bit for
no, no, definitely not. And especially given, as we've all found out, Christmas deals right now
are not available in the supermarkets, and I don't have an awful lot of choice for local places
outside the supermarkets, so I had to order this one online. So, yeah, it's, like I said, it's a
solid one. I put it this way, normally I can get Santa's bud porter, which we spoke a bit before,
which, in spite of the name, it does not taste earthly, you know, definitely not. It's a very
pleasant, festive porter. I would have that over this. Yeah. So, yeah, it's a solid, it's a decent,
well, maybe say decent, rather than solid. It's decent, it's a bit of a solid. So, I'm glad we've
all got something we like. I see, I think I do have to perhaps spend some time drinking some
of beers you're drinking, and just look at the comparative scoring on an attempt to get my
calibration a little bit tighter. But I'm going to stick with the score I gave this, and I think it's a
good beer, and I'm going to enjoy it. And I did buy two of them, so I will enjoy the second one as
well at some point in the, not too distant future. Absolutely, absolutely. And it's, it's actually,
it would be quite good to actually hear your thoughts as well, and the other ones are hopefully
up with them on untapped. Hmm. Yes, I'm trying to get in the habit. Yes. I believe you'll not be
with us for the next one, Paul. Is that right you're heading away? That is correct. I'm off to Germany
next Monday, and I'll be away for a week, so I'll miss your next recording, which is a shame,
because I do actually have a delirium Christmas here, which is probably right up your streak,
and is a nice 10%. So, I will enjoy it in, in an, in an abstentia from the show.
Well, you've actually got both myself and Dave's favorites, because you've got delirium for Dave,
and you've got gardens for me. Indeed. I haven't even get that this year. It's better stock everywhere
for me. You see, Manchester has everything. It's my daughter would tell me again and again.
So, if you want to get in contact with us, then please leave a comment, or you can act
generally, tag us on untapped. I'll put little aerodolinks or we're using them in the show notes,
check over there, but thank you once again for joining us, and Joyce Login tomorrow for another
exciting episode of Hacker Public Radio.
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording podcast, click on our upload link
to find out how easy it is.
Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by an AnHonestHost.com, the Internet Archive,
rsync.net, and our mirror network.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
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Episode: 4542
Title: Can Haiku Mumble?
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4542/hpr4542.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:13:34 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4542, for 2025-12-30
Today's show is entitled, "Can Haiku Mumble?"
The host is Claudio Miranda and the duration is 00:10:07
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "Claudio makes good on a promise made during HPR's New Year's Eve Show 2024 and tests Mumble on Haiku"
This is a fun video, this is fun.
Hold on a second.
Ah, much better.
Hello, Hacker Public Radio, this is Claudio Miranda,
and I'm recording this episode for HPR to see if Haiku can mumble.
Now, the reason I'm recording this episode is because
during the Hacker Public Radio New Year's Eve show last year, 2024,
I was wondering if Haiku actually was able to run mumble
in order to be able to connect for the HPR show or to record HPR episodes
or even to just the chat.
And I said I was going to check it out this year,
and it's taken me up until now to record this episode,
so we're going to be testing this.
So I'm sure you're wondering, or not, but I'm going to say it anyway.
What is Haiku?
Aside from a 575 poem, it is an operating system.
It's actually the open source successor to the B operating system
from B incorporated, or it's been shortened as BOS.
It was an operating system that came out in the 90s, early to mid-90s,
and was way ahead of its time with preemptive multitasking
compared to Microsoft Windows or macOS at the time,
which only used cooperative multitasking.
And it almost became the operating system for Macintoshes
when Apple was known as a beleaguered company
until Steve Jobs made an offer to Apple
with his next operating system.
And they ended up purchasing it for much less
than what B was selling it for.
And they got Steve Jobs in the package
as interim CEO and then CEO.
And the rest is history.
That eventually became macOS 10 and today's macOS.
As for B-Inc, B-Inc not having been able to sell to Apple,
tried various other ways to bring BOS to the market,
but it was unsuccessful thanks to a lot of what Microsoft
was doing at the time and with their OEM partners.
But anyway, all of that I'm sure you can find.
I'm going to put it on the show notes
the Wikipedia page for BOS and its history
and also the homepage for Haiku.
So if you want to check it out.
Now I've also included the homepage for Mumble
so that you can be familiar with it in case you're not.
Anyway, so once B-Inc ceased to be
and the B operating system was sold to other companies,
some developers wanted to kind of bring it back
as an open source project,
taking what was already open source
and trying to build off of that
to recreate an open source version of what was BOS.
And it originally became known as OpenBOS,
but then it changed a few names.
And eventually, as the project started to come together
and really take off, it was called Haiku.
It's been around for a good while
and the latest version is R1 Beta 5,
which you can download from the website in the show notes.
But I am using a nightly snapshot.
So this one I have been using
and I updated it to the latest snapshot
for December 19th, 2025.
And that is hrev59233.
So I'm going to go ahead and install Mumble.
First, I'm going to check in Haiku Depot,
which is the graphical software package manager for Haiku.
Let's see if I can find it.
Haiku Depot, there it is.
Now, you'll find a number of apps here
that have been ported over since.
The project is quite old at this point.
I guess you can say it's around 20 years old at this point.
So I would say it's pretty mature,
even though it is still in beta form.
Quite usable.
It's a single-user operating system.
So that's the way it was designed.
They wanted to keep that as the...
They wanted to keep that...
The Haiku developers wanted to keep that
as one of the features of the operating system,
even though it's...
They wanted to keep it more as a personal operating system,
as opposed to having it be multi-user.
So anyway, back to Haiku Depot.
Searching for Mumble.
And there it is on the list.
I already have it installed.
The version in here is 1.5.634-1.
So that's already installed.
And I'm going to set it up right now.
Oh, one other thing that I wanted to say
is that there's also a command line package...
PackageManager command called pkgman
that works very much like apt on Linux,
on Debian-based systems.
So if you do a packageman-h,
it should give you all the commands.
But there's both ways to do it.
So let's go ahead and launch Mumble.
I already have it installed, as I said.
All right, Mumble here.
Now, initially, what it will...
It may go through the...
Because I've already sort of set this up
on this installation of Haiku.
You may get the audio wizard.
Now, one of the things...
Because I like to use push-to-talk.
And I recommend that everybody does as well.
And I think for the HPR New Year's Eve show,
this is required.
You can go through that.
But the problem is that
when you get to the part of push-to-talk,
when you want to add the keys to use
to trigger push-to-talk,
it doesn't really work.
So what I'm going to do first,
I'm going to connect here
to the Mumble server,
which for the HPR,
which is chatter.skyhaven.net.
Okay.
I'm going to add new
when I want to connect to the server.
And then I will put that there.
The port is 64738.
My name is Claudio M.
And then select connect.
Oh, okay.
Sorry.
Once I have that set,
I'm going to select
chatter.skyhaven.net.
Connect.
And I should be connected.
It says server connected.
Perfect.
So I'm going to set up push-to-talk.
I'm going to go to configure.
Settings.
And I'm going to go to audio input.
And where it says transmission,
I'm going to set it to push-to-talk.
And then when I scroll down,
because for whatever reason
this has the audio cue,
I disable that for push-to-talk
because it's very annoying.
So once you have that set,
say okay.
Oh, one other thing that I set also
because you can't configure the keys.
There is, under transmission,
there is a box to check
that says display push-to-talk window.
It basically opens a little window
where you push it
and it activates push-to-talk.
So I have that somewhere
in the window here.
Sounds.
So I'm going to move my user,
my username,
over to the audio test section
so that I get the repeater.
Okay, it's all set up.
I have the mimic-claudio-m user there now.
And I'm going to test it out.
And you should be able to hear it.
Testing, one, two, three.
Takes a little longer.
Testing, one, two, three.
And there you go.
So push-to-talk is working on this.
Mumble is working.
I can actually set up a Haiku machine
and with Mumble
to connect to the HPR
Mumble server
so that I can chit-chat with everybody
when the HPR New Year's Eve 2025 show kicks in.
So that's it.
It works.
Mumble, HPR,
HPR.
Haiku can mumble.
Yes, it can.
And hopefully my mumbling in the beginning
didn't distract you.
Like I said,
I have all the information here in the show notes
including the link for the HPR New Year's Eve show
and also the page on how to connect
to the HPR community room using Mumble
because that one's not directly linked
on the HPR New Year's Eve show page.
So it's all going to be there.
Hopefully one of the janitors
will see if they can modify that
or make it easily available for visitors.
Anyway, it's going to do it for me.
This has been Claudio Miranda
and tune in next time
for another exciting episode
of Hacker Public Radio.
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording podcast, click on our upload link
to find out how easy it is.
Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by an AnHonestHost.com, the Internet Archive,
rsync.net, and our mirror network.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
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Episode: 4543
Title: Nuclear Reactor Technology - Ep 3 Reactor Basics
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4543/hpr4543.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:13:36 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4543, for 2025-12-31
Today's show is entitled, "Nuclear Reactor Technology - Ep 3 Reactor Basics"
The host is Whiskeyjack and the duration is 00:11:22
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "Basic features of reactors and descriptions of the most widely used commercial reactor types."
This episode is a third in an eight-part series on nuclear reactor technology.
In the previous episode, we covered types of nuclear fuel, recycling of nuclear fuel, uranium
and thorium resources, and medical isotopes.
In this episode, we will describe the basic features and characteristics of reactors
together with descriptions of the most widely used commercial reactor types.
All commercial power-efficient reactors use similar principles, a nuclear reaction
in the fuel generates heat.
The heat is carried away by a coolant to a turbine which spends a generator to create electricity.
Fast versus slow reactors, reactors can be placed into more or less two categories,
fast and slow or thermal reactors, the latitude terms are equivalent.
The term refers to the type of nuclear-efficient reaction which predominates in the reactor.
Slow neutron reactors, slow or thermal reactors use slow or thermal neutrons.
Slow neutron reactors are by far the most common type in commercial service.
They are cheaper and easier to build and operate.
However, they can only use a small part of the nuclear fuel.
With a straightforward uranium fuel, they can only use the U-235 isotope, plus part of any
plutonium which is created during the reaction.
With uranium plutonium mox fuel, they can use the physal plutonium isotopes, but not the others.
Some U-238 will be converted to physal plutonium, and then consumed in the reaction, but for
most reactor types, the majority of the energy comes from the U-235.
Thorium plutonium, or Thorium uranium mox fuel, can be used as slow reactors, but the fuel
cycle requires a continual input of fresh physal fuel, plutonium in most proposals, from
uranium cycle reactors.
Nearly all commercial power reactors have been some form of slow reactor.
Fast neutron reactors, fast reactors use fast neutrons.
Fast reactors can use fuel more efficiently, but a more complex and expensive to build
and operate.
At least, some designs of fast reactors can produce more plutonium from U-238 than they
consume.
This allows a fast reactor to produce plutonium for several slow reactors using uranium
or Thorium-based mox fuel.
Only a small number of fast reactors have been built.
The commercialization of fast reactors will probably depend upon uranium becoming much
more expensive and so making recycling a few more attractive.
At present, uranium is so abundant and cheap that there isn't a lot of incentive to
economize on it.
Some most fuel is used in a one-through fuel cycle.
A reactor moderators, a moderator is a material that is used to slow down neutrons so
they are more likely to react with the nuclear items in the fuel.
Some sort of moderator is normally required to have a self-sustaining reaction for slow
neutron reactors.
The main moderator materials are water, heavy water, and graphite.
Fast reactors do not use a moderator, instead they use the unmotorated fast neutrons directly.
However, this means that fast reactors must be built from materials which won't unintentionally
moderate the reaction.
Light water.
Ordinary water is commonly referred to as light water to distinguish it from heavy water.
Light water is a moderately good moderator, although not as good as some of the common alternatives.
Reactors using light water as a moderator must use enriched uranium as fuel.
Heavy water.
Heavy water differs from ordinary water, and that is molecules contain heavy hydrogen,
more commonly known as deuterium.
While regular hydrogen has a nucleus containing only a proton, deuterium has a proton
and a neutron.
Deuterium is often used in the industry to refer to heavy water, although technically
it's only the hydrogen atoms which are deuterium.
Deuterium is extracted from normal water, but any of several different processes which
I won't go into here.
Heavy water is a very efficient moderator.
Due to this, reactors using heavy water moderators can be fueled on natural unenriched uranium.
Some proposed designs have used slightly enriched uranium, but this is just to reduce the
size of the reactor.
Graphite.
Graphite is a form of carbon.
Graphite is also a good moderator.
Reactors using a graphite moderator can also be fueled on natural uranium.
However, some graphite moderated reactors have used enriched uranium.
Unmoderated.
As mentioned previously, fast reactors not use a moderator as they use fast neutrons directly
in the reaction.
Coolants.
In commercial-fission power reactors, the nuclear reactions used to produce heat.
This heat is then usually used to boil water to produce steam, which a steam being used
to drive a steam turbine, which spins a generator to produce electricity.
Common coolants.
The common coolants in commercial-fission power reactors are light water, heavy water, or
a gas such as helium or carbon dioxide.
Alternative coolants.
Some alternative coolants which have been tried or proposed are a liquid metal of some
sort, an organic oil-coolant, molten salt.
Depending on the design, a reactor may use the same material for the coolant as it used
for the moderator, or they may be different.
Primary and secondary coolant loops.
The primary coolant is the coolant that comes in direct contact with the nuclear fuel
assemblies.
In many reactor types, this coolant is then passed through a heat exchanger to heat a secondary
coolant.
The secondary coolant will then typically be turned into steam to drive a turbine.
The primary and secondary coolant may be the same material or different materials.
The secondary coolant is usually light water.
Some reactor types do not have a secondary coolant loop.
Instead, they boil water directly in the reactor, and this steam is then passed directly
to the steam turbines.
Steam generation.
Most commercial power reactors are used to generate steam, which is used to drive a turbine,
which in terms spins a generator to make electricity.
The steam is normally created in one of two ways.
By far, the most common way is to run the hot coolant through a heat exchanger, known
as a steam generator.
The coolant boils the water in the steam generator.
The steam is then used to drive a turbine.
The steam that runs through the turbine is kept separate from the coolant material, and
the water that goes through the turbine never passes through the reactor itself.
This is the most common design.
The other common method is to allow the coolant water in the reactor to boil, and
then using that steam to directly to drive a turbine.
Braton cycle gas turbines.
An alternative to steam turbines is to use a hot gas such as helium to drive a gas turbine
directly.
This is called a Braton cycle.
That's BR-A-Y-T-O-N.
This removes the need to have steam generation equipment, but the very hot gas presents
other difficulties in terms of materials and design.
Braton cycle turbines have seen very little use in nuclear power.
Refueling method.
The uranium fuel must be replaced on a regular basis, with the fuel lasting no more than
a couple of years or so.
Offline refueling refers to shutting down the reactor to replace the fuel.
Online refueling refers to refueling a reactor continuously while it is in operation.
Refueling method used is determined by the reactor's design.
Main commercial reactor types.
The following gives a brief overview of the most common commercial reactor types.
I will cover the less common models, including some more unusual ones, later on in other
episodes.
PWR.
Percerized water reactor.
This is the most widely used style of commercial power reactor.
The name is usually abbreviated as PWR.
These are made by a number of companies in a wide variety of countries around the world.
It is characterized by the following features.
The moderator is light water.
The coolant is also light water.
The moderator and coolant are mixed together.
There is no distinguishing between them.
Steam is generated in a separate steam generator and does not boil in the reactor.
It uses enriched fuel, usually 3 to 5% uranium 235.
Refueling is conducted offline with the reactor shut down.
The reactor itself is a large metal pot called the reactor vessel, containing the fuel,
moderator, and coolant altogether.
PWR.
Boiling water reactor.
This is less common than the PWR, but there are a large number of them.
The name is generally abbreviated as PWR.
There are most common in the USA.
A PWR is very similar to a PWR, with the exception that the primary coolant is
allowed to boil in the reactor vessel and then drives a steam turbine directly.
There is no steam generator or secondary coolant.
Other than this, the PWR and PWR are very similar.
PHWR, pressurized heavy water reactor.
This is also known as a can-do reactor named after the most common model.
It was developed in Canada and also used by a number of other countries in Europe, Asia,
and South America.
India developed their own version based on Canadian technology and these are used in India.
It is characterized by the following features.
The moderator is heavy water, the coolant is also heavy water.
The moderator and coolant are kept separate and do not mix.
Steam is created in a separate steam generator and does not boil in the reactor.
It uses natural uranium fuel, no enrichment is required.
The reactor itself is a set of hundreds of separate pressure tubes,
running through large, un-pressurized tank of heavy water, known as the Kalandria.
Re-fielding is conducted online with the reactor running at full power by depressurizing
one-two at a time.
The Kalandria contains the moderator.
The heavy water in the Kalandria remains that ambient temperature and is not heated.
The fuel is in the pressure tubes in fuel bundles.
These fuel bundles are much shorter than the fuel rods used in PWRs or BWRs.
The coolant runs through the pressure tubes around the fuel bundles.
The reactor design is very flexible in terms of the sort of fuel it could run on due
to its excellent neutron economy.
Conclusion We have covered the main reactor characteristics.
These characteristics can be mixed in various ways to give different reactor types.
The characteristics also affect the type of fuel that can be used.
We also covered the three main commercial power generation reactor types.
In the next episode, we will describe some of the less common historical reactor types.
This concludes the third episode of an eight-part series on nuclear reactor technology.
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording podcast, click on our upload link
to find out how easy it is.
Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by an AnHonestHost.com, the Internet Archive,
rsync.net, and our mirror network.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
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Episode: 4544
Title: Uncommon Commands, Episode 2
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4544/hpr4544.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:13:38 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4544, for 2026-01-01
Today's show is entitled, "Uncommon Commands, Episode 2"
The host is Deltaray and the duration is 00:11:49
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "A summary of four commands, mtr, scrot, zless, and last"
Hello and welcome to Hacker Public Radio in Episode 2 of the Uncommon Command series.
The first command I want to mention in this episode is MTR.
You've probably used the pink command before to check to see if your network is working.
Back in the day I used to ping Yahoo.com all the time and it seemed like a lot of other
people like to use them too based on tutorials and presentations and documentation at
the time.
I suspect I picked up on the practice from some tutorial website somewhere or some colleague
back in the days of my early career.
I always wondered if Yahoo received so many ICMP Echo requests from around the internet
that they had to dedicate a person to deal with all that traffic.
Along the same lines as Ping, you may have also seen or used the Tracerout Command.
This is another network connectivity diagnostics program that has been around since the
early days of the internet.
It's fun to see the path that your packets take from your house or to get to various
websites and destinations around the globe.
One time someone even made a special Tracerout destination that listed out the opening
crawling text from Star Wars.
That host is long gone, but you can try running a Tracerout against another host called
bad dot horse for a similar experience.
After tracing to the destination it should cycle through a list of host that are the
lyrics to the song Bad Horse.
Just make sure that you give enough hops to get through the whole song.
Use the dash M option with it like this.
Tracerout space-M space 100 space bad dot horse.
To build on the functionality of Tracerout there's another program called MTR that isn't
as well known, but was created back in 1997 by Matt Kimball.
It originally stood for Matt's Tracerout.
In 1998 Roger Wolf took over the development, changed the meaning to my Tracerout, however
according to the GitHub repo Matt Kimball still involved with the development.
Instead of just being another Tracerout program, MTR combines the functionality of Tracerout
in ping with a real time display to create something new.
By using the EndCurse's library to draw on your terminal, MTR takes over your terminal
and instead of just a static printout it shows each leg of the journey and updates the
statistics to that leg and the host in real time.
This allows you to monitor over time and better pinpoint where the problem might be.
To start the program simply type MTR followed by the destination host name or IP address.
We can use Yahoo.com as our target.
If you're using Linux as your desktop and want to force MTR to run inside the terminal,
then use the dash T option for terminal or text, however you want to remember it.
So use the command MTR Space-T Space Yahoo.com.
It should open a Curse's Base 2E Interface or TUI Interface and start tracing through
the host to Yahoo.com.
One advantage you might notice depending on the path is that while Tracerout would stall
at any host that doesn't reply to an ICMP request, MTR will skip that host and come back
to it each cycle so you can see the complete path right away even if you don't get all
the routers to respond to you.
At each hop it will give you statistics to the router such as packet lost and round trip
ping time.
This can help you narrow down where a problem might be.
One thing to keep in mind through those that a lot of routers are set up to either ignore
ICMP requests like this or deprioratize them.
So packet loss at a router might not truly indicate the source of the problem.
It's more art than science, but it's definitely interesting and great for showing off.
Across the top you'll see a list of options.
One of which is display mode which you can cycle through the display modes by pressing
the letter D. This will give you a few different types of histograms which can show you
your connectivity metrics over time.
You can press the R key to reset the statistics and to quit MTR you can just press Q or Control
C.
The next command I'd like to talk about is Scroat or Scrot or however you want to pronounce it.
It's a screen capture utility for the command line.
It's spelled SCROT to use it from X Windows you simply run Scrot.
By default with no arguments it creates a screenshot of the whole screen and saves it to
a file according to the current date and time including seconds and the resolution of the
image captured.
It also saves as a PNG image type file by default for lossless capture of data.
But why take screenshots?
Well they are often useful for capturing a program you're having trouble with on your
system so that you can share it with tech support or some tech forum where you're trying to
show what you're seeing.
If you're helping a colleague friend or relative with their problem you might
ask them to take a screenshot so that you can see what they are seeing.
Or you might take a screenshot of your own to share it with them so you can show them what you're seeing.
Given the dynamic nature of computing it can also be useful to preserve history by
taking screenshots of web pages, applications, desktops and so on as they are prone to change
over time and they might not be possible layer to see the previous functionality or recreate it.
They also are more accepted as a form of proof although of course it's not that hard to
fake screenshots so your mileage may vary on trying to convince somebody.
It might also just be for nostalgic purposes so that you can go back later and remember
what your computing experience used to be like.
Scrot was originally written by Tom Gilbert and released on October 26th of the year 2000.
I first discovered it in 2012 when somebody recommended it to me so it's been around for a long time.
There are other screenshot programs out there as well but I find Scrot to be
nice minimal and scriptable through shell scripts of your own.
However, if you want more functionality you might look at a program called FlameShot,
spelled FL-A-M-E-S-H-O-T which allows command line control as well and has a nice compact on-screen
menu for quickly making changes and annotations that you're likely to make with a screenshot.
The next command is Zless.
Sooner or later you'll encounter a compressed file that you'd like to view or search in.
For me it's usually a rotated log file from a previous month that has been compressed.
But it's kind of a pain to have to decompress the file just to work with it and you might not even
have enough space when your storage to decompress it. This is where the command Zless comes in.
With a Zless you can view a file that has been compressed with GZIP.
Zless works by decompressing part of the file in memory. This way you don't create a new file in the
disk and don't modify the original file. You can do most of the things that less can do so it's very
handy when working with GZIP compressed files. But that's not the only command in the set of
commands. There's also Z-Grepp which allows you to prep transparently on GZi compressed files as well.
And there's also Z-More and Z-Cat and Z-Diff and Z-CMP which are the GZi compression counterparts
to the cat-diff and CMP programs respectively. These programs are part of the GNU version of the
GZIP package and should be installed when you install GZIP. But wait there's more. There are also similar
programs for other types of open source compression formats such as BZIP 2 format and the newer
XZ format. Instead of pre-fixing each command with Z you would instead use BZ or XZ as pre-fixes
to the same commands mentioned previously. So for example, BZ-Less and XZ-Less.
According to an early change log from the GNU GZIP source, Z-Less and some of the other
related scripts were first added to the GZIP source on October 14, 1998 by Paul Eger.
They might have an earlier origin though. And finally, but not least, we have the last command. I
literally mean a command that's called last LATST. This program has its origins from the early days
of Unix when systems ran on big monolithic servers that many people logged into from teletype
terminals and video terminals. It was very helpful to system administrators or curious users as to who
recently had logged into a system. To use last, you simply can run it and it will print every entry
in its log. But that can be somewhat overwhelming depending on your log rotation schedule or
popularity of the machine. So you might want to at least supply it with a username to search for
or an argument like the word reboot to see the previous reboot times in the log. You can also
limit the number of entries shown by specifying an option of a dash followed by a number. So dash 10
would show the last 10 log in. In the output of the command, you'll see multiple columns. First,
the username followed by the terminal device they're attached to. If the connection was from
a remote system, the next column will be an IP address. If it's local, you might see colon 0,
if it's say a x-windows log in. The last column showed the initial log in date and log out
time followed by an elapsed time. If the user was logged in over multiple days, you'll see something
like the number of days plus the hours and minutes. In my research of the Unix Heritage website at
TUHS.org, I found that the program last was originally written in February of 1979 by Howard Katseff
and included in the second release of the Berkeley software distribution or BSD back in May of 1979.
After some extensive digging and older versions of the Wikipedia article for UTIL dash Linux
and using Archive.org, I found that the version of last used in Linux distributions was originally
ported in late 1992 by Michael Hart with some changes by Peter Orbeck. Sorry if I don't get those names
right. Both of these people seem to work on this at the start of their careers at the time.
The package it was included in was originally called ADM UTIL, but later became part of UTIL Linux
and then in the late 2000s, UTIL Linux dash NG after development of UTIL Linux Stoll.
Thanks for listening today as we cover some uncommon commands. If you have a favorite use for
one of these commands I mentioned, I'd love to hear about it in the comments on the HDR website.
Take care and I'll talk to you again soon. Bye.
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording podcast, click on our upload link
to find out how easy it is.
Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by an AnHonestHost.com, the Internet Archive,
rsync.net, and our mirror network.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
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Episode: 4545
Title: YouTube Subscriptions 2025 #12
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4545/hpr4545.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:13:40 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4545, for 2026-01-02
Today's show is entitled, "YouTube Subscriptions 2025 #12"
The host is Ahuka and the duration is 00:16:28
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "Part twelve of my list of subscribed channels"
You are listening to a show from the Reserve Q. We are airing it now because we had
free slots that were not filled. This is a community project that needs listeners to contribute
shows in order to survive. Please consider recording a show for Hacker Public Radio.
Hello, this is Ahooga for Hacker Public Radio. Welcome in you to another exciting episode.
And this is coming to you from the Reserve Q. So you know what that means? We're not getting
enough shows submitted. Hacker Public Radio is a community project that relies on members
of the community to record and submit shows. If that doesn't happen at some point, we
shut the whole thing down. I don't want that to happen. I'm assuming if you're subscribed,
you don't want that to happen either. So record a show and submit it. It's really
not that hard. So with the public service announcement out of the way, I'm going to
continue with my discussion of YouTube channels that I subscribe to. And I'm going to start
this one with Rick Steve's travel. Now Rick Steve is a travel writer. Also has a company
that leads tours primarily Europe. In fact, the company is called Rick Steve's Europe.
So these are a series of videos. They're long. So typically an hour and a half to two hours
at a time. So some of them might be check favorites beyond Prague, Normandy and D. D. B.
Which is Toledo in Spain. Ethical traveling in a warming world, Norway in a nutshell, you
know, all of these are over an hour. Now they come out once a week. I will sometimes skip
one. If I don't have the time, he's also got the Rick Steve's Europe channel by itself. And this
is the primarily the short form, relatively short. So a lot of these are like 25 minutes. And I
think what they are is rebroadcasts of the television show. In the United States, he's got a
program that heirs on the public broadcast system, PBS, called Rick Steve's Europe. So this is,
I think mostly just rebroadcasting those programs. There's a lot of them by now. He's been doing this
for years. The next channel I'm going to mention is Ringo Star. Yes, the ex beetle. So this is
partly news. If he has a new release, he may release a music video to go with the new song.
Typically, though, it's mostly just short stuff. And maybe four or five minutes max.
So then there's Robert Reich. Robert Reich was the Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration
and this is another one of my news and politics things. He's a observer of what's going on in
comments on political developments in the United States. Now, these can vary between short and long.
So he did one like the ten biggest myths about our economy that was close to a half hour,
that he did one, why the super rich are killing social security. And that was like four minutes long.
So a little variety there. On the next one is called Rob words. Rob is the name of the host.
And he's a word geek. What that means is that he is taking a look at some of the interesting
things about language. These are typically in the 20 minute or so range, 17 to 23 kind of thing.
So one of them was the worst English phrase book ever written. That was interesting.
Did Shakespeare invent as many words as people claim? Untranslatable French words.
Words, the Vikings left behind. Old Norse words that are still in English.
Did one on the alphabet, the origin of all of these letters? And so on.
Okay, next channel is Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. That's the official channel.
So usually it's going to be stuff about the induction ceremonies and who's getting inducted each year.
So it's kind of a news channel as much as anything.
Then there's Rowan J. Coleman. And he does what he calls in-depth retrospective reviews on science fiction
and superheroes and stuff like that. So he's talking about visuals stuff. TV movies, things like that.
Review and analysis. So might be Star Trek, Babylon 5, Robo Cop, Red Warp, and so on.
Then there's Royal Caribbean blog and Royal Caribbean is a cruise line. So this is about cruising.
These are, again, you know, probably about 10 minutes long. It comes out about once a week.
Things not to do on a cruise. The five big changes coming to Royal Caribbean in 2025.
How much do I tip everyone on a cruise? I'm not sure if this is actually an official one or
there's just some guy decided to do it because it reads like it's just some guy deciding to do it.
On the other hand, I've got to assume he's got some kind of relationship with Royal Caribbean
cruise line that enables him to do it, otherwise he'd probably get a cease and desist.
But there you have it. Then the Sabaton history. Sabaton is a Swedish heavy metal band and a lot of
their songs, possibly all of them. I'm not an expert. I have to do with war and related topics.
So the Sabaton history channel is hosted by Indy NIDAL. Now Indy NIDAL was the host of the World War
one series that we talked about when we were looking at real-time history. He's one of the people
that split off and is now hosting videos on time ghost, which we will get to because I'm going
through this thing alphabetical order. So he's the host of the Sabaton history channel and
so it will usually be a discussion of something in history and then there's a Sabaton song.
It's about that and then he'll talk to one of the members of the group and say, okay, when you wrote
this song, what were you trying to do, what were you thinking about? Then there's the next channel
be Sassy Gamer Lady and this is another one of those Gamer channels. Now she does a number of things
but occasionally Civ will be a part of that and so it's mostly the Civ that I'm interested in.
Then science news channel. Science news is a publication that for a long time has been coming,
it's been published in the United States for decades. I think it traces itself back to the
beginning of the 20th century. They had been publishing by weekly and I think in just now with
2025, they may have just switched to monthly because I just got a very different looking publication
that says it's the January issue. So if the publication is all about what's in the news and science,
very good stuff. The videos are really short. So when I say short, I mean typically less than a minute,
occasionally just over that but like see a vampire bat working out on a treadmill.
An animation one, how Pluto met its largest moon Karen.
Watch an Ethiopian wolf slurp nectar from a flower. Here's what work is praying on a whale shark looks
like. So and all of these are like you know 30 seconds long kind of thing. So just a short little thing.
Then there's science at NASA, another one of the NASA ones and this is from the Science Mission
Directorate. So it's talk about the science work that NASA is doing and that could be
experiments conducted in space or it could have to do with developing new scientific instruments
or what have you. Something going on on a space station could come on this channel but it's
basically science oriented. And there's a channel that I could probably drop at this point because
I don't think the the host is doing anything any more because he switched to a different name
channel. This channel is called scienceium an element of knowledge and the Derek the host
now has a channel called veritasium and seems to be doing everything over there. But there were some
a few good videos there. Then there's the Sci-Fi channel. Sci-Fi is short for science Friday and in the
United States that is a radio program that is on national public radio or American public radio.
I'm not sure either. I'm not never entirely sure what the difference is but it's a public radio
program. It's also a podcast and it's a YouTube channel and what they do on the YouTube channel is
usually somewhat shorter form. So you know we could be talking about anything from a couple of
minutes to seven or eight minutes occasionally something longer. They have a Sci-Fi book club and
that can engender longer videos because I have a group of people talking about a particular book
so that can go on longer. But most of these tend to be anywhere from a few minutes up to like 15 minutes.
And then there is Sci-Show. Sci-Show is another complexly
product and it's just a YouTube channel devoted to science. So these are the same people behind crash
course. They're the people that got involved with PBS digital and this is their specifically science
related channel and then they split out a couple after that. So there's also Sci-Show Psych
which is all about psychology. I haven't seen anything lately from them so I'm not sure if
they're still doing it or if it's on hiatus and then there's Sci-Show Space which is specifically
about space and that does seem to still produce a few things. So like they did one a few months back
about black holes and then there is security now. This is the twit network. This is the one with Steve
Gibson and I sort of just check in. Those are so long. The average video there seems to be at least
two hours long and I don't often have that much time but the nice thing is in the show notes they
list all of the topics. So what I tend to do is I scan that first and say okay is there anything
here I really want to know about. And you know frequently it is the case that I look at and say
nothing that's going to compel me to dig into a two hour long program. So I think that's enough
for this. This is a hookah for Hacker Public Radio signing off and it's always encouraging you
to support free software. Bye bye.
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording podcast, click on our upload link
to find out how easy it is.
Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by an AnHonestHost.com, the Internet Archive,
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Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
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Episode: 4546
Title: HPR Community News for December 2025
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4546/hpr4546.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:13:43 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4546, for 2026-01-05
Today's show is entitled, "HPR Community News for December 2025"
The host is HPR Volunteers and the duration is 01:32:01
The flag is Explicit, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "HPR Volunteers Kevie and Ken talk about shows released and comments posted in December 2025"
Hi everybody, my name is Ken Fallon and you're listening to another episode of Hacker Public
Radio. This is HBR 4546, the community news for December 2025 and joining me live from Scotland
is Kevi. Hi Kevi. Hello and a happy new year given this is the first episode for me of
2026 and also the first community news of 2026. Yes, so happy new year to everybody and
we hope that one of your new year's resolutions that is totally achievable is sending into a show
for HBR. No, I'm not happy with that one. I actually would rather the resolution to be
multiple shows to HBR. Very good, very good. So how was your yard listening? How was the
switching of the year? Yeah, I had a family time over the holidays but the weather took a turn for
the worst so we were down in the south of Scotland and we decided we were due to come back today
actually but because of the weather we decided we'll travel up on new year's eve which was not a
good idea. But the reason I'm saying it wasn't a good idea was it was just such a horrible day
uh but on ash on a boat that normally has I think it caters for about 250 vehicles there was less than
10. You know I mean that's one thing. Hogmanay nobody travels in Scotland it's up it's a session day
essentially. Exactly, exactly. How about you? How was your uh holiday season? It was fine uh very much
acting as a taxi service to to people but uh it was nice um we had uh Christmas with the uh some
of the families of two of the kids have moved out all three were away for new year's which was the
first time ever which was uh nice they were all with friends and stuff. Oh that is excellent so uh
I mean people tend to get Christmas presents of course on the 25th but you know we get them on a
daily basis here at uh HPR Towers because of course when you guys send in your show that is a present to
HPR. Oh that's that's so smooth really you should be doing this professionally. I would dearly love to
give up the teaching and do this professionally. My phone allowed. Um so for those of you don't know
first time here Hacker Public Radio's uh community podcast that releases shows every weekday Monday
through Friday and last year we passed our where did we start give me one second I'm just going to go
to the stats page which is on our syndication page and you can get a list of the HPR stats and if you go
there you'll see that we've been running for 20 years three months 14 days 10 hours. Now is that
including today with the techie or is that purely HPR? Uh that's today with the techie yeah as well
so which brings up another point that if we go to uh for 2026 so this year it is 2026 this year uh the HPR
episodes once it hits uh 4 700 which will be on Friday the 8th uh so on August the 7th this year
we will have hit 5 000 episodes of HPR 5 000 episodes of HPR that is of course if people continue to be
generous and send in shows so let's talk about HPR. HPR is a community podcast that releases
shows every weekday Monday through Friday the shows are sent in by people very much like you
in fact exactly like you and we've had some fantastic submissions this year we've had some fantastic
submissions from new hosts and hopefully there'll be a lot of people who will uh be wanting to send in
episodes and one of the things that i heard over on the community news was either people don't have
ideas in which case do your introductory episode and kevi and i and whoever else is listening in the
comments archer will definitely come up with a list of show topics that you can record and the other is
when you don't have time to do it remember that HPR is a community podcast so therefore the barrier to
entry is a lot lower not saying that you should send in crappy audio but if you're out for a walk
and that's the only time that you have to record a show better to record the show then than not have
a show recorded at all what do you think kevi absolutely absolutely please do get stuff in and
bear in mind as well it's something that even if it's something that you do on like a daily basis and
you think oh that's not interesting well it's to hackers yes probably is because it may be something you
do but something we don't know about at all and let's be honest as well if you have a smartphone
the term crappy audio really is out the window these days because the microphones they're using
now on just the basic microphone on the smartphones are way better than what we were having on the
computers 20 years ago and we're still recording then exactly and even then there's a lot that we
can do with the audio when we take it in we can send it to uh audiophonic and they use hashtag ai to
remove a lot of the background noise yes there'll be artifacts and whatever but no any show is better
than no show so try recording uh an episode on your daily whatever and any time that you do have an
opportunity to record the show try send try sending one in anyway enough about that i think let's move
on to what this show is about and this show is community news which is recorded by hosts like ourselves
usually on the uh friday the friday before the first monday of the month so if the hbr new show is
coming out on the first then we record it four days earlier if it's coming out on the seventh we'll record it
four days uh earlier than that and that is just give us time to process it and send it out and what
we like to do is uh go through all the shows and read the comments from the community that have been
submitted on that show and if there are no comments we'll give our own impressions of the show itself
so everybody gets some constructive feedback and positive feedback on their episodes and then we'll go
through the rest of the comments and we'll give you uh rundown on anything that's in the mailing list
and of course anything that's been happening in the background uh with regards to the uh ongoing
developments on the hbr community and project itself let's see okay yep and you know before anyone asks how
much do i get paid for this well as you've said many to time yourself ken feedback is the currency on which
we pay our hosts absolutely it is and um there was a great episode uh last month uh about how to
contribute to open source but uh and free libra software and that is the number one thing you can
do the next big thing that you can do aside from sending in a show yourself is get somebody else to send
in a show so uh we should be uh i was out on a walk the other day and and thinking about hbr as i do uh
and podcasting in general is going through waves now every man and his mother has a podcast and now is the
time for us to be sowing the seeds for when they there is a dial in the waves coming up where people are
dropping off their shows and not recording as much now is the time for us to be having people
come in onto hbr because we will continue if there's anything that has happened that we know
that has happened in the last 20 years we are consistent so let's and you can help with that by
encouraging other people to submit shows and yourself one show a year it's not that difficult
absolutely and plus like you see 20 years this isn't a fad you know i mean podcasting it's sadly
as much as i hate to say this for a lot of people has become a fashionable thing just now you know
like you say every man this dog has got one absolutely we're still going to be carrying on
with it even when the dog has been put to the kennel right so we did actually have quite a number of
shows in this past month uh one uh one a working day what i should say working weekday so maybe we
should actually get to having a look at we should we should start the first one was on december the
first which was the community news for november 2025 let's start with that one shall we were there
any comments keby now we are rich the pair of us we are rich why do i say that because uh this was
one of the better commented episodes we i think there was six or seven six it is and the first one
was by archer 72 silent key i heard again about the silent key and was reminded that an electronics
instructor of mine in a local college was a fan of the paddle key as a ham radio operator i'm wondering
and on a mission to find out if he is silent key or still alive
the graduating class was 30 years ago 1995 and he was and he also taught me to use the 8080 processor
assembler which the chip could only be rewritten after erasure from exposure to uv light and trey says
silent key archive hi archer 72 you might want to check the arll silent key archive link in the show notes
and a rll is american radio right let me just wikipedia that while you're uh while you're looking
up the while you read the next trey comment yes so trey went on to say actually i'm glad i got this one
tux jam cyd episode thank you kevy for a shout out concerning cyd you sent me on a quest to find and
listen to your podcast it took me a bit to figure out how to spell tux jam but i finally got it and
i'm listening nicely done and on the subject of spelling trust me i'm dyslexic i don't go for fancy
spelling quite often it's purely phonetical when it comes to the to any of my shows or anything i see
and a rll is american radio relay league which is the big amateur radio uh league in the world actually
and in america so uh the next one next comment was from candy canator 07 and thoughts decided to put my
response into one bc i didn't want to spam the comment let me know if that's not allowed and
stuff sorry what i'm surprised somebody recorded an eight hour show that seems way too long to keep
uh talking for sad face uh next point is i maybe will make an episode or two on my scripts though i'll
start one with task warrior which doesn't use x clip since from the manic follow-up is my first
episode this might have is next one peer tube is a cool concept but i only occasionally watch
videos on the anon slash stf instances so i don't have the experience to make an episode about it
next point agreed ai freaking sucks as both an artist and a coder and next you can't listen to regular
books lol yes you can somebody reads them out to you uh next one ladies happy birthday to archer it's also
uh candy canator's birthday in two days happy birthday uh and he posted that on my birthday
as well either the news list has been going to spam or i'm missing it because i completely forgot about
it i'll double check once i'm finished listening and re-tray thanks for the introduction to tux jam
i have another podcast to dump into g potter yeah i like that yeah another listener except for they
i i can't speed it up two times because it ruins the music yeah we have had that actual comment uh
before uh yeah probably you know me no no not just for you actually a few different people but uh yeah
i had one actually commented saying uh could we have one without the music at all and i'm good well
the point is tux jam so i would just be tux which would be mega building you know it would just
uh purely be another linux podcast no no that's fine i've i've found a way to get around it
yeah right so we have archer 72 responding with hello candy cane r07 i'm glad you are enjoying our
community and a happy belated birthday you mentioned sdf which i have an account on but rarely use i should
try it out again and on radio is good to hear on a road trip uh do you use an instance on matrix or
mastodon cheers archer 72 and for probably the seventh different pronunciation of candy canators
zero sevens hashtag we have the comment thoughts thanks for the happy birthday stf is fun but i keep
forgetting to check in on the com chat i actually just got a little handheld media player which i've
been loading with podcast episodes and i'm confused myself as to his last comment what's w yeah before i
say it out loud i'm going to go to uh urban dictionary and find out no didn't find anything there and it's
it's whiskey alpha foxtrot romeo november warn warfender yep i'm old and unhip yep i'm happily joining you
there i haven't a clue what that means it's when uh how old did that make you feel when i think it was
archer said 95 was 30 over 30 years ago and i'm thinking that doesn't sound right no no no no i know what
it is it's an answer to his questions so uh he was going do you use uh archer asked do you use an
instance of matrix or mastodon and he uses warfin which is w-a-f-r-n the social network that respects
you warfin is a federated social media inspired by tumblr that connects with both fediverse and blue sky
well now if that isn't an episode right there kevi explain to us old folk how that uh what this
new up-and-coming social network is license where it's hosted how you get an instance who do you
contact what's the community like etc etc etc exactly definitely actually given the the sheer size of
that comment forward i think that could be about two or three episodes you're not wrong you're not wrong
so moving on to the next day we had an interview with elspeth about sl shop and the hop event
and i'm sure uh lee is cutting and pasting these comments and sending them out immediately
this this is something i discovered that lee does uh after the community news episode so what we should
actually do is comment about elspeth like 15 times during the episode and then you'll have to cut the
whole thing up and send it well she's appeared a few times so we could certainly have a good few
comments but yeah i really actually enjoyed this listen to this one the i had never heard of this
thing that the shop and hop uh sounded really good i was actually surprised to i don't want to say
political but um actually i don't know any word of saying it but i was quite surprised when she was
speaking about how difficult it was to get in and then even when you got in getting a good pitch so
to speak or plot or whatever you want you know it was amazing actually listening to the experience
so it was kind of a shame to hear uh with someone like that you'd almost kind of want
to kind of get the you know the the new people having the best places and then those who were maybe
more established being a wee bit further down because people are more likely to go search for them
uh and or a constant rotation but it doesn't sound i suppose it's like anything in life it's
it's not what you know it's who you know so if you're a member in the committee or something you're
going to get prime pitch but it was really good i was really pleased to uh actually hear about this
because it's something i'd never heard of and it's to me i it all these episodes you know it's so
foreign to me the second life stuff and selling stuff online but if you compare it to something like
the ibc which is the big broadcasting thing all the main pitches in the huge halls are like the big
cisco's and the oracles and the uh big broadcaster people are i've got the main ones and then you have
the small little boots around the site so it does follow the convention of of a normal um you know
exhibition or so or a normal exhibition like that and even getting a spot at one of those exhibitions is
really really difficult so in one way it's quite similar and the other way i found it fascinating
to be honest yes actually that's what i maybe thought it wouldn't follow because it is uh virtual
you know online life was a kind of alternative life almost turned to world um that's what i thought
maybe that might actually have a place to change because like you say you know in reality big companies
always dominate and it basically until they're broke they'll continue to dominate uh candy canator
zero zero seven says peek into the community i think this is a really cool peek into the community
that while i've heard of it in the past thing i've never really looked into it until now the
interview was entertaining and clear that elzabeth is well integrated into the community and there's
lots of experience i think she is definitely adding a lot to uh a lot to our community as well
more people we have from with diverse backgrounds doing different things the better say i absolutely
and speaking of slightly different things the next day whiskey jack started his first episode on
nuclear reactor technology now i have to confess when i first heard of this i was thinking
oh i'm interested but i then i then i remember being taught about nuclear physics in school
rule and thinking please let him be nothing like my physics teacher because it would just send me to
sleep but thankfully not i've really enjoyed this so he goes over the basics so uh basic terminology etc
and talking about uh and actually i didn't even know this was a thing i have to admit in my ignorance
i didn't know there was uh civil grade uranium compared to military grade things like that
uh so yeah this was all really good so this was the very first in i think a series of eight yeah
eight episodes so this is one that i have actually with by the end of the month we've had i think three
i think were released and i've enjoyed every single one of them so i mean this is something where you
know you're probably saying oh this isn't of interest to hackers i only know about this well yeah this is
something i mean am i a nuclear technician no do i work in the power industry no but this really interested me
absolutely and uh i had to laugh uh i met the comment you know
hpr consists of uh nuclear reactor technology and beer garden stuff what could possibly go wrong
especially coming from whiskey jack so it's fine i'm thinking of that homer simpson episode
working at the nuclear reactor but uh this is no we should definitely try and get that and you can
whiskey jack on for a nuclear uh power episode combined with beer and caught just call it the homer simpson
episode very good uh there's been a lot of comments on this uh bjb says love this show and series
thank you i listened to the first episode in this series and it's super interesting thank you i'm
eagerly looking forward to the rest of the series and kevin o'brien just makes a comment saying looking
forward to more i think your plan is excellent and i'm eagerly awaiting the future installments
trey says looking forward to the series very well done many decades ago we learned about some
of this in college physics class we even had the opportunity to visit a research reactor at a local
university where we participated in the daily startup process observed uh krennikov radiation
firsthand and even experimented with the effects of certain type of radiation exposure on semiconductors
i am looking forward to the remaining episodes in this series excellent and it's nice about this just
another side note it's nice that he is approaching this from a non-political point of view and we've
had issues this year uh where i must say hand on my heart i'm very impressed with the hbr community
where uh our approach to something that is political has been very fact-based and calm and collective as a
community so it's good to see this coming through that we can discuss topics that some people might not
like but in a honest and open way yes absolutely absolutely and it's uh it is a sign of a mature
community as well because we're in a day where so many if you disagree with me you must be my enemy
no that's just total nonsense we're not all gonna agree uh but uh yeah so carrying on with his uh
with his experience with his movement away from uh ms based operating systems al was on the next day in
four five two four living the tux life episode three now for somebody just moving on to linux yeah this is
not something i would really recommend anybody trying unless they're seriously going hardcore
al automates his own install of linux mint and is using looks with all sorts of volume resize stuff
yeah great well this is kind of interesting because obviously he's you know when he says this is the
first time i'm moving to linux is a little bit like asterix beside it i know a lot of people now are
linux experts in work so they're spinning up kubernetes clusters they're putting pods here left
right and center they're doing uh dynamic network changes so they're using linux on a daily basis
all the time so they're very close very familiar with they like console commands but now they're coming
from that to running a desktop environment so i find i find that's why i'm finding this super fascinating
yeah totally uh for those you don't know al's also a co-host of tux jam so when he actually said oh
i'm going to do moving to linux as a cds we're all kind of is this is this april the first are you
serious we're all are all the links users and he was saying no i'm not a full-time one i was like what
like the the hints are here like when you look at it oh yeah i'll just run an ansible playbook to
install my distro of choice okay that that's a perfectly logical same thing for a new linux user
to do yeah but to be honest though i'm really glad to hear him recording this and again you know people
saying they don't have time they don't have uh they don't have specifics they don't have media
expertise these have all been kind of five minute long episodes they've not been overly long it's just
literally him going through what he's done and it's just basically a diary of himself and this is
great it's great for us to hear it and it's also great for him to look back thinking oh yeah that's
what i did back then and also uh just on that note this month uh because we've had the uh end of year
show and people have been talking and i've been talking to people in person listen don't let the fact
that you're that you're embarrassed about your voice or uh that your your your native language
isn't english don't let that stand in the way of sending in the show or that that you can't speak at
all um don't worry about that write the script send it to us and we have the option of uh doing the
text-to-speech on it uh which is very good nowadays or uh we have a whole team of volunteer narrators
who are more than happy to take your script and read it as a human just like you you would if you
could but you can't yeah and we're very very tolerant of uh of people who um who english isn't their
first language or have do we even have a show on uh about somebody with a speech impediment uh how they
sent in a podcast so this is a normal thing we do uh so don't let any of that stop you from sending
in the show you have something to say you've done something cool in your house and nobody gets it
send in the show absolutely now speaking of done something cool in the house uh i'm actually going
to let you take the next one because i think you may be better to speak with than i am so this was
a missing male merging thunderbird by a certain ken fallon no i don't know him no no yeah uh this one
i have to admit there's another reason for doing the hbr episode is cause every single year i need
to do a when it comes up to the community news things there's a lot of things that i need to do
in preparation for it and they're simple but i keep forgetting how to do it because year has passed
so this year i said right i'm going to document this so that i have it for next year and where's the
the best place to document it uh wrote a little md uh a quick write-up of the notes so that i remind
myself and then i thought hey you know this would make a good episode so it's basically if you have
a small mailing list you're now we're not talking about spamming people but i don't know your local
club or something and you need to send out an email to people and you don't want what their addresses on
the bc uh you want everybody's addresses on the bcc and stuff this is how you can do it with a little
tool in thunderbird where you don't have to sign up to somebody's third party site or whatever
it's just a low tier low barrier to entry in a really really simple way to do a a mail merge list
without having to go to huge extremes now i know we do change things for granted but why would you
want everybody to appear as bcc why not just put everybody and click from your own email address
all the email address in your address book because that would be a violation of the general data
protection action equivalent legal things that are legal uh laws that are in effect around the world
so to protect people's privacy and on the bcc field the address of the other people's addresses
are not listed so you yeah that's why
yes i know good episode actually and actually quite a handy thing because i have done this in
the past and of course was especially with something i don't use too often and i've had to go through
manually and add them all to bcc so this is probably something i'm going to use myself so uh it's something
i hadn't thought of to be perfectly honest so i'm like and the thing is what's embarrassing is i did
mail mergers in school yeah once upon a time i should have once you start talking about it i remembered it
and i was like oh dash but bear in mind that was a long time ago yeah i've done it via um uh i've done
it via like back in the day with microsoft access databases and you know for work and mail runs and
all sorts of things like that and then i've done it a libra office with mail merging for you know christmas
letters and printing off uh you know printing off um mail stickers you know address labels and stuff
like that so this is very similar but it's fierce low barry barrier to entry you put the addresses into
a csv file and you can maybe if you had like four different things that you're that you involved that
you have four different csv files and you just have this thing within thunderbird do you know what shocks me
is that's uh some guy on the internet didn't send in this episode being the thunderbird expert on the
on the uh network yes well you know i mean if you if you were here you know it would be good to hear
his response to that but uh we'll need to remember that question for next month absolutely so we have
the bofang and the str plus plus where lee tries transmitting and recording on vhf and uhf uh lee is
um got his um got his technician license which is uh the introduction license in the uk there are
three levels and other countries are just two and some there's just one um but on his way and i have
to say that he is even though i'm fully licensed he's moved far further on his journey than i am and
that's okay too now am i right in saying lee actually only got into ham radio from kind of
listening to your talk and talking to other users in last year's old camp i believe so yeah so there
you go that's uh that that is amazing actually given how relatively short a term that is when was that
last october that's a quarter of a year and he's got this more it's a year and a half uh it wasn't last
year we didn't have another camp last in 2025 it was in 2024. oh was that a year okay right time flies
i genuinely thought that was last october oh fair enough but good episode i really enjoyed it i
really enjoyed it not just also it did all my ham thing and i was thinking yeah i should do that i have
i have everything here necessary to do that so i should actually do that um trey also said
strs well done sir strs and strs for those not in the know are software defined radios it's
essentially what everything's happening on uh ham radio now for the most part uh strs have really
opened up parts of radio technology experimentation to the wider community i have noticed a significant
difference in performance and quality between inexpensive str dongles and higher-end devices like
the str duo which i prefer i've not tried the str plus plus software and regularly use str connect and
str angel continuing to experiment is the best way to learn and grow uh side note within the terms of
your license of course of course of course but great episode love this and i have this one bookmarked in my
brain for that mythological day when i get time to play with radios that said i have moved my radio
here to physically where i can touch it so i now have two physical radios next to me none of them are
plugged in none of them and they have an antenna but still it's a start it's a start there you go so
they've moved up the list of the things ken hasn't done that's good editing a new year that's good
you've got that few things checked so yeah that's good do you want to do the next one yes i was actually
this one made me chuckle just before i quite get to it it's purely because i had completely forgotten
about that episode that i had done uh on cd ripping and then uh lee actually who we just spoke of the
last episode he actually included it in the the recent anniversary episode and the then out of the blue
we have archer 72 with overly complicated media ripping setup so and for you he does this is
overly complicated from what i would actually remember from uh from ripping software so actually
he's dealing with something though that i've never used nat's blu-ray because i've once kind of dvds
and that went out my i never bothered actually replacing the optical drive when it damaged uh
actually that's a lie the internal one uh so i do have an external one but it's not blu-ray i've um
got some quite some movies and i sometimes i will just like a movie so much i want to get the dvd so that
there's no uh there's no basically i want to get hug father from terry pratchett which is an excellent
excellent uh two-part series and it's on dvd but the dvd is twice the price of the blu-ray whoa yeah
this had me interested like do i save the money and get the blu-ray but then you need some software
from somebody who requires a license and he may at some point in the future take the license away so
that that was the only thing about the blu-ray ripping that's had me a little bit concerned yes and
i do like the fact of uh from from this uh layout he's got here it does appear that he's actually
putting it onto uh a specific drive for move a specific drive for movies which is probably on a
home server now you may think why in this day and age would anybody want to rip a dvd or blu-ray or
anything well plain and simply if your internet goes down you've still got media to watch if you don't and
you rely purely on internet provided uh forms of entertainment if your internet's down you've got
no form of entertainment left and the views expressed on the show do not necessarily reflect those of my
employer which i'm mentally required to say in this case also um what i find is that if i have it locally
then i can use mpv as a media player uh and then i can adjust the brightness and saturation and the
sound and i can add subtitles to it and i have a lot more control over it than i do skipping forward and
using the arrow keys and then you the drm keys get messed up on the server and then there's you're forced
to use the ui of the uh whatever streaming platform and it's invariably crap except the ones that we
work on of course uh so uh well i i end up actually just having the dvd ripping it and then playing it
on the dvd rather than looking at it on the streaming media that's available to me which i also pay for
but yes absolutely now the next day we had henrik hemron in episode 4528 with photography software
now uh yeah so he goes through essentially what he uses so he talks about digicam
uh raw therapy gimp rapid photo downloader pics view scan entangle display cal and dark table a good
proportion of which i've used but i'm not that big into photography photo editing and media editing
things like that but uh he's gone a bit uh further in than i would go but yeah it's actually see again
this is something you know people say they don't have the expertise they don't have this sort of
that this is just plain simply what they use to do a certain task and like i said there's things here
i don't know about i didn't know about always good to share and a good episode i'm really enjoying
this series which is actually should be a series now in itself because he's chugging along producing
these and going through it systematically um and giving us a view into what he's using i've found it
all super interesting some of the software i just barely touched and more of it he has encouraged me to
have a deeper view in it and what i'd like to do is if henrik for a start can people who are into
photography please get engaged and start adding some comments to this gives him some encouragement
about these shows because they're absolutely excellent and i would like deep dives into every
single one of them not well i am asking i was going to say not asking you to do what a hookah did with
libreoffice but yes i am asking you to do what a hookah did for libreoffice on every one of these
tools i know that may be a bit much but for some of the simpler ones yeah that's a possibility but i
think henrik has a plan in his mind and is continuing to do that so please and please comments in there and
note to self to uh convert this to a uh photography series or better yet can people tell me if you're
interested in photography should we have a dedicated photography series on the network and just talking
about the series people um hosts themselves don't get to decide the series anymore um there was always
a rule where you need to have three episodes for it to be considered to be a series uh but my view on
the series is very similar to and my view this is the as an administrator as one of the janitors is um
is it should be a bit like uh a room at foster and what i mean by that is that it's not it shouldn't
be about specifically a single product um it should be about encouraging collaboration under a more of
an umbrella so they've had a desktop environments room where they've got kde and gnome and various
other different people in the same room talking about it equally they have um they no longer have
an amateur radio they just have a radio room where software-defined radio satellite broadcasts
everything to do with rf is in the one room um and uh social medias so they'll have matrix along
with mastodon along with the various different people in the same in the same development track
and that's how i feel we should have our series done of course we can be overruled by the community
but there is an element of the administration of the whole thing here and what makes logical sense
so for each series ideally it should have its own icon it should have its own blurb it should have a
basic description of what's going on and i we're definitely discouraging clothes series where somebody
has um say taking clattu's urban camping series which was a unique thing in its on itself where it was
something that he did um but it's unlikely anybody else is going to be adding to that series in the future so
that's where we were about series sorry for the tangent uh kevi i understand that
at this rate you're going to uh you're going to miss your next appointment
well it's got a few hours left so hopefully not
the next day we had the yoga a review of the yoga oh sorry were you finished with that
yep fine on uh the next day we had one laptop to rule them all but brian in ohio a yoga 370
and it was uh inspired by episode 4402 which i think was from me if i'm not mistaken which was the
which was the pine tab 2 episode by brian in ohio oh yeah it was episode 4491 was where uh we were
where and that was the interview with that was the interview that tibo uh and myself did with
david lavoy who was the pepper and carth author and he we were discussing the think pad which i have
here the yoga 370 and that inspired this mini series of shows and in this uh this is a show by
brand in ohio where he's putting slackware on and uh discussing the various different scripts and such
yeah this one was quite good they just got on about talking about again what he was doing to set
things up and am i remembering this right this is the one where the actual screen detached and became
like a tablet uh i think it falls around um at the back is that what it was yeah because he was
speaking about uh rotate and auto-rotating that i seem to remember that's the reason and i was just
i remember uh thinking it's one of those things that i i never get into uh for myself personally
i like a big computer i i like being able to upgrade it when i want so i'm actually always at this
to hear people's experience with laptops yes i have a laptop for when i'm traveling and things
but the fact is if you're a gamer and you want a laptop you you really do have to spend quite a lot
of money on it and then they become dashed heavy that was my other experience the one time i used a
gaming laptop it was physically like carrying the weight of a break around it was so dashed heavy
i should maybe look back into it but it is good to hear about yeah i mean people uh putting this i
like to spoke about i think was slack where he put on it uh speaking about as well the um
the software on there there for reading pdfs especially with ocular i think he used
uh yeah yeah it's absolutely great absolutely good it and i remember rightly did it used to be a
default nubuntu back in the day uh i thought i think kubuntu it was but i don't know it's a it seems like a
kd app to me all right because it definitely was in one of the ones that i i can't see anything i was
at his dropper for years but uh yeah that's what i came across it was in that and it was one of these
ones that i always actually used to put in uh yeah yeah i really like this one and it uh it was also
one that was enjoyed by paul jay who left the comment thanks great show hi brian thanks for the very
informative show i have and use three x 270 lenovo laptops and i am writing this on an x390
i have never considered a yoga version with a touch screen but may well do so in the future i also
appreciate the other information you have shared best wishes for the new year paul and the following
day uh was a hookah continuing his series on playing civilization five part six and he was
looking at game mechanics and civilization now i don't want to end up taking this away from you
are you sure you don't want to go with the in-depth one here uh this one i'll just give you the summary
from the show notes playing war and combat long and basically land combat naval combat air combat and
his conclusion that was a very brief introduction blah blah blah blah so i'll go get a coffee and
you can start waffling on about gaming yeah he was talking about the the different not just the the
the basic mechanics of what although he did he did touch on that but also talking about the different
forms i mean of course civilizations are developmental games so you know you start simple and you do
you keep on going as that you progress your technology so obviously the the first ones you do
are literally going to be ground combat and your weapons are going to be severely limited pretty much
to clubs and throwing stones essentially but as you develop the technologies you go through you can
you can obviously decide as well we spoke about the different forms although there's different uh
transportation let's say so you can have eventually you can develop into land vehicles you develop into
sea vehicles uh develop into air vehicles but you know he even was talking there about
very often there are some which they are purely uh the the combat is a secondary thing you know like
there was some uh vehicles uh some uh vessels he was talking about there and the sea vessels and
they were saying that they were more scout although they do have combat on them uh it was quite
interesting the fact that he said that you you can actually overcome a city from the sea if it's a port
city but he said he actually had the caveat as well i've never done it myself so usually with these kind
of games the things like air and naval are very much uh ranged attacks and then to actually conquer the cities
you would send in the troops but yeah it was really good uh like i said i must admit i've never played
the civilization games i've played free civ i've never played in the civilization games themselves so
for me as an outsider who's interested in gaming i'm loving the series and a series that i am loving
is the next day hpr beer garden six imperial stouts wow this is a fascinating history lesson i yeah i i love
the way you're doing this it's just uh of course it's you kevy and dave the load bug um where you're taking
some beers discussing it and um giving us a little bit of the history as well and i'm sure you wouldn't be
opposed to uh people doing non-alcoholic drinks on this somebody wanted to give a rundown of uh
of other non-alcoholic beverages feel free to do so absolutely and in fact we don't want this to be our show
at the end of the day uh we want this to be a community show so if anybody has even if people want to do
beers if they wanted to do that do their own talk on it it's entirely up to you i mean we've actually just
recorded one that's going to go into the reserve queue that's talking about what we do for making
an episode and what we would recommend but they don't have to they don't have to follow that exact
thing it's not an exact science so yeah i've been actually enjoying doing this because
the we're we're taking a style and we're just talking about the history of it because we probably
don't appreciate and it's funny because dave himself says he was very often one for saying
i don't like borders i don't like borders until we actually looked into them and did the history of
them and now he started to appreciate them himself he just they weren't what he thought to be honest
and i'm just finding this interesting i mean it was i was saying that in one of the recent episodes
if all homework was like this i would have probably stayed on and got my master's and doctorate
oh well there are no comments on that um this one but let's move on to the next show
yes and the next show was oh it was trace a cheap yellow display part five the graphical user interface
so him talking about really uh getting the cheap yellow display say i had a problem with this by the
the way the graphical interface setting it up when i was doing it uh check out the tuxim episode if
you want to actually hear my uh annoyances but uh yeah him talking about the generally how he had got
things set up how it was tested how it was getting the touchpad and everything and the the layout it's
not as easy as it sounds that's actually one thing i will say so i totally felt his pain when i was
listening to this i'm going this sounds very dashed familiar um i was um weirdly enough i was wondering
why uh i hadn't heard your episodes in a while and then i realized that my download script was doing
something to check for org files and because you were anyway as a reason i had a whole year's backlog of
shows uh from tux jam to listen to and i was moving so i was moving furniture from my house to my daughter's
house and i got to listen to tux jam back to back the whole way from from home the whole way up to her
house so that was excellent and then i realized that ye had done a series on the cheap yellow display
yeah prompted by um train's episode yeah yeah that's it and uh it was uh a tree actually mentioned
that in the the comments on last month's community news and it was really good actually trying but the
one thing i did find i'm going to say this as a caveat to anybody that wants to do this the first thing you
need to do and the absolute first thing is find out what exact cheap yellow display you have because i
i stupidly assumed i first went on and got mine oh the cheap yellow display they must all be the
same okay there's different size i'll have to check for that but they must all be the same part of
matt no no no no no no no no they're all flipping different there is no standardization on them and
it's really annoying it was your comment last month that uh made me realize hold on it was his
comment last month that made me realize hold on i haven't heard tux jam in a while why is that so
then i found the bug in my uh in my script glad you got that rectified i mean that's a christmas
a whole year's worth of tux jam well it was great because it started off with the the uh the christmas
uh the first episode of last year because i had the christmas list from 2024 so uh i had the first
episode and then it was like oh it's the weather is cold the weather is warm it's getting warm it's
wet it's flooding it's it's cold again it was nice but with this trace episode they uh the thing about
the the ui having to use a windows piece of proprietary software that sounds very sad to me
yeah now i didn't actually experience that i have to confess so i'd forgotten about that part
actually because yeah he was just saying he just couldn't get it running i don't have a windows
partition on this pc and there's never been one in fact on this pc so i couldn't do that suppose i
want to unless i was going to use it run up a virtual machine but i didn't have that my biggest issue was
trying to find stuff that actually worked for the specific cheap yellow display that i had and but even
then there's so many different drivers and things it ended up my biggest problem was i had the wrong
driver installed for the display module and that's what caused me norris just says uh starting small
this is a good tip for any new project i like to see success early so i tried to start with something
small just to see something working good motivation to keep going and a solid foundation to build on
actually that is very good advice that i need to give myself
uh with regard to this cheap yellow display i have loads of plans for them but i need to just take
one out and put the time on it and be happy and move on absolutely yes that's what i would highly
recommend highly recommend indeed now so the next day it was a continuation by whiskey jack on the nuclear
reactor technology and this one was specifically nuclear fuel so again something i did not know
about i mean i knew about the fact it's just yeah well i i sorry i knew about the episode yes but what
i mean is i knew about natural uranium and rich uranium and then he goes on to talk about all the rest i'm
like whoa did not know all that so and even you hear words like natural and enriched and he went on
to explain what it was and what you know i've heard a lot about thorium and how it's going to save
everything and he kind of went into here's what it is and then the pros and cons so that was nice sorry
did i cut you off no no you didn't it was just what i was saying no i think you mentioned it already i
love the fact he's not coming from this with either a pro or anti thing he's just factual and he says
you know he's giving the the both sides uh the the pros cons like i said this yeah we need more episodes
like this uh in the in the shows absolutely brilliant and it seems that bjb is also in agreement thank you
for an interesting series i'm really enjoying this series thank you oh sorry i'm greatly enjoying this
series thank you even better the following day we had claudio reviving my kawai k4 synthesizer and he
describes how he brings it to life after years of dormancy and nice links in the show notes and good
tips on what he did didn't know absolutely into synthesizers and stuff so there's an avenue for
the next time i'm talking to claudio that we can start bugging him about uh all series perhaps and
what they are how they work etc etc totally and i thoroughly enjoyed this and the one thing can i
give a bit of constructive criticism here it's not no it's not criticism just an encouragement here
is i listened to this in the car and i was really thinking oh i'm loving this and he talked about links
in the show notes and when i finished my journey i went on the website i was hoping to really hoping
to see some uh pictures etc can we recommend some pictures like some pictures and what i would like
to have heard was a audio uh just a recording of him playing something non-copyrighted that we could
add to the show notes absolutely yes you fixed it so you should prove to us that you fixed it
it's not i'm sure we can do that in the next follow-up episode yeah but uh no i don't want
to be too too mean there now that was a really good episode really interesting uh yeah i'm talking
about the different parts as well yeah and i mean they even if you're not into synthesizers or whatever
if you have an old piece of kit the methodology that he used for replacing it is applicable to you know
a tiny thing that approach it in the same way and the logical steps that you do yes indeed now we
didn't have any comments on that so moving on to the next day and al is back with us for living the
tux life episode four various software i've been using and yeah so he goes on course of course
everybody just installs prometheus yes and this is what i'm still laughing this is definitely not a
newbie's guide to linux i think it is it is a newbie's guide it really is and he's highlighting
something here that you know there are people who've got like a macbook and work or windows and
work and they're working on all these servers and their knowledge is fantastically good it's just
they don't use linux and i see that with the guys i work with them work and they're on servers the
whole day but they're on them via their macbook or or their windows box and they could and yes josh i'm
looking at you uh they they could very well be running linux on their home pc so that's good yeah
absolutely but actually i i i did uh have pity on him because he has touched on something that i think
every linux user has battled with when they use laptops battery to management it's it's just that's
one thing i've found it's probably the other thing that's probably put me off using a laptop for
uh extended periods my word just even with battery saver on it's i i i think the best that i got out of
either of my laptops uh was i'm bearing in mind one of them actually came with linux pre-installed
it was from judo computers here in the uk and it's still with battery saver and everything turned down
i can get three and a half hours out of it yeah the thing is though i've been using laptops for years
as my main computer and i've never had an issue with batteries but before you go on and around the
reason for that is i have like a one and a half hour commute and if something goes wrong it's a
three-hour commute and then i plug it in in work and then i have another commute going home and then
i plug it in at home so i i'm never away from a power cord so long that it's a problem yeah i totally
get it the i just like i said i totally uh actually i will say one thing al is doing something i mean he
also goes on yeah i love the fact he talks about deja duper things like that as well you know straight
away back up and yep good and the fox clone uh uh tmux is is the terminal he seems to use as well so
he's certainly not going for your uh off the shelf stuff that's real but this is exactly why i love
linux and it's or you know linux can do links and the whole ecosphere and freely open source software
is that you can you can play to your own strengths in it you don't need to if these are tools that
he's comfortable using that he's used before in his daily life why make it harder on yourself use
those tools feel comfortable and then add another app and then add another app and then you know you
visit yourself in two years time and you go oh i completely changed the way i work and now i know all
this other stuff and that's knowledge that's never going to be lost absolutely absolutely i mean there's
a whole show in here but that would be one thing i would say if anybody comes to me and recommends
they're wanting what's my recommendations for using linux actually the first thing i would say
to them is install this this this this on your windows slash mac machine whatever you've got yeah
and the thing is when you're actually getting familiar with the software it's not that big a jump
you know when you're when you've got i mean most people go oh i can't get my software
if you prep them it's not a big issue at all yeah exactly you already know how to drive it's just
you've gone from uh at that point you're going from a uh uh petrol car to an ev yeah well that's it
that's it so candy cane art oh sorry no go ahead you do it i was going to say so well a couple of
comments on this episode candy cane art at 07 cool setup i also have to use my laptop for my main
computer though it's nice to have the same exact setup at both home and when i'm not i will say
that tlp supports settings charge limits directly and i'd recommend setting it up there since it
persists after boot local scent looks interesting i'll check it out and tlp is a feature reach utility
for linux saving laptop battery power without the need to delve deeper into the technical details
doesn't tell me what tlp stands for though but um al did mention that in the show notes
and by the way i need to when i'm posting stuff about al i need to use capital letters so it's clear that
it's a l and not a i that is a true archer 72 says tmux hi al if you like tmux check out hpr
3845 using tmux it uses tmux resurrect to also save multiple session between reboots
nice one there absolutely yes and going on to the next day we had
welcome to the linux community by delta ray uh thoroughly enjoyed this one actually
this was really a kind of quite a comprehensive episode lasting about half an hour uh and he
goes on to speak about everything you would probably want for the basics of somebody moving over so he
talks about beginner friendly distros um helping the community pardon where to get help
where to get help yes the local communities he links to some mastodon uh foster done free geek
yep and softer alternatives actually i quite liked the way he had put that in and of course most
importantly the gaming section although i am disappointed by his lack of the heroic game launcher
that needs to be in that comment comment or an episode uh this one i personally uh archer said it
uh in the let's let's just read the comment here archer 72 says brilliant brilliant episodes hey ken is
the room in the about page to list this as a top episode archer 72 not only would i uh and i asked archer
to make a ticket for that on our git t instance where anybody can recommend pretty much anything if they
want related to the website but this is such a generic introduction that um it's it should be like a
link on every single linux destro that's out there every single um any linux thing anything to do with
free libra and open software this is the thing that you should listen to first absolutely yep it was
utterly excellent now so the next uh comment is by torren doyle delta ray did a fine job in covering
gnu linux aka linux here thank you delta ray for this concise coverage of linux you spoke very well
and i'll skip over my one where i just said basically what i already said delta ray said thanks thanks for
the feedback and encouragement i'm glad this landed well as i was a bit uncertain about it and thank you to
sigflop for proof listening to it if you're serious about having this linked from other places then
maybe we just need to post it on some forums forums reddit facebook etc good to see that uh he's in
contact with sigflop yes and then the next comment is by morhoek good talk cli magic nice hearing your
voice for the first time i love linux too and i'm liking a lot liking a lot many tools that help you fix
stuff like codex uh gemini cli and claude code they integrate very well and are awesome way to learn
new commands this year i've learned about a secret dub thank you i'm looking at how am i gonna pronounce
that a sweet uh ss iw
launch and control and wolan magic pocket wake of wake on lan whoa wake on lan magic packet wake and
lan w-o-w lan i guess all right okay yeah that is interesting that's an interesting selection of
tools there by morhoek let me just check has morhoek ever submitted an episode sadly not what an opportunity
absolutely definitely there's there's i mean that's just too good an introduction not to that should
be wasteful if you don't submit that and there's uh like one two three four five five different
episodes right there like uh for example the wake on that what's waking on why would you use it uh magic
packets etc what are those uh how can you what are the benefits of using it what are the dangers of using
it what tools there are how you can install them what other alternatives are there there you go yep
definitely plenty of potential for new episodes there but another person who's relatively new although a
big part of the community almost in a short space of time is elspeth and she has put in elspeth in it
since 97 and this is part one the and actually i'm looking forward to hearing this because uh
this one was a 43 minute long episode where she talks about her uh she talks about her experience in
it and actually i took my take my hat off to her for this because she talked about some things that
you could tell even listening to her still upset her and she goes on about her history sorry say again
and i don't blame her for getting upset about them oh not at all no uh yeah so she's it talks about how
she's been in it uh i'm just talking about gender inequality that she's uh really had to put up with
being a female working in it for a long time and the generally as well just the amount of sexism
she's had to endure which is really sad to hear uh so yeah but it's it's it's not just a totally sad
episode it's really interesting the way she goes through uh everything and uh she was also i also found
it really quite sad and also interesting a bit sad uh overall the when she spoke about how these days
people who have been got the same or even less experience than her because back then there was
no real degree in computing or not many people had it and she says she's got more experience than many
but yet she struggles to get a job because uh now being a female if you don't have the degree they just
won't even look at you so yeah it was kind of sad to hear that but uh she's obviously a strong person
the fact she's still talking about this yeah well yeah it's uh it was a tough listen i have to say but
on the other hand i'm looking at it and i'm also saying it it was inspirational in a way that um that
she didn't have a degree yet she was able to learn all this stuff and knowledge and uh get herself up
to a point where she is capable of doing this and the fact that she is coming against these obstacles
with gender and neurodivergence is is unfortunate and i realize how lucky i have been um my first ig job
i the manager was a was a woman who was one of the best engineers i knew and one of the best managers
i knew and we had a more or less 50 50 team so it never entered my mind that the it sector wasn't
gender balanced or that there was any of this in quality inequality or sexism and that was the same
when i moved to another job uh in the netherlands and then i had one job where i was working for
a period of time i'm not going to say how long i was working there and it was like super macho and i
was going this is not a pleasant place to work and thankfully i am now working in a place where there's
a better gender equality and more diversity as well leads to a better team all in all so there you go
absolutely they actually i never think of this place where i live uh as being forward thinking
but uh when i think you're just gonna be thinking back in school i didn't know them well because
they're the it guys and not the teachers but uh but this is when i was a pupil there was always a mix of
male and female when i went to college here for one year the i was doing engineering and the computing
element was part of it now the computer side of it i think there was four manufacturers three women one
male yeah so actually i didn't see this but now come to think of it it was after i moved away
when i think about it you know the it has been 99.9 dominated by males so yeah this is actually
something it's worth bringing up yeah totally and uh i subscribe to the future feed and if you're
into in order to do the quality control and also to get the episodes earlier so i've listened to the
second part of this it's well worth a listen as well so the following day i did a show about hpr
branding why the intro is the way it is and it was part of i mean it was part of something that i had
wanted to be doing anyway which was move this explanation out to the git t instance and basically
the show notes of this is the git t instance so it's not that i had to do extra work for it
well i did have to do the extra work for it but it was on the to-do list anyway so now it's done
um basically going through and i think uh we had um nice wise mentioned about the intro and outro
before uh so i've been thinking about this episode that long back so it's not that big a jump to be
actually doing it um and in the show for those who didn't hear it it's breakdown of what the what
the intro is how long it is who who it's who who wrote it for us what tools we use to create it um
why why we're doing it who where what when and why basically and the outro same thing as well and also
links to discussions we've had about show notes and i realize now that i didn't put in um nightwise's
episode which was also a discussion so i'll add that now to the ever-growing list of my stuff i need
to fix after this episode so kevi if you can read the first comment that would be great right then so
it's by candy canard07 interesting peek of behind the scenes hi i find it pretty cool how the intro
outro is all automated and i'm legitimately surprised that people dislike it the music is really calming
and sets the mood well and i was always kind of wondering what tts you were using since it's a lot
more understandable than e-speak is or at least the default voice for it and steve burn says merci i
didn't imagine this a dire subject for most people but thank you for the overview and the rationale
it's nice to hear about the trivia and archer 72 comments with hello if you're interested in piper tts
check out hpr 4027 piper text to speech engine piper can speak in multiple languages if you want to check
it out links given archer 72 is becoming our official librarian here
yes and another reserve show youtube subscriptions part 11 professor rock
brock brock's annex quill 18 rachel flower music radio free shop uh some other channel
and he's going from the p to the ears this is uh a hookah put in a series of excellent shows about the
youtube channels that he listens to some of which i also listen to and some of which i go okay that's nice
not into uh cruising at the moment but when i do i know where to uh get my subscriptions
yeah absolutely so no it's it's good to actually hear uh this kind of thing uh sadly it does also
mean that we're lacking in shows when we do hear this kind of thing so it's a it's a kind of bittersweet
but it's also a good a good approach to the uh boston boom and i've felt that this year we really worked
on the um by using the reserve shows we're alerting the community that hey guys you know don't take
this for granted as prior to that we were sending out mails on the mailing list and then we only get
shows from people who are on the mailing list and not the community at large so when these shows go out
we deliberately put in there rather annoying uh could be pleasanter but it's kind of deliberately
annoying not really kind of um message in there that this is coming from the from the reserve queue
and that's what the reserve queue is there to fill the slots you know sometimes sometimes it happens
people are all busy um so if you have a show that's timeless you can put one in the reserve queue if
you have a show that you want on your birthday you can put it in the main queue easy peasy lemon squeezy
exactly yes indeed and i hope i didn't break the rules here because that was from the reserve queue
but this one the next day he had actually uh booked it as a normal slot so there you go that's another
benefit of adding to the reserve queue you might get to hear it yourself more than once every fortnight
so he did arthur c clark other novels part one uh i must admit i'm loving this series by
arthur c clark uh i've only read a couple of his books but i enjoyed them and i came back and re-read
one i think it's a city in the sky uh recently and of course uh i'm getting in trouble because
uh my wife's just asked what's this big box of books that's just arrived from arthur c clark
nothing dear ignore that you will ignore the box in the corner i i'm also uh downloaded some onto my
e-reader and i'm reading them but i haven't had time but it's i am reading like about half a chapter
every night so i will get to them but inspired by this series so thank you ahuka please keep keep
doing what you're doing absolutely yes please keep them coming really good and uh it actually
inspired me one thing i've never done is his last one on the 2001 series uh it inspired me to actually
i've watched the film i'm going to go back actually and read the whole thing when i actually get some
time uh well i've got to get through that box i bought there 2001 was not part of it but i'm going to
go back and read the 2001 series and while he's doing that he will also be doing beer garden seven
uk christmas ales i didn't even know this was a thing there you go so um it's well like i said it
in the show it kind of is and kind of isn't if you're a purist a christmas ale does not exist it's
just a certain type of ale that they've made christmasy but it has come into its own thing
and it's something i absolutely love and it's just they're different they're different enough to
have their own uh exactly their own style and yeah i really enjoyed this and it was good to actually
be joined by paul paul's now been on a couple so trying to get him back for another few but uh
we're going to see uh what happens in the future but yes so thoroughly enjoyed it uh yeah how did you
find this one i loved it i love this actually um aside from my only failing with every single one
of your episodes is i want the beer to be shipped to us you know your rss feed should deliver the
actual beer that you can so that you can play along and perhaps actually you know i was thinking maybe if
you could tell us what beers you're going to be reviewing in a few months time we could try and source
those beers to drink along as you're as you're uh doing the episode well now this is a secrecy here
but uh tell you what give me two six and i'll go and get my list no interesting um so love this episode
it was a little so for a little late on the 29th for christmas but it was christmas period here
so very good show yes and i can tell you um coming up if you oh my word right okay put it
as a comment into the next wednesday i was going to say next wednesday we're going to be doing barley
wines that's when we're recording that so if you want to come along you're more than welcome so this
comes out on monday make sure you've listened to it and if you if you're still there so now later on in
the month we are planning on doing the belgian scotch style ale oh right and the after that the
two we've got lined up they're all winter ones just now so we've got a scotch ale or a wee heavy
depend they both are interchangeable and then lastly we've got baltic porter so that's what's coming up
in january and february yeah but like my thoughts were for the listeners so that once you recorded the
show you could subscribe to a feed or something and you could then order because they're now
being posted three months in advance that will give enough time to order and ship them
so that when the episode is released you could drink along as you're doing the episode oh absolutely
that's why i just thought i'll give you that right now so any listeners can actually um
and i'll just make a note to add those to the show right and while you're doing that
we had an episode from claudio m the next day or claudio miranda actually then i'm using some
masters on title there can haiku mumble so this was actually quite interesting if you don't know what
haiku is haiku is an alternative operating system it's not linux based it's different again uh or should
say unix based uh however it's it's been on it's been in development for quite a while but it's one
of these things it's never really gained a lot of traction so a lot of things like drivers etc and
software just hasn't been written for it uh it's one of these things it's on my to-do list uh i've never
tried it i have to confess but like i said it's a bit like the herd kernel it's on my to-do list
uh but he goes on about getting uh haiku uh well sorry getting haiku to use mumble and how
effectively and i don't want to spoil the entire episode but uh it just talks about his experience
there so yeah so that was just in time as well for any haiku users to listen to the new year show
or take part in the new year show and he uh he just got it in before the end of the year his promise
so he got his uh his new year's resolution sorted at the very last moment and then the last episode
of this month and of course the last episode of 2025 was the third in our series of nuclear reactor
technology and i realized that my irish accent may have made that sound like something a dog might produce
the third nuclear reactor basics and there were several comments from leandro says praise for
this series excellent series on nuclear technologies thanks for this educational educational opportunity
and kevin o'brien makes the next comment saying really enjoying the series i find i am looking
forward to each installment of the series well done yeah i enjoyed this one as well him speaking
not so much about the fuel as he did in the last one but this is talking about the basics of the
reactor and the the different types as well so yeah again thoroughly enjoyed this one now going back to
the um comments from um the previous episodes and this was on how i use newsboat and reddit so the first
comment was checking for ahmed uh to see if there are issues as i said this is about newsboat for podcasts and reddit
and what was my comment about there are extra checks when you upload a comment on an episode outside of the main feed
so the future feed or episode going to 10 blank slots and this was why was i putting that there uh
i don't know why i put that there per se but um oh yeah no there was yes so there was a issue with uh
so ahmed uh posts in the next one download format for hpr episodes hello i've set download format to
uh download dash file name dash format space quote percent t dot percent you quote which worked fine for
all podcasts except hpr where the extension is php instead of mp3 is there a method to have a special
download file name format for hpr podcasts and my post something went wrong in posting that and i went to
check and it's basically because there are anti-spam questions um there are three additional anti-spam
questions if you are not if you're posting on an episode that's outside of the main feed so if you're
if it's not in the last two weeks so if you're posting a comment on a future feed i'm a bit suspicious
because okay why are you posting on something that hasn't even been released and if you're posting on
really old shows or older shows um spammers love doing that because uh they'll post on the show
that has been very popular and it's got lots of comments and now the moderator's brain is just
click i approve click i approve click i approve and then you've got spam in there and then um they've won
so that's why i posted that cryptic question in there um and i will put a comment into this comment
to say that we have opened a bug on this issue and we have implemented a change that may or may not have
fixed this so ahmed can you please check to see if that works now and also this year will be a great year
to do a show so i could get the pronunciation of your name perfectly are you still with me yeah yeah
i was just actually waiting for your link no i'll uh i'm putting it into the email that i'm writing to
myself because previously i could just tell dave to do it actually i could should have told archer to do
it what am i thinking uh but i'm writing an email to myself with all the fixes so i've got one two
three four five six seven different things i need to fix after this episode as i'm reading
oh there's a link missing here there's this missing there there's something else so the next
the next comment and the last comment from previous was uh more hook commented on arthur c
clark sequels by our uh hookah and he made a comment and uh a hookah responded it was episode
four five two zero and programmer and content creator nice episode nice podcast episode i agree that arthur
c clark made a very good book on rendezvous with rama science fiction without a killer robot or even
aliens is so uncommon yeah that one was a good episode actually i'll give that um was that the
only two did we only have two from previous yeah and then kevin kevy responded to that glad you liked
it i'm glad you enjoyed it there is more to come from arthur c clark dr who robert a hindman and ee duck
smith so something to look forward to absolutely yes please do keep the comments coming as long
as you're not a spammer please keep them coming absolutely so that rounds off the comments that
rounds off the episodes and then let's have a look at the list and the only thing that we had in the
mail list was the announcement of our four upcoming 14th believe it or not annual 26 hour new year show
which i know got to at least 32 hours the last time i checked in um and then we also
had a comment about the community news being recorded but as this is the last show of the year
i will start by thanking all 57 contributors who contributed to hpr in 2025 57 different people took the time to send
in a show to hpr last year absolutely fantastic thank you ahuka thank you al antoine archer 72
benny brian in ohio candy canator yeah mate but i don't have the next i don't have the link to
for anything which makes no sense because i just typed in can you do the next line it's on the index for
this episode if you do a refresh to the bottom of the show notes uh sorry sorry we'll have to edit
this but not at all if you're putting yeah sorry that's why i wasn't able to help you in the last
ones purely because no you're you're you're winging it no sorry i updated the the show notes right so
yeah so we've got celeste claudio miranda daniel person dave hingley dave morris delta ray dnt
then we had elspeth folky fred black jim log harry larry henry cameron honky magoo hpr volunteers iota germ
jeroen batten jezra and a certain ken fallon then we had a certain kevy kerbotica clatu comic lee
lucky boy good lad there major ursa and manon mark w able might be mike moss bliss mr x murph norrist
and operator oxo paul j rito roan shane solo spider and some guy on the internet swift 110
the love bug they bought trey trickster troller coaster whiskey jack and
wo-chick wo-chick how you how am i saying that sorry well how i say it is wo-chick but you know
wo-chick send us in another show to correct us yes please do and we apologize for that so yes thank you
to each and every one because if it wasn't for you guys then we wouldn't be here recording this
episode just now absolutely and for those who don't know hbr will eventually end at some point and what
we plan to do is end it with honor like um lost in bronx says in the episode old soldiers which
prompted me to help out here at hbr we continue when a podcast shouldn't pod fade it will finish
properly when we have no more shows coming in we'll post all the shows from the reserve feed we'll play
all the shows that have been scheduled in the future and we'll shut the podcast down with grace
hopefully i'll be decomposing in wherever i'm decomposing at that time uh the end comes to us
all but um hbr does rely on people sending in shows and we're not messing that is what we were going to
do when uh when we run out of shows yeah that's it and i i hope that's not in my lifetime either so
yes please keep him coming i want to keep on doing this for a good few years yet and absolutely and
like dave morris who was a long-time janitor able to retire and still continue continue sending in
shows even though he occasionally does come in to clean up the tea room from time to time thanks
dave for the script for generating the hosts at the end of the this episode uh and wishing everybody
and i genuinely mean this a fantastic 2026. absolutely yes you may you have a great year let us all in
fact have a great year so without further ado tune in tomorrow for another exciting episode of hacker
hacker public
Radio !!!
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording podcast, click on our upload link
to find out how easy it is.
Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by an AnHonestHost.com, the Internet Archive,
rsync.net, and our mirror network.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
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Episode: 4547
Title: Cheap Yellow Display Project Part 6: The speed and timing of Morse
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4547/hpr4547.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:13:43 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4547, for 2026-01-06
Today's show is entitled, "Cheap Yellow Display Project Part 6: The speed and timing of Morse "
The host is Trey and the duration is 00:10:51
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "A discussion of the Morse code speed and timing considerations needed for our CYD project"
Hello again, this is Tray. Welcome to Part 6 and my cheap yellow display project series.
Thank you so much for hanging in there with me on this rambling series.
If you wish to catch up on any of the earlier episodes, you can find them on my HPR profile page,
and there's a link to that in the show notes.
To review,
my project is to build a portable Morris code key or memory,
which can be connected to any amateur radio HF Transsever by simply plugging it into the code key input port.
This is based on an ESP32 platform which comes pre-packaged on a yellow PCB board with color touch screen display and Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.
We commonly call this contraption the cheap yellow display.
So far, I've defined the necessities collected the required hardware and failed miserably at building the graphical user interface.
While I sort out the technical challenges getting my GUI code to play nicely with this cheap yellow display's touch screen,
it's important that we spend some time discussing Morris code itself,
and the timing standards that we will need to follow.
I am not going to dive too deeply into the history behind telegraphs and Morris code, but it is very interesting.
If you want to learn more, Wikipedia has the origins and evolution written out very nicely on a page that I've posted a link to in the show notes.
For our purposes, we will fast forward from the year 1821 telegraphy began all the way to 1865.
When the International Telecommunication Union, the ITU, standardized what it called, International Morris Code.
When I say Morris Code for the remainder of this podcast, I'm referring to this ITU International Morris Code.
Morris Code typically includes the following characters.
The 26-letter basic Latin alphabet.
The India-Arabic numerals 0-9.
And then there's also a single-accented Latin E.
And it's written as an E with an accent mark over the top of it, in a handful of punctuation marks.
These characters are encoded using a sequence of short and long signals.
Each short signal is referred to as a DIT.
Each long signal is referred to as a DIT.
At a young age, I began to refer to them as dots and dashes, as this was how they were usually written.
For example, the letter A consists of a single DIT, followed by a single DIT.
When written, it would look like a period, followed by a hyphen, or what some people might call a minus sign.
And you can see this written now, or typed out in the show notes.
This encoding method allows messages to be sent by turning on and off an electric signal.
This could result in a light flashing, or a tone sounding to the pattern of the signal.
The timing of a DIT and a DA, along with the spacing in between them, is clearly defined.
Morrisco.world does a great job explaining the timing, and you can find their explanation at the length that I've posted in the show notes.
It all starts with the DIT, or more accurately, the amount of time the DIT signal is turned on.
We will call this length of time one unit.
Everything else is based upon this one unit.
We will get to the actual length of time for that unit later in the episode.
For now, it's just one unit.
So if a DIT is one unit long, a DA will be three units long.
So there is an obvious consistent difference between a DIT and a DA.
Also, empty space between elements of the same character is one unit long, and the space between characters should be three units long.
Let's demonstrate this using the letters H, P, and R.
And H would be four DITs.
A P would be one DIT followed by two DAs, and ending with one DIT.
And R would be one DIT followed by one DA, and ending with one DIT.
Remember, when we send these grouped together like a word, we need three units of spacing between each character.
You can hear this now. This is the Morse code for the letters HPR transmitted at 15 words per minute.
And that is a perfect segue to the next section, words per minute.
The speed of Morse code is measured in words per minute.
But how do you calculate this when some characters are short, like the letter E, which is only a single DIT long, and other characters are long, like the letter J, which starts with a single DIT, and is followed by three DAs.
And that's just letters. What about words? We have short words and long words. How can we standardize on words per minute with so many diversity of length?
Well, thanks to the French. We have a quite elegant solution to this problem. Well, okay, not the French in general, just Paris.
Paris is the standard word, which has been agreed upon, to be used for determining the speed of Morse code.
The word Paris is 50 units long. How do we come up with that?
The letter P consists of a DIT, then remember another DIT, another unit in between the DIT and the next thing. So one for the DIT, one for the blank space, three for a DA, one in between again, and three for another DA, one in between again, and one DIT. That's 11 units.
And it also is very confusing when I spell it out. It's written in the show notes.
Then there would be three units of space in between the P and the A. All right. Now in A, we said before, it's a DIT and a DA, so that would be one unit for the DIT, one unit in between three units for the DA, five units.
Now another three units in between the letter A and the letter R. A letter R is DIT, DA, DIT. So that would be one unit for the DIT, one unit in between three units for the DA, one unit in between one unit for the DIT, seven units total.
Again, spacing in between letters is three units. Now the letter I, which is just two DITs. Oh, yeah, and there's a space in between.
So one for the DIT, one for the space in between one for the DIT, three in it. Another three units for the space in between the letter I and the letter S, an S, is three DITs.
So one unit for the DIT, one unit for the space in between another unit for the DIT, another unit for the DIT, another unit for the DIT, that's five units. And then we tack on seven units for the space in between words at the end of it.
So, if you take the 11 plus to 3 plus to 5 plus to 3 plus to 7 plus to 3 plus to 3 plus to 3 plus to 5 plus to 7, you end up with 50 units for the word Paris.
That was a lot. Again, if you want to visualize it, you can see it in the show notes.
Or if you want to hear it, here is the word Paris, sent at 15 words per minute.
More as code world does a great job explaining the maths for how many milliseconds long a ditch should be for a specific words per minute of code.
But no, we can't keep that simple.
Some guy named Donald R. Russ Farnsworth had the complicate things and increased the gaps between the letters to make the interpretation of the code easier.
So there's even more maths for Farnsworth timing. Wait, wait, wait a minute.
When did I start saying maths instead of math like a normal North American?
What is the reasoning behind pluralizing the word math anyways?
Which way is more original to the English language math or maths?
This sounds like a show idea for someone other than myself.
So if you know the reasons behind this or you're interested in researching it and sharing it with us, I look forward to listening to your show in the future.
Alright, back on track. Anyways, there is is much more math about Farnsworth timing on another page on Morris Code World and there's links to all of these in the show notes.
But I don't want to get into all of that detail there. Not when there is a shortcut we can use within our code.
Simplified we can take 1,200 and divide it by the number of words per minute we desire and it will give us a close enough approximation to the number of milliseconds long a dip or a unit should be for what we are doing.
So for example 15 words per minute the messages you've been listening to throughout this episode.
Addit was 1200 divided by 15 which equals 80 milliseconds in length. It was 80 milliseconds in length.
If I speed it up to 20 words per minute which is the speed that I try to practice at.
Addit would be 1200 divided by 20 which is equal to 60 milliseconds long. That's pretty short.
This will be an important calculation for us as we develop the code we will learn or we will use later on as we construct the our messages and how the.
And this is a good stopping point so that I can get back to trying to build that infernal GUI.
Goodbye.
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording podcast, click on our upload link
to find out how easy it is.
Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by an AnHonestHost.com, the Internet Archive,
rsync.net, and our mirror network.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
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Episode: 4548
Title: YouTube Subscriptions 2025 #13
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4548/hpr4548.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:13:44 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4548, for 2026-01-07
Today's show is entitled, "YouTube Subscriptions 2025 #13"
The host is Ahuka and the duration is 00:15:36
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "Part thirteen of my list of subscribed channels"
You are listening to a show from the Reserve Q. We are airing it now because we had
free slots that were not filled. This is a community project that needs listeners to contribute
shows in order to survive. Please consider recording a show for Hacker Public Radio.
Hello, this is a hook up for Hacker Public Radio. Welcome me to another exciting episode,
and this one is coming to you from the Reserve Q. So you know what that means. That
means you need to record a show. Hacker Public Radio is a collective, and basically
it's a community project that relies on members of the community to record and submit shows
if it's going to continue in operation. I'd like it to continue in operation. I assume
if you're listening to this, you would like it to continue in operation. So you know, let's
get going there and record some shows, people. Now I'm going to continue what I have been
doing for the Reserve Q. And this is looking at the YouTube channel subscriptions I have as
of January 2025, which is when I'm recording this. When you're hearing it, I don't know. If
we're really lucky, you're not hearing it until 2027, but I don't know if we're going
to be that lucky. Many of that, let's pick up where we left off. And the first channel
I'm going to go to this time is called Sid Meyers Civilization, and it is the official
Sid Meyers Civilization YouTube channel. Now I happen to know that in an earlier episode,
I had mentioned another channel and said it was the official one. I lied. Really sorry
about that. I got confused because it said something like Sid Meyers Civilization. It sounded
like the official channel. I went back and looked and really what it was is occasionally
YouTube will create a sort of a virtual channel that will collect videos from different people
because they're on the same topic. And so it's a topic channel. And so the one that I thought
was the official channel was not. It was a YouTube-created virtual channel. And there's a few
of those that are somehow in my subscription list. I don't know if I subscribed to them or
if they just automatically get added to my list by YouTube. It's not like I spend hours and
hours on managing subscriptions. It's just something I do for fun. Anyway, the official
Sid Meyers Civilization channel, as you might expect, has a lot of stuff from the for
access, which is the company that makes civilization now. And currently, as I'm recording
this, the big thing is Civ 7, which is coming out in February of 2025. And so we're getting
a lot of videos having to do with the upcoming game release. Some of them are short little
videos introducing some of the players that you can play in the game, Ben Franklin, Harriet
Tubbin, Machiavelli. Others are longer videos in which the developers go online and go
through playing an aspect of the game, describing something about what they intended to do
with it. And those can last easily an hour and a half in length. Now, the next one is
60 symbols. And this is another one of Brady Heron's channels. And this is videos about physics
and astronomy. And I'm big on physics and astronomy. That's something I have an interest in.
So I enjoy these videos. The typical video here is anywhere from 10 to 20 minutes. Occasionally
longer. I've seen half hour ones. It doesn't really go much past that. And a number of them are
fairly short. So 60 symbols if you're into that. Now, what Brady Heron has done here is he has
gotten involved with nottingham University in England. And so he has a number of these channels
that he works with faculty from the university to put the stuff together. So the astronomers
and physicists that you'd see on this channel are pretty much from the University of Nottingham.
Next channel is Sophie Alloway. Sophie Alloway is a drummer. She's a member of Lidian Collective
and I mentioned the Lidian Collective channel and that they're a group in England that I really like a lot.
And so Sophie has her own channel that deals with her drumming. And I happen to like the way she
drums. So how would I describe it? It's more like, you know, there are some drummers that are
out to convince you that they are absolute masters of technique and can drum 4,000 beats per second
and everything else. That's not what Sophie does. She does tasteful drumming that fits the music
and I appreciate that sort of thing. Then there's space rocket history.
Now space rocket history goes along with a podcast. So you could just get this as an audio podcast
or you could watch it or listen to it really on YouTube. I don't think there's really any video involved.
It's interesting. The fellow who does this started years ago
with some of the historical stuff. You know, talking about people like Robert Goddard and
Seal Kofsky and all of the early pioneers in rockets and getting into the space race with, you know,
the Russians sending up split neck and the United States responding with their space program.
And it's an ongoing historical thing. He's taking things in order of how they happened.
So he's finished all, he's got through all of the Apollo missions.
Space lab. It's now working on Apollo Soyuz and, you know, at some point, I assume if he has the strength
to keep going, he's done almost 300 of these already. I suppose if he keeps going, he'll get to the
space shuttle and it's interesting because he covers in the historical thing. He covers both
the Soviet and the American. I assume if he gets closer to contemporary times, we're going to start
hearing maybe about Ariana and the European Space Agency and India and China who are
Japan, all of whom have active space programs now, but right now it's back in the 1970s.
The next channel is Stam Fine. He reviews movies and TV and among the things he reviews are
Dr. Ho. And so I'm mostly subscribed for that, but it's occasionally, I might take a glance at some of
the others. He's done some Star Trek and other movies like some James Bond.
And the next channel is Stubagful, which is an odd name, but he's an odd person. I think his name
is Stuart, so that's where the Stu comes from. And he also does talks about TV shows and
uploads them. And among those TV shows is Dr. Ho and that was my primary interest. He does other things.
I'm not sure any of them are ones that I've gotten particularly interested in. But Dr. Ho is
enough. Next one is Swini. Now, Swini, I hope I'm pronouncing this right.
Because I think it's an Irish name. And the way it is spelled here is Swi, BH and E.
And what this channel does is an animated history of videos. Now a number of them are
20-minute long or longer. Some of them can even go up as long as an hour, but
most of them are more 15-20-minute length. And I love history, so that's all the more reason.
Then there's talk more talk. Talk more talk is a solo Beatles video cast. And one of the people
involved in there is Ken Michaels. And I mentioned the Ken Michaels radio is being one of my channels.
Another person is Joe Mayo, and I mentioned the mean Mr. Mayo. Tom Hanyati from the two-leg
spot guest is another one of these people. And you know, solo Beatles means they're talking about
stuff that happened after the Beatles broke up as a group. And as you may know, all four of the
Beatles went on to have a very successful solo careers. So that's really what they talk about.
And there is the Tadeski Trucks Band, Susan Tadeski and Derek Trucks. They're married couple.
And they have this band. And it is, I don't know, sort of a combination of mixture of
all-man brothers, grateful dead. You know, hard to describe, but they're a really good band.
And this is their official channel and they put out videos. And many of them are really short.
But I remember during COVID, they were actually putting out full concerts on this channel. And the way
they did it was they were asking you to donate money to, I don't remember now precisely what
organizations, but organizations that were trying to deal with the COVID pandemic.
So, you know, it was a good thing for them to do. I really like the band.
So this is their channel. The next one I have is called the Ark. Now, where I live in the
vicinity of Ann Arbor, Michigan, the Ark is the home of live folk music, traditional music,
contemporary stuff. It's a wonderful place. The facility has, I think, about 400 seats.
And it's pretty difficult to not be close to the stage. You know, I think the worst seat there
is probably 50 feet from the stage. So, you get up close and personal. And they will put out concerts
on this. And that's the main thing. So, Lath al-Sadi is one of the people that they did recently.
You might know him from some of those America's got talent or something like that. But, you know,
he was a very well-received guitarist. And he's local here. So, they did a concert of his. And that
was like almost three hours. The next channel is the Beatles. And this is the official YouTube
channel of the Beatles. And obviously, I'm a big fan of the Beatles. So, this is mostly going to be
short things. Announcements or short videos like there was one about the cutting process for
they just did a box set of the 1964 U.S. albums of the Beatles. And so, they talked about what
the cutting process was like for that. So, I think that's probably enough for this particular
episode. I'm going to cut it off here. This is a hookah for Hacker Public Radio signing off.
And as always, encouraging you to support Free Software. Bye-bye.
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording podcast, click on our upload link
to find out how easy it is.
Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by an AnHonestHost.com, the Internet Archive,
rsync.net, and our mirror network.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
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Episode: 4549
Title: [deprecated] Pomodoro Task Tool (pomotask.sh)
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4549/hpr4549.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:13:45 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4549, for 2026-01-08
Today's show is entitled, "[deprecated] Pomodoro Task Tool (pomotask.sh)"
The host is candycanearter and the duration is 00:04:29
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "Going over a small bash script I used to use to help with tasks"
Hi, and welcome back to me making an episode.
So I figured making a bunch of episodes to a young or random scripts have made for myself
and making a sub-look would be fun in an easy way to get some episodes out.
The full script will be in the notes, and most of the time will be bash or Python.
This script, in particular, I had rewritten, as I dropped a swing app.
So that's why it's deprecated in the title.
And one of the sort on this script is follow up on my last episode of Creeping How Well Task
where you're tied in the scripts, and over here, this deprecated one that are starting
with page on a script, which is much more difficult to discuss.
I made a circle back to the job erosion of the script at the end of the series, so we're
forward to that, if it ever happened.
This program act as a simple preliminary timer, but also printed a path for each project
in your task where you're interested in sequence.
The sub-cell lot for someone like me, who always sounds the focus on the most critical tasks
for getting to work on blog tasks, which end up picking up on me.
So now, let's start the part of my line analysis.
L-Rest equal 0 is just a pressure that they counter for a 15-minute break on a third
loop and resetting it.
For this, I don't know if the way I found a drill timer work, if I get 25 minutes of work
at 5-minute break, except for that on the third break, it's a 15-minute break.
This variable will keep track of that, and the plan of 15-minute break on the third
break.
This next line is the program in an event loop, as the program is designed to run until
the user-turn agent.
This current statement is mostly just here for debugging and to show the user with status
to program it in.
The inner loop runs once for each project in your list and then returns back to the top
of the loop in order to get more projects.
This line is actually, I guess, from your task where you're interested, if you think
a lot of bash magic, so let's take this step by step.
The dark sign in brackets is the common syntax to find a sub-shel and run a command in it.
It's uncaptured the output of the command.
This invoke a man is at the heart of many bash scripts due to its profitability.
We're invoking task warrior with the filter of a plus pendinger, pending a virtual tag that
captures any tag of the pending status.
This isn't needed because by default, the unique command will capture any task in this
history, including completed, deleted, or waiting tasks.
A unique and a special scripting command at that print is all unique elements of the given
field.
It's output is then typed into shop, which then rearranges the line that randomly.
This inner portal then gives over each project that was captured and displays its tasks
in a table.
Once the inner portal runs out of projects to display, it then returns to the outer
portal to collect more, just like a command is another debug.
The error, or just rather than a command, that's the play it to the user.
Passplayer displayed an error code if the provided filter returns nothing, and the uses
to make it to display the entire table if a project is completely clear if the force
timer is up.
The double bars intact is another bash vote in, that says to run the second command if the
first one returns an error.
This line is a simple bash syntax that can be used in place of a statement.
This is more of a personal preference and can be removed if needed, but the first display
after it falls, like it will always display the full task table.
Here is what a task table is actually displayed if we're using two built-in bash programs
being time out, but sure makes a program after they give a number of seconds, and watch,
which continuously runs the provided command and displays this output to terminal.
This also lets you skip a given or superior if needed by a basic control C. This is
the only term that it's a watch program.
Then we increment the rest timer, then we prompt the user to begin a break by crossing
enter, which is done through a basic read command.
The rest time is done for the 5th and 5th at the standard break time, but if we've got
this read break so far, then the rest time right instead such a 15 in the chapter is reset.
Then we do a basic timer where we set up another while with, to check for when the rest
time is greater than 0, and then say for 60 seconds and then document the rest timer.
And then another prompt and read for the user to enter, to continue back to another
work, and then draw the end marker for the two loops we use in the beginning.
And that's it, the two and that's the loop to keep it running forever, as long as there
is still working on stuff. This is extremely rudimentary in half some issues, like how
some hospitals keep the right period, or how the first period each cycle is completely
discarded for showing a full table, but it worked pretty well for my use case, and
maybe we can have you all too.
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording podcast, click on our upload link
to find out how easy it is.
Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by an AnHonestHost.com, the Internet Archive,
rsync.net, and our mirror network.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
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Episode: 4550
Title: Playing Civilization V, Part 7
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4550/hpr4550.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:13:46 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4550, for 2026-01-09
Today's show is entitled, "Playing Civilization V, Part 7"
The host is Ahuka and the duration is 00:14:48
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "We continue our look at the game mechanics of Civilization V."
hello this is a hookah welcome to you the hacker public radio and another exciting episode
in our ongoing series on computer strategy gaming and we're still in civilization five
and the topic for today is science and how to get a science victory how to use science in
general for whatever victory types you're going for so everything having to do with science now
in most respects it's not all that different in Civ five because science has been the science
victory has been part of civilization from the very beginning and it has been more of an
evolutionary change compared to revolutionary most of the texts are the same as in previous versions
there is a tech tree that is pretty similar and you need to keep up in science for any victory
condition you are thinking you may want to just beat your enemies into submission and if so
look at our previous episode about war and combat but if you're using chariots while they have
tanks you aren't going to have success it's also obvious that if you're going for a science victory
you really need to focus on science now many of these tips should be followed for any victory
condition but should be mandatory if you're drawing for a science victory now the mechanics of
researching technologies is that you have to accumulate a certain amount of science to discover a new
technology but this amount goes up over time so you have to continuously be looking to increase your
output of science to keep up for instance one of your first texts would be pottery which is a cost of
35 science but in your capital city you get three science from your palace and let's say of a
population of two so you're getting five science per turn that means you will research pottery in seven
turns but the education tech costs 485 science astronomy costs 780 science
scientific theory costs 1,650 plastics 4,700 particle physics 6,000 these are all key
texts to advance your science to a science victory so you can see that you need to be continually
increasing your generation of science now to start with population equals science you will get one
science for every point of population that does not however mean you need to have a lot of cities to
get there four to five well developed cities are quite sufficient and adding more cities can
cause unhappiness problems since higher population itself can cause unhappiness there is no good
reason to add to the problem now the next boost you can give to science is by building city improvements
the first which comes early in the game is the library which is available once you research writing
a library boosts the science output of the city by one science for every two citizens
so roughly a 50% increase but it's rounded down in any case building it early pays off
because advancing through the tech tree is a process of accumulating science the earlier you can get
these boosts the better the other population base boost is the public school which is available when you
research scientific theory which also boosts science by one for every two citizens and also offers a
specialist slot for a science specialist and since more population means more science the grandary
available when you research pottery is a good building just because it does grow your population
now there's one other building worth mentioning which is the observatory available when you discover
astronomy it doesn't depend on population but on location you have to have a city that is located
directly next to a mountain to build this but it adds 50% to the science output of the city
mountains are otherwise useless unless you're playing as the ingas but if you want a science boost
and happen to see a good location the ideal spot is an isolated mountain that is not part of
a mountain range so you don't lose out on your farming and mining production and if you can put a
city right next to that mountain it can be a big boost now then there's also specialists you can at a
certain point take some of your citizens out of the farming and mining and turn them into specialists
but you have to have a slot for them and those slots come in buildings as well we've already mentioned
public schools providing one slot universities available when you discover education
provide two slots as well as boosting the city output of science by 33%
the other science building which comes late in the game is the research lab available when you
discover plastics which adds another special a slot plus four science and then adds 50% to the
science output of the city now it comes pretty late in the game so it's not going to be much of a
help for most of the tech tree but when you have to research the space techs and you're going for a
science victory you know those space techs are very expensive and so building the research labs
becomes really important for that now wonders the first one if you're going to go for a science
victory that you want to try for is the great library it gives you a free library in the city that
builds it plus three science per turn and a free tech now use the free tech to get an expensive tech
like philosophy if it's free why not get as much bang for the buck as you can now the
Oracle provides one great person point per turn towards a great scientist so that can be helpful
hang gardens provides plus six food per turn which will help boost your population
and a free garden which boosts your great person points by 25%
leaning tower of Pisa increases your rate person points by 25% in all cities plus a free
great person of your choice when you build it. Borsland tower gives you plus 50% from research
agreements plus a free great scientist and the Hubble Space Telescope provides two great scientists
a free spaceship factory in the city where it was built and a plus 25% production for spaceship
parts now all of the above are world wonders which means you're in competition with other players
to build them and only one player can be successful in each case so you won't get them all
now you can sometimes rush a world wonder by chopping that is using your workers to cut down for us
for added production but you need to have high production cities to build wonders in general
there is one national wonder to focus on though and that's called the national college
now every player can build their own version of any national wonder the national college
is good but it can only be built when you have a library in every one of your cities your strategy
should be to build it as soon as possible so don't build more than three or four cities before
you get to this it gives you plus three science plus an increase of 50% in the science output
of the city you build it in yeah great scientists as you work on your science you will accumulate
great person points toward getting a great scientist someone there's also produce great
person points and all of your science specialists produce great person points as well as these add up
you'll suddenly see a great scientist appear in the early game the best thing to do is use
this great scientist to build an academy move the great scientist to any tile within your city
and create the academy there it will yield at least plus eight science but there are modifiers that
can also add to that the alternative which is better later in the game is to use the great
scientists to get a free tech discovery the reason is that early in the game that plus eight science
is very significant and it can accumulate over time combine that with things like an observatory
and a university that increase the city output and it can add up very nicely but by perhaps the
medieval era and certainly the Renaissance era you start running out of time for that accumulation
of science to add up meanwhile the text have gotten so expensive that a free tech is really the better
option now another thing you can do to increase your science is to engage in research agreements
with other players these become available once you research education and you have to have a
declaration of friendship with the other player before you can create a research agreement
you each put a certain amount of gold into the pot to fund the research and after a period of time
typically about 30 turns you each get an amount of science from it the way it is calculated is
based on the partner that produced the least amount of science during the agreement from a
science standpoint if you're head in science it probably won't benefit you to enter into the agreement
but it does build your relationship with the other player so I wouldn't avoid them all together
now if you're behind in science of course it can help you a lot another thing you can do to
build up your science is policies and ideologies now given that you should probably be building tall
like four to five cities instead of wide which would be eight to 12 cities or more it makes sense to
start out with tradition instead of liberty as your policy tree but once you get to the
Renaissance you'll want to enable the rationalism treat him as your science when you get to ideologies
you have a choice to make ignore autocracy that is not a science oriented choice
if you have three to five cities freedom is the best ideology because specialists require less food
using civil society and have reduced unhappiness using universal suffrage
with a wide strategy of more than five cities order starts looking better as your ideology
getting workers faculties will give you a plus 25 percent science from every factory
now another thing that can help is exploration generally this is a good idea for a number of
reasons but one we want to focus on here is the effect of meeting other players
now in the first place if you find other players who have researched texts you do not yet have
you can trade for them and you should do this whenever possible remember the other players will
all be trading with each other anyway so if you don't participate you simply fall behind
if you have a nice tech and can trade it to just two other players you will jump up two
texts along the tech tree and that can be huge if you hold onto it as a secret some other player
will research it and they will trade it and get the boost instead so trade whenever you can
another advantage is that when you discover that another player has a tech you don't have yet
your cost to research it goes down now that was tech trading but what about trade in general
and that's the next science boost when you set up a trade route with either another person or a city
state one of the benefits can be an increased year science the main benefit of trade routes is
money at least that's the way I play so I will start always by looking for the best addition to my
treasury but if I have two possible trade routes that provide equal amounts of money but one offers
more science then I might prefer that particularly if I'm going for a science victory
now the last thing that is going to influence all of this is which empire are you going to play
some of them are really oriented to a science victory the two obvious choices are Babylon and
Korea Babylon gets a free great scientist when you discover writing which is very early
so you should use it to put down an academy right away and it earns great scientists 50% faster
Korea's advantage comes from plus two science from all specialists and from all great
person tile improvements plus you get a tech boost each time a science building or a wonder is built in the
capital now you can win a science victory with any empire if you're careful about leveraging your
empire's strengths for instance Venice and Portugal can rake in the golden huge amounts and you can buy a lot
of stuff that way or with the counts you can generate a ton of faith and that can be used to buy
buildings and great scientists with the right social policies so this is just kind of a quick
overview of the science path and there's always more to learn if you really want to dive into
science options and get a science victory the civilization fanatic site has a pretty good strategy
guide and I've put a link to that in the show notes so this is hookah for hacker public radio
signing off and as always encouraging you to support free software. Bye bye
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording podcast, click on our upload link
to find out how easy it is.
Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by an AnHonestHost.com, the Internet Archive,
rsync.net, and our mirror network.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
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Episode: 4551
Title: “Elsbeth in IT: Since ’97” (Part 2)
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4551/hpr4551.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:13:46 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4551, for 2026-01-12
Today's show is entitled, "“Elsbeth in IT: Since ’97” (Part 2)"
The host is Elsbeth and the duration is 00:39:05
The flag is Explicit, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "Lee talks to Elsbeth about her experiences in IT as a woman, continued."
Here we continue to talk between myself, Lay and Ellsworth, about women in technology and Ellsworth's IT career.
When my second husband, who he was a software developer, when I met him, had been for quite some time,
he was asked by, you know, I'm trying to remember how he and the creator of the company interacted.
Somehow or another, he got connected with this gentleman that had an idea for software, but was not a developer himself.
And it was for something all I'm going to say is it was for something in the health care wellness bubble.
And he started decoding that software for him.
And over time, they needed somebody, my ex-husband needed somebody to test the software for him, but they didn't have the funds to pay somebody that had a degree or had more experience.
So he asked me to look at it and he had been asking me to look at it and try things out.
And eventually he realized, I'm pretty good at this because I have a knack of seeing things from different angles and trying things different ways.
And he ultimately wound up having me do the QA portion. He would send a bill for his software development stuff, but then there would be a QA invoice as well.
And that was just the work I did. It was never officially under my name.
And that's how I got into QA. I taught myself how to effectively look at every aspect of the software from both a usability and a practicality standpoint.
And do test studies and keep data records or whatnot.
Okay. So actually, what system were sort of systems were these back at least still dots in those days.
It was like Windows 3, but when Windows 95.
Oh, it was Windows xP?
When we started out, I think it was Windows xP, I think.
If it were 95, it would be right before the switch over.
And it was like 2007.
It's when?
Yes, so they were just starting when those face turns stuff.
You know what, I think I might have had this on my computer when I started testing.
Yeah.
I'm pretty certain I did.
Was that a lot of things across?
Well, as you've seen that from their full mentioned IT crowd.
So in the episode where the bomb disposal unit is running on Vista and Moshouts.
We're all going to die.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So the software, obviously, had back-end database.
Did it have internet connectivity as well?
It was meant to be used on an iPad.
It started out as like a...
It started out as like...
Almost...
I don't even want to compare it to YouTube.
But do you know Vimeo?
A little bit.
Yeah.
So it's basically...
It was basically a way for users to do exercises.
I'm not going to talk about the industry.
But I think I can see this.
It was a way for users to do exercises from home when they needed to.
It's kind of like...
I guess kind of...
Social media is kind of replaced all the time now, but...
Yeah.
It was basically...
This went like the internet, actually.
I picked Zypazan.
Come out.
Back in that day.
Well, eventually it was being developed for mobile.
It's what I'm saying.
Right.
Yeah.
Okay.
So, yeah.
So, quality assurance.
And yet all the things you've mentioned...
To the gender dynamics for different or the same when you are now doing this.
At this time period.
I mean, I was...
Yeah.
I was homeschooling my kids.
Old time.
They were getting older, so I had more time.
Like individually.
And so it was basically just...
Rather than pay somebody who had a resume to do this stuff.
The owner and my ex decided to just...
Bill...
You know, my ex would bill for the QA work under his name.
It was me doing the work.
But it wasn't me being recognized.
The only recognition I have is...
Every year I get a piece of paper saying that I have ownership shares to a company that has no value.
Okay.
Okay.
Yeah.
It's...
It's operating in the negative, so it's never, you know.
Yeah.
So, you're in a very different environment to your previous job.
Did any of those kinds of things follow you there?
No.
Actually, I pretty much thrived in that because it was just me interacting with the owner
and my ex who...
My ex and I had a really great working relationship when I came to that stuff.
We were able to talk about everything.
If there was a challenge, you know.
It was good.
I was able to communicate with the owner.
And when the owner would come to be in like, you know,
hey, why can't this release happen?
I was able to say, hey, you know, this is why it's taking so long.
You know, you need to allow them to have time to work through the update, you know.
Or he needs to focus on this particular thing, you know, so that he, you know.
It was basically kind of like a combination of QA and project management,
even though I will not take project management credit for it, if that makes sense.
You know, just that the skill set of being able to interact and translate between the developer and the stakeholder.
That, that was something.
Yeah.
And I, I thrived in it.
I loved it.
Yeah. And looking back, would you say you're triggered with more respect when you're doing this role?
Yeah.
My ex never really fully believed that women should fill less than in the industry.
He was really good about giving me credit, even though I, like it,
it wasn't officially a job that I can, you know.
You could put that you could put on your resume.
Right.
I mean, I can, I can put it on my resume, but like there's no.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Do you feel that experience?
How much of it was grounded in the technology of the day?
And how much of it would you say was transferable, even to the modern day?
What I didn't know at that point in time is that Sigma 6 was so important.
Like this was going, as it, this is a 15 year time period.
I didn't realize that like I had done my research on, you know,
QA techniques and software, you know, like logging notes and Jira and, you know, stuff like that, you know.
Like I have that sort of experience, but being told like when I was studying the Sigma 6 stuff
to actually look for a software development QA position, because I felt like I would thrive in that.
Again, especially if I could work from home.
I realized that there's a corporatization of QA that came into play that I never really experienced.
So qualifications that I don't deal as really necessary qualifications of somebody knows how to hunt a bug, track it, document it, explain it, you know, test it, retested again, you know.
Like everybody that plans their life may plan their life differently, some may use a planner, some may use, you know, post it notes, you know.
There are different ways to get to the same end goal.
And it's basically pigeonholed everybody into having to do something a certain way that I don't actually think is the best for the industry because it's all based on manufacturing.
And software isn't, maybe it's digital manufacturing to some degree if you want to put it that way, but it's not quantifiable in a stack of product.
And sigma 6 seems to be more focused on productivity from that perspective than from.
Okay, if you let somebody walk away from their computer for 10 minutes to decompress and think through the challenge that they're having and why they can't figure out why this bug is doing what it's doing.
And seeing if there's a way that could maybe make it work.
And then come back when they have some sort of inspiration, then just like, oh, and you go back and you go and you figure out whether there's another way to get it to work and then you document that and send it back to the developer.
You know, I don't think everything has to be translated through a book.
If I make sense.
Yeah, you can probably define lots of different approaches, holistic approaches.
That might be a good definition for my QA as holistic QA.
Yeah.
I've never even considered that.
Yeah, the idea that there's one way of doing something that you do it by numbers and that that's great for consistency.
If you want to minimize variables, but.
And it maybe works statistically on on mass, but.
You know, there's.
I think there's a lot of sustainability and there's a lot of variation in one size fits so just fits no one.
Yeah.
That right here.
Yeah.
I think one size fits off it's no one that you just said.
Yeah, sums up the entirety of this.
Yeah.
That a lot.
I mean, based it based on your lived experience.
What signs made it clear to you that the tech world hasn't progressed even in the years that.
That you've sort of been in the out of it.
Because women still don't have the you know, while there may be some women that have thought.
All of the issues that comes with being a woman in any industry.
To get where they are and there is more notable women in the industry.
And I still feel like.
I'm consistently seeing that women aren't paid as well.
Women do statistically make less than the industry than men do.
Women with all the progress in tolerance and the me to movement and trying to get, you know, no I'm not going to go into that but like the whole progression of maybe.
More acknowledgment of women's rights and whatnot.
We still have issues that are not addressed.
And it's gone from have, have they gone from war being I've, to being more inherent biases.
I am not going to name the company or when I worked for them, but it was within the last seven years.
Okay.
This was not in QA.
I will say that.
But this shows.
I've seen evidence of this in the IT industry as well.
When a female goes to HR to report issues.
She is not the majority of the time and I'm not going to say all, but even with women in HR.
A female that is reporting an issue is not treated with the same respect as a man reporting an issue.
There.
And I see this all over social media of women talking about it.
And it doesn't matter what the industry is.
A woman makes a report or a woman works really, really hard and gets the credit taken away from her by somebody else.
And in this case it could be.
Male or female it's just it's all about the competition somebody has a good idea.
You report that somebody stole your ideas or your work or to credit for your work and it just gets shoved under the rug.
And this has everything to do with the corporatization of everything in my opinion.
Now if you can't have control as a corporation then.
And it really just depends on the company.
Can you just clarify?
Can you maybe not give a real example?
Just give a made up example of exactly what you're talking about.
Let's see.
Dolly is has produced a new innovative piece of code that will change the way the users experience the software that a company is developing.
Payton.
I'm going to use Payton because that's a gender neutral name.
Payton sees Sally software and sees the potential of it.
And immediately starts criticizing her for what she could have done better in front of higher ups.
And then implies to the higher ups that.
The only reason Sally developed this was code was because Payton and Sally had a conversation that led to her developing this code.
Who knows what's true?
Only Payton and Sally.
But the higher ups have caused a question.
And Payton has socially.
Sally's one who's known to the grindstone just doing her job.
Payton's maneuvering for advancement.
So the higher ups that heard this conversation have had more interactions with Payton and have more trust in Payton.
Because they have a better social interaction.
Whereas Sally consistently has turned out.
Code.
Quality code.
Quality work.
What not.
They have no reason to question her ability to write the code.
But they have subsequently been.
Lead to believe that she couldn't process creative ideas and development in code.
So an innovative idea has to come through somebody that they can more socially understand.
And then Sally gets tossed under the bus when she goes to HR.
To report that Payton has taken credit for her idea.
HR is like trying to find out, you know, basically doing the whole Solomon and the, you know, two moms in the baby situation of okay.
Well, how do we know who's actually telling the truth?
It becomes corporate politics at that point in time.
And it's no longer about the code.
It's no longer about the ethics.
It's just drama.
And that happens all the time to get women to keep their mouth shut and just do their work.
So people profit off of our desire to not be a part of the drama at some point in time.
Okay, thank you for crystallizing what you're talking about by illustrating what you're talking about with a sort of concrete narrative about that.
How do you think it came about that workplace culture has failed to keep pace with the very real changes in society around the first in the inclusion?
I think it falls directly back to corporate politics.
Workplace environment is affected by how corporate politics are.
I think we made huge strides forward in the work from home movement during COVID.
I think mental health was better now hold on.
People that were able to keep their jobs during COVID by working remotely had better mental health than they did when they were working in the office.
I want to clarify that because COVID was a really rough time for everybody mentally.
But there was a movement to get work back into corporate culture.
Recently, at least here where I met in the United States, it's almost impossible for me to even get a call center position remotely.
For some reason, I think to some degree the people that took advantage of the work from home culture destroyed it for those who really thrived in it.
However, I think companies could have done a much better job of looking at the statistics of those regardless of what industry it was that we're working from home.
The work life balance was so much better then.
So right now when you ask that question, I'm kind of struck in the dichotomy of those that are still able to work at home and thrive and those who can't because that right now is having a huge impact.
Just a couple of sides.
Just on that subject, I have my experiences and thoughts that work from home sometimes is not a static thing.
Given time, it's dependent on what you've been doing before and even where you're going afterwards, like if you've been working in the office and then you go to work from home, you may see an improvement, but then over time that may degrade.
I don't see it as a panacea, even if someone is near a virgin, it's not really arguing your case, but if I could just fix it.
So I've had it bad experiences working from home in my very early career where it's led to severe mental health crisis, because it was not I was doing it in the wrong way maybe.
I've seen times in my life where it has very much enabled me to function a lot better.
So it's okay, here's the solution, just do that and that's the solution.
I think some people work really well.
I think some people work very well in office, I think some people work really well in home, but I think everyone needs to have.
And this was something that was making huge strides and it seems like we've just kind of reversed a little bit at least here, I don't I've only worked in the US, so I can't speak for anywhere else.
This isn't me trying to be critical per se, it's more of a just an observation that I saw mental health support within corporations, causing people to have a better work life.
And I don't see that right now.
I see that starting to be taken away.
I don't know about anywhere else, but I think that that supporting the whole person not just the employee makes a huge difference on the quality of work anyone can do regardless of whether they're working in the house or in home.
And when we were working in home, there were more social gatherings online to interact.
And that's kind of just faded away and I saw that happening during my last year working in a work from home position.
I saw it starting to fade away and I'm like that's that's really kind of a shame because when they do these little 15 minute corporate teams meetings and stuff like that and everyone's online, they've got somebody hyping them up and everybody's you know getting positive it helps when you have a mental health crisis line that you can call and not worry about what that's going to cost you.
That helps you cope with the intricacies whether it be in housework or in homework.
And until we start taking the employees mental and physical and emotional health into play, you're just going to wind up having employees that just find a getting beat down burnout and quit.
And it doesn't matter whether your neurodiverse or not, but it does tend to affect neurodiverse people a little more.
Do you think there's any danger of the increased interest in supporting employees of the mental health as virgin on this side of intrusive and almost being a means of manipulating people.
Okay, I think if it's done the right way and that is.
The mental health isn't coming from the company.
It's an added benefit so.
Well, here I'm trying to explain it because I'm coming at this from an American perspective, okay, so a lot of employees regardless of.
If you want to have a quality of life where you're able to go get a cup of coffee when you need to decompress.
But you have to choose between whether you go get a cup of coffee or you pay.
A copay.
To go to a therapist whether it's online or in person.
That's a problem and that's an issue that people are having all the way up to the middle class.
Income level for people in the U.S. because insurance is insanely expensive and if you don't get it through your.
If you don't get benefits through the company where your pain or reduced amount, but you're still paying a fee.
And that would be your.
Not just your copay.
You're, um, you have to pay your deductible.
You have to pay your premium.
So your premium is, you know, every month you pay a certain amount.
That means that you're covered.
Well, part of that coverage is as you have to pay a certain amount or a deductible of.
The total cost that's going to be put out on your health insurance.
If you have any health issues, whether you need to go regularly to account the.
The therapists just to deal with mental health stuff, whether you have any physical conditions.
That deductible your pain very, very quickly.
So usually it depends on what the insurance is and what the premium is and what it covers,
but that's usually between $48,000 a year.
But you have to pay up front or for they fully cut the insurance fully covers.
Your stop and then you still have a copay, which means, you know, $10 to $25.
If you're having to choose between self care and mental health or physical health,
you're never getting to enjoy life outside of work.
All you're doing is coping with existing.
And that's what the majority of Americans are dealing with.
If a company steps in and says, we are covering.
The full cost of you being able to call a mental health therapist at no cost to you.
Anytime you need to, which is.
Honestly, when it comes to hiring and firing and getting training employees and stuff like that,
it's cheaper for them to do that and provide that access.
Now it does come down to the employer actually choosing to do it for the employee actually choosing to, you know,
use the benefits, but it's there.
And those are two, you don't choose to use it. They wind up having a more loyal employee.
Is it is there any risk of it being used to make someone have more capacity to actually do things that actually they find unsustainable.
That have a much.
Oh, that's a good question.
They get, it just allows the company to increase the burden on that person before they write it.
My answer to that is companies can use that.
Companies can and I have seen it happen.
I cannot discuss this other than to say that I have worked.
Where I have had three access to mental therapy through the company that wasn't like it was not.
Like the company wasn't going to spy on my stuff from that.
But because of the nature of what I was doing, they offered that.
And yes, I did burn out.
That was a job where mental health therapy was absolutely necessary.
And I did burn out.
And I did have to say that I couldn't keep working even with that.
And it was literally the therapist that was provided for them was one of the people that helped me make the decision to walk away from that position.
Is that answer the question?
Yeah, that does that make sense.
I think you've touched on that and the previous podcast that episode that you recorded is community podcast.
So actually just to come back to how we started.
Have your personal experiences kind of shape your beliefs about whether women are truly been treated as equals in employment in the economy?
I will have to reiterate that I don't think that they are treated equally.
I think that some people choose to.
And the majority of companies choose not to make that a priority.
I think it depends completely on the societal culture that's around.
And I would be interested in seeing how it was treated in a different location just to see like a different geographical location to see if that made a difference.
But there's too much about society globally, but it's that it's very clear that it's still in a shoe.
It doesn't take a whole lot to see that it's not just about corporations and employees and whatnot.
It's just how our global community exists.
Okay.
So I know we've been looking at things with somewhat of a critical eye and but looking at very real experiences.
Right.
If we shift a little bit and maybe looking a bit forward and thinking what you wish had been different.
How would things have been different in a more ideal situation during your years in IT?
I wish I had been more confident.
This is more about introspection really to some degree.
I wish I'd been more confident to assert myself and say, I do even with the consequences.
I wish that I had been more confident to say, I did this and I did this well.
You know, you may be trying to switch the direction and trying to redirect it somewhere else, but my work is good.
I didn't have the confidence back then.
Today, if I were to look at getting back into the IT industry in any aspect of it, I would be interested in seeing how I was accepted based on my lack of academic achievement.
And yet, my skills at my abilities.
I'd be interested in seeing whether that was more accepted and more appreciated.
Okay.
So there are things like this.
I don't know if this is necessarily better or worse.
There is like the SFIA framework, which looks at skills and competencies.
I'm very much, it doesn't so much matter how you got them.
It's more that you can verbalise than communicate them, that you can demonstrate them.
Yeah, but is that something you have to pay for?
That's one of my big beefs.
I should pay for proof.
SFIA is a framework for employers to end for employees, potential employees.
It's just a framework of saying to do this is a certain role in the IT industry.
They divide the IT industry to hundreds and hundreds and dozens of different roles to do this role.
These are the things you need to be good at.
This is the kind of experience you have to have to do that role at a certain level.
Whether it's a simple level, like a junior level or a medium level or a senior level.
This is what it's composed of.
How do I know?
My personal opinion is it can be a bit restrictive because it's like assumes that you've come along a certain career path to get to where you are.
That you've been exposed to things in the same way that they're expected.
In the other hand, it sounds like, I mean, I'm not saying that there's not like a firewall as such that they won't even let someone get to that interview stage to do that demonstration without the degree.
I kind of think a good organization maybe will be looking not just at the qualification, will be looking at what can that person actually do.
What can they demonstrate that they can do?
Interesting. I have never heard of this before.
Do you know who?
He's happened to know who develops this and internationally.
I'm on the SFA page.
I'm really launching to that really.
It's just a collaborative community effort.
It's an initiative that goes back to like even the British computing societies industry structure model.
That was from the 80s.
But it's just developed from there.
I think the point at the point end of it and not done that well out there.
I think it has served lots of people quite well.
That's something I'll have to look into.
I love that this is.
I mean, there's some obviously there's some pay aspects to this.
But there's also mostly free.
That's interesting.
Not for profit organization.
Yeah.
It's free for most non-commercial use is basically what it's at.
You're just saying a minute ago that you'd be interested to see how someone was treated like coming into the workplace.
What you think companies should be doing maybe that they aren't at the moment.
Beyond perhaps the things that we've already discussed.
I think far too often a company may out that they have tolerance and inclusivity in what not.
And diversity in their company structure.
But I really believe just being one of the minorities in that in a couple different ways.
But the interview process is meant to call corporatized individuals.
Somebody who has a corporate mentality even if their skill set is, you know, coding or graphic design or whatever.
I think there needs to be more understanding of what it means to bring in a diverse individual.
And not just talking, I'm talking about somebody that has different ways of viewing things.
Different ways of performing than what is traditionally deemed as employable work quality.
And while this may vary from both company to company and country to country.
There is still very much the aspect of you cannot be an authentic individual if you're walking into an interview.
If I walk in their stimming.
That's going to create a prejudice immediately.
And if the person interviewing me is not familiar with somebody who's neurodivergent.
Then they immediately put a negative perspective on what my quality as an employee would be.
How do you think someone could be supported in that situation?
I think that that requires whether it's smaller big businesses to choose to educate themselves and their employees on the different ways individuals can interact with the world.
I hear people all the time saying that they have inclusivity in their company and I'm like, no, you don't.
You have a paragraph in your employee handbook that says that we are going to do this, but in practice it doesn't happen.
And that requires people choosing to get out and get to know what it's like to interact with somebody who functions things and processes differently when you do.
Do you have any advice that you think would be relevant for say young women or women who are neurodivergent or entering the world today?
Believe in yourself and your value.
As you are, do not conform yourself to be something that you're not because you're wind up paying for it either mentally or physically and the long run.
Don't compromise who you are.
Okay.
What if anything gives you hype even with everything that you've experienced will give you hype about the future?
People like you.
Honestly, people like you, people like Ken who having had multiple obviously conversations with you.
But also even the service that I had with Ken, I see people who want to see other people succeed in life and are perfectly okay with not dictating how success looks.
Sorry for calling you out there in a good way.
Sorry.
Okay.
Shall we wrap this up?
I know it's but we've talked quite a lot about, I mean it's quite some heavy stuff that we've talked about made.
You know, I hope we haven't, I hope the generalised would obviously if people have different views.
Those are welcome people can record their own episodes.
People will definitely, even if they don't have different views they might, they will definitely have different experiences.
And this, in based, just one part too, you know, just the two of us just talking, we're not really trying to prescribe things to other people.
You have all turned up views, those equally valid.
Just to clarify, I would like to openly state that anyone who wants to make a, you know, a response video to this or just express their own thoughts on it.
Tag me or, or let me know that you've done it and I'll go listen to it because I know that not all people have experienced the things I have.
Not even other women, you know, because there may be women here that have not experienced the same thing I have.
And they have wonderful success stories and I'd love to hear that.
But I'm not saying everything that I've said to bash all men.
And I think that's really, really important to note because.
Some of you may come listen to this and think, oh wow, she's pretty harsh.
And I was being harsh at the people that treated me poorly.
Not, you know, I tried to emphasize those that did bring good too, so.
Thank you for listening to all this.
Thank you very much help, Spith.
Goodbye from me and goodbye from.
Else that.
Bye bye.
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording podcast, click on our upload link
to find out how easy it is.
Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by an AnHonestHost.com, the Internet Archive,
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Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons
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Episode: 4552
Title: Printer Conspiracy
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4552/hpr4552.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:13:47 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4552, for 2026-01-13
Today's show is entitled, "Printer Conspiracy"
The host is MrX and the duration is 00:07:02
The flag is Explicit, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "This is an episode about a possible EPSON print driver conspiracy"
Hello and welcome, how could a public video it ends?
My name is Mr. X and welcome to this podcast.
As usual, I'd like to start by thanking the people of HPR for making the service available
to us all on these here in two tubes.
Each HPR is a community podcast provided by the community for the community.
That means you can contribute to them.
If we all give just one show, we have more shows than we know what to do with, we've
gone to a great deal of effort to make the process as simple as possible.
This pick up a microphone, phone, an MP3 player, something got to hand at the record button,
send it in.
The website's got a few ideas you could introduce yourself if you're not sure what to send
in is your first show, so as you could start.
So I feel a bit rusty myself actually because it's been quite a while since I've done
a show myself, so I thought this would start for a good start for 20, 20, 6.
This all started when I was having issues with the printer, so I have a very old Epson
R-300-NJ printer, I'm serving for many years, although it was at least 10 years, all
if not 15, and I thought I got it even before I was interested in Linux, for many
of these years, now I've been using the printer extensively on Linux and not in Windows
at all, it's been a really good printer and has been incredibly cheap to run.
Many years ago I got a number of sets of links for it, I think that only cost about
15 pounds, and then shot well later a colleague at work gave me a set of links, so I ended
up with a large bag full of cartridges, which I was working my way through ever since.
I used the printer in frequent, for many years, this is far from ideal for an inkjet
printer, as doing so tends to cause the ink nozzles to clog up.
Unsurprisingly, in later years, it has become somewhat temperamental.
The problems consisted of paper mess feeds probably down to the rubber take up roller
going hard over time, and missing bits of printer, this is assumed due to the infrequent
use of a printer, and age of the inkjet cartridges all of which were well out of their
expiry dates.
The mess fed paper could be solved by individually feeding each sheet through the printer,
the poor slash missing print could be solved by a combination of running the print head,
pinned routine, or by replacing the fend and cartridge.
Laterally, I had print problems again, and as per usual after cleaning the heads, and then
finally changing the cartridge, the printer is imprinting normally.
Shortly after this, I bought myself, to splash in by myself, an apple mark, many, thought
it could be useful to be able to print from it.
I visited the Epson website, download it and stole the Epson print driver for my chassis
R300 printer.
I tried printing from the Mac, and received a warning stating something like some of the components
within your printer are worn and mini servicing.
I'd never seen a mess like this before, as a normally print using the open source print
drivers on my Linux PC.
When I tried printing on my apple mark, no black text was visible on the page.
I tried using the Hickling routine, and this made no difference.
I eventually had to resort to changing the color of the text within the Libra Office document.
This led me to print the text that was at least legible.
At the time I was a little suspicious of all this, a printer had been working so well
just a few days previously.
I plugged my trusty printer back into my trusty PC running an old version of Ubuntu using
the open source print drivers.
I fired up Libra Office and tried to print a document.
To my surprise, a printer was very good, while it was not as good as when the printer
was new, the quality of black and color text was actually very good.
My suspicion though I can't prove it is that the Epson print driver has worked out
that the printer is 10 plus years old and needs to be returned to Epson for servicing,
or to purchase a new printer.
To ensure that the driver is crippling the output from the printer, the open source print
drivers have none of this nefarious nonsense, and allows the printer to operate as normal.
As I said, I cannot prove any of this, however I leave this up to you to decide what
you think is going on here.
At this point, I was going to end the podcast, however the story didn't end there.
My mother wanted me to print out some holiday insurance documents for her.
She sent me a copy of her documents as I told her my printer was working again.
The first print out slightly faintly, but was readable.
The other page is seemed to print using invisible ink.
I technically need the heads, but it made no difference.
It looked a bit like my printer, or at least the cartridge, this past its expiry date.
Cleaning out our loft, I found the original box for my Epson R300 printer, and discovered
that it was purchased in May 2005.
This means the printer is now over 20 years old.
At this point I decided that it was maybe about time that I replaced a raging printer.
I used a printer very infrequently, and really need color.
For this reason I decided this time to buy a laser printer, since I believe these don't
tend to dry out like ink jet printers, but they're less likely to suffer with infrequent
use.
All the time we'll tell though, I don't expect this one to last 20 years.
Finally, I told this and I'm not sure if using the Epson drive had anything to do with
the final demise of my printer, though who knows.
As glad to see, I leave that up to you dear listener.
Okay, I think that's it for this episode.
If you want to contact me, you can contact me at MrX at HPR at googlemail.com.
As MRX, ATHPR, the Atsemble, googlemail.com.
So until next time, thank you, and goodbye.
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording podcast, click on our upload link
to find out how easy it is.
Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by an AnHonestHost.com, the Internet Archive,
rsync.net, and our mirror network.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
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Episode: 4553
Title: Nuclear Reactor Technology - Ep 4 Less Common Reactor Types
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4553/hpr4553.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:13:48 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4553, for 2026-01-14
Today's show is entitled, "Nuclear Reactor Technology - Ep 4 Less Common Reactor Types"
The host is Whiskeyjack and the duration is 00:17:34
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "Some of the less common historical reactor types."
This episode is the fourth in an eight-part series on nuclear reactor technology.
Less common reactor types. In this episode we discussed some of the less common historical
reactor types. These are a mixture of less common commercial types and some experimental
or research reactors. I will cover advanced or future designs in another episode.
Miner successes. First I'll start with some reactors that had minor successes, but for
one reason or other, didn't find widespread sales.
Magnocks. This is a British design, but saw very limited use outside of the UK.
The name comes from the type of fuel used. This used a non-oxidizing, magnesium aluminum
sheath around the fuel. The first nuclear reactors anywhere to produce power for the grid
on a large scale were the Magnocks reactors at Calderhal with 460 megawatt units starting
in 1956. Other claimants to this title were experimental reactors that produced anywhere
between less than a kilowatt to no more than 5 or 6 megawatt.
It is characterized by the following features. The moderator is graphite. The coolant
is carbon dioxide. It used natural uranium. The moderator, fuel and coolant are contained
in a steel and concrete pressure vessel. The carbon dioxide coolant is used to create steam
and a steam generator, refueling is done online. This design was succeeded by the AGR.
The Magnocks reactors are currently all shut down or dismantled due to age.
AGR advanced gas cooled reactor. This is a British design, but not used outside of the UK.
These were based on the earlier Magnocks reactors. It is characterized by the following features.
The moderator is graphite. The coolant is carbon dioxide. It uses uranium and rich to 2.5
to 3.5%. The older Magnocks reactors use natural uranium. The moderator, fuel and coolant
are contained in a steel and concrete pressure vessel.
The carbon dioxide coolant is used to create steam and a steam generator, refueling is
done online. The operating temperatures are much higher than for other reactors mentioned
so far. This allows for higher thermal efficiency and so allows more power to be generated
from a smaller reactor. This design is no longer being developed. The AGR reactors are being
faced out as a reach end of life. The design was successful from a technical perspective,
but did not sell well outside of the UK.
LWGR, light water graphite moderated reactor, also known as RBMK. This was originally
a Soviet design and never built outside of the Soviet Union. It was unusual in how it combined
features and ways not seen in other reactors. It is characterized by the following features.
The moderator is graphite. The coolant is light water. Fuel is contained in vertical
tubes running through the graphite moderator. Steam is boiled directly in the fuel channels
and there is no separate steam generator. It uses slightly enriched uranium, refueling
is conducted online with the reactor running at full power by depressurizing one tube at
a time. There is no containment building. The reactors at Chernobyl were of this design.
These are not related to the more common VVER designs which originated in the Soviet Union
at about the same time. The VVER reactors are fairly conventional PWR designs.
Historical oddities are dead ends. Next, I'll cover some historical oddities or dead
ends. Some of these designs may make a comeback, however, so don't write them off completely.
In many cases, there was nothing inherently wrong with the reactor design. The design
owners in many cases simply decided that there was a better market for some other design
they had. Organically cooled reactors. Organically cooled reactors use an organic oil compound
as either a coolant or both as a coolant and moderator instead of water. The reason
for using an organic oil was to allow higher operating temperatures without high pressures.
This allows for the reactor itself to be unpressurized and thus simpler and cheaper while
the high pressure parts are combined to the steam generator in steam circuit. Higher operating
temperatures allow for higher thermal efficiency in the steam cycle, allowing more power
to be produced from a given size of reactor. Organically cooled and moderated. This uses
the organic fluid as both coolant and moderator. The main example of this is the Pickwood
Nuclear Power Plant built as an experiment in the U.S. in the early 1960s. This generated
43.5 megawatts. The basic design was similar to the American PWR designs in that the fuel,
moderator and coolant were together in one tank and steam was generated separately. However,
the reactor vessel was an impressurized due to the high boiling point of the organic coolant.
The coolant was a standard commercially available heat transfer fluid used at industry. The
design suffered from the following of surfaces due to the breakdown of the organic fluid
and the build-up of sludge in the reactor vessel. It was shut down after less than three years
of operation. Organically cooled and heavy water moderated. This uses an organic coolant but the
moderator is heavy water and is separate from the coolant. The main example of this was the
WR-1 reactor in Canada. This was a research reactor and was not intended to produce electric power.
Nonetheless, it was large enough to produce 60 megawatts of heat. The design was similar to PHWR
or also known as Kando, reactors, and that it consisted of a number of tubes,
holding the fuel and coolant, which ran through a large, unpressurized tank of heavy water.
Unlike normal Kando designs, the tubes ran vertically rather than horizontally.
These tubes were unpressurized and the coolant operated at relatively high temperature.
Since this was a research reactor, there were also tubes which were used to hold experiments
which were to be irradiated. Fueling was online. Fuel was uranium carbide rather than the
normal uranium oxide. This was cheaper and easier to make than oxide fuel and was chemically
compatible with the organic coolant. Because the oil was non-corroso, the metals used to build
the reactor could be less complex and expensive than once it had to withstand both radiation
and high temperature water. The higher operating temperatures would have allowed for higher
efficiency if a steam cycle was added. It ran for two decades from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s,
when it was shut down as Canada's national nuclear lab decided to start to consolidate operations
onto fewer sites. This used a different organic coolant than the Pekkor reactor in the U.S. did.
It did not suffer the same following in sludge problems. The lack of problems may have been
due to a combination of factors, including not using the coolant as a moderator,
and also better control the chemistry. The design of the Pekkor reactor in the U.S. was based on
their PWR designs and so inherently had large volumes of stagnant fluid, something that was not
possible with a two-based design such as WR1. Preliminary work was done on turning this into a
large power reactor design, but this did not proceed as Canada decided to focus on further
development of existing water-based designs instead. HTGCR, high temperature gas cooled reactor.
I have mentioned the bagnox and HDR reactors, but there were a variety of other gas cooled
reactor designs. Some of these were built but generally as one off prototypes. These other
reactors are all characterized by the following features, helium gas cooled, high temperature
operation, graphite moderator. The fuel is sometimes referred to as prismatic, as it is in
the form of blocks rather than the spheres used in pebble bed reactors. I'll mention pebble bed
reactors in more detail later. It's not clear to me how refueling is carried out. Some used
uranium thorium mixed oxide fuel. A variety of reactors are built in the 1960s, 70s and 80s,
but always as one off prototypes. No gas cooled reactor other than the U.K.'s
magnox and HDR designs have been commercial successes. However, there is renewed interest into
this type of reactor today, mainly in connection with using the heat to directly power large
process industries to replace burning fossil fuels in chemical or metallurgical applications.
HWLWR, heavy water light water reactor or, also known as SGHWR, steam generating heavy water
reactor. This was an odd style of reactor in that it combined features of several different
reactors. There were a number of different reactors designed in several countries which use this type,
although none went beyond single prototypes. Countries building them included Canada, the U.K.,
Japan and Italy. Like a can do or PHWR reactor, they use a heavy water moderator in an
unpressurized calendria. However, the coolant was light water rather than heavy water.
The pressure tubes are oriented vertically rather than horizontally as found in a can do.
There were all boiling water reactors in which the coolant boiled directly in the
coolant channels, rather than an A separate steam generator. There seemed to be nothing inherently
wrong with the concept, it seems they just did not for any advantages over other reactors already
being built in those countries. Ractors making a comeback, next I will discuss a couple of types
of reactor that have been around for a long time, but have recently started making a major
comeback in terms of interest. Pebble bed reactors, this reactor type has a long history and its
basic ideas go back to the very early days of nuclear power. Series attempts at commercializing
it however, first took place in Germany or West Germany as it was known at the time in the early
1960s. AVR. The first one was the 15 megawatt AVR reactor in the western most part of Germany.
The concept behind the Pebble bed reactor is the fuel and graphite moderator where a single unit
contained in many small spheres, each about the size of a billiard ball. The reactor was basically
a bin full of these spheres. The coolant was helium gas which would circulate between the spheres.
Fresh fuel spheres would be added at the top of the bin and spent fuel removed through the bottom.
It ran from the late 1960s to late 1980s.
THTR 300. The AVR was succeeded by the larger THTR 300 in the early 1980s.
This supplied 300 megawatt's electricity to the grid, operating until the late 1980s.
The helium coolant fed a steam generator which in turn operated a conventional steam plant.
The reactor vessel was made from pre-stress concrete, the fuel with the mixture of uranium 235
and thorium. South Africa, China and the US. Pebble bed technology was in licensed to a group in South
Africa who pursued development for many years before money ran out.
The technology was also licensed to a group in China.
Chinese development led to first the HTR 10 prototype reactor in the 1990s and early 2000s
and then the HTR PM reactors in which a pair of reactors feed a single
210 megawatt steam turbine generator. This started operation in 2021.
This Chinese plant is the one which people often refer to when they talk about small modular
reactors in China. Part of the South African design team were then hired by an American company
called X-energy who wanted to take the German and South African technology and sell it to the SMR market.
Making a comeback? At this point it's hard to say whether pebble bed technology is actually
making a comeback although there is renewed interest in it. MSR or molten salt reactors.
The distinguishing feature of molten salt reactors is that they use molten chloride or fluoride
salts as a coolant. Since the molten salt has a high boiling point, the reactor is
unpressurized and steam is created in a steam generator. Slow or fast neutron reactors,
molten salt reactors may be slow or fast neutron reactors. Slow neutron reactors would typically
have a graphite moderator. Fast neutron reactors would not have a moderator. I will discuss
fast neutron reactors in more general terms in another episode. Fuel. The fuel may be uranium,
plutonium, thorium or mixture of these. The fuel may be in separate fuel pins like
another reactor types or maybe dissolved in the salt. Some interest in molten salt reactors
seems to be focused on using them to consume stored spent fuel from other types of reactors,
such as light water reactors. The use of spent fuel is intended to provide a means of getting
rid of long-lived radioactive waste from spent fuel by burning it in nuclear reactions.
Salts. The salts are usually sodium, magnesium and calcium chloride or lithium fluoride salts.
Chloride salts are typically used with uranium fuel in fast neutron reactors.
Fluoride salts are typically used with thorium fuel in slow neutron reactors.
Chloride salts are much less expensive than lithium fluoride salts,
which require isotopically pure lithium-7. Why some variants used is all fuel?
One major reason for dissolving the fuel in the salt, coolant, is to allow the removal of
Protaktinium 233, which is produced as an intermediate product in the process of transmuting
thorium 232 to uranium 233. Protaktinium 233, or PO 233, is a major neutron observer,
and so interferes with the thorium reaction. To Protaktinium 233 decays into uranium 233 with a
half life of 27 days after which it could be fed back into the fuel stream.
Various design for thorium fuel would typically have a separate blanket of additional
thorium around the reactor core in order to produce more uranium 233 from neutrons that would
otherwise escape. Protaktinium 233 is not a significant problem in the blanket.
History experiments with molten salt reactors date back to the 1960s and 70s.
Recently interest has revived, with research being conducted in a number of countries on both
dissolved and solid fuel versions. Types of molten salt reactor, there are many different
variants of molten salt reactor, so I won't try to describe them all here. Some used solid fuel,
some used fuel dissolved in the coolant, some used spheres similar to those used in
pebble bed gas cooled reactors. Many of the reactor types described elsewhere in series have a
molten salt equivalent. Pros and cons, pros. On the positive side, molten salts remain liquid up
to a very high temperature, allowing that for the generation of high temperature steam which
can drive a turbine efficiently. The high coolant temperature also allows for creating high
temperature process heat for direct use in industry. The salts are non-corrosive to special
alloys develop to handle them. The salts are not damaged by radiation. The dissolved salt
reactors can be designed, such as an increase in temperature, cause a thermal expansion of the salt,
which in turn reduces the rate of reaction, providing a passive self-regulating safety feature.
Cons. In the dissolved fuel versions, the primary coolant is highly radioactive,
making maintenance more difficult. The chemistry of the salt must be carefully maintained to
prevent it from becoming corrosive. Lithium salts must be enriched, rather like uranium is often
enriched, to nearly pure lithium 7 since lithium 6 will produce radioactive tridium when
fissioned by neutrons. Supplies of fairly pure lithium 7 are limited as it is mainly produced
as a byproduct of producing tridium. Birlium is used in some compositions and is highly toxic.
Continuously chemically processing the coolant in the dissolved fuel variants adds complexity to the
system. Overall, there are a very large number of molten salt designs. Of the less common
reactor types, molten salt reactors are undoubtedly the ones which are seeing the most current
interest in terms of numbers of new designs and the amount of current R&D. Conclusion. In this episode,
we discussed some of the less common historical reactor types. As we have seen, there have been a
number of different reactor designs, which are less commercially successful for one reason or another.
Some of them may be making a comeback, however, particularly as the basis for a small reactor.
In the next episode, we will describe fast neutron reactors. This concludes the fourth episode
of a N8 part series on nuclear reactor technology.
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording podcast, click on our upload link
to find out how easy it is.
Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by an AnHonestHost.com, the Internet Archive,
rsync.net, and our mirror network.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
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Episode: 4554
Title: How I do todo
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4554/hpr4554.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:13:48 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4554, for 2026-01-15
Today's show is entitled, "How I do todo"
The host is Jim DeVore and the duration is 00:17:00
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "This is how I manage my personal todo list. "
Hello, hacker public radio friends. I am Jim DeHore, a long time listener, first time show host.
I am an engineer currently working with embedded software and construction equipment. I have been
involved at the intersection of computers, electronics, and controls for about 50 years.
I have a strong tendency to build and repair things myself even when it doesn't make economic
sense. I simply enjoy learning new things and working with my hands.
This is an episode on how I manage my personal to do list using genetroponys to do.txttility,
send file format, and a collection of apps and scripts. The intent here is to not provide step
by step to plant some ideas that you might want to follow up on. Ironically,
creating a show has been on my to do list for at least a year. Checking that off today.
This show is not explicit. Looking back at my history with to do. I believe this show might
be relevant because it combines a need that most of us have for independence from services
in a hackable architecture. I was a daytime or paper-toting person for many years. It worked,
but it took a lot of effort to maintain. In the late 19, I switched to it to do app on my
Palm Pilot. Eventually that became a trio 755 phone slash PDA. The keyboard finally died on that
phone after four and a half years. I went to an Android-based phone about 2008. It replaced all the
PDA functions that I enjoyed on my Palm Pilots. I dimly recall having access to it to do app.
Maybe a commercial service that had shut down my memory as fuzzy.
I found Gina Trapani's file format and bash grip. I don't even know if I'm pronouncing her name correctly.
My pronunciation is from a guide to the city in Italy. I believe she was the founder of lifehacker
and that's how I found it. She created a simple structured text file format.
In the 2D.TXT, it has one line per task with this format. Each field is separated by a space.
First field is optional. It's an X that marks completion of that task. Second field is also optional.
It is a priority in capital and a capital letter in parentheses. Field 3 is optional. It is the
ISO completion date. Field 4 is optional. It's the ISO creation date which must be specified if you
have got a completion date specified. Field 5 is the free form to do.field.field 6 is one or more of the
following. TXT, this is a single word that starts with a plus character. A context is a single word
that starts with an AT character. Field 7 is optional key value tags. For example, a due date
might be represented. This DUE colon ISO formatted date. And there's other files in this system.
AttitudeDue.sh, the command line version of the utility. A configuration file that helps the
to do system find all its files and extensions. Done.TXT that holds the archive to do.
I replicate the to-dos through Dropbox. You can also use Google or the DIY sink or don't sink it all.
At home with my laptop, I don't sink. I read the file from a network share that is synced on my
NASBOX as Dropbox limits the number of devices on their free plan. I don't have anything against
paying, but Dropbox's prices are structured for heavy users. A handful of text files is all that I
think. You can learn more at http colon slash slash to do txt.org. Genus Focus was on the command line at
least initially, but what caught my attention was that it was a structured file format that was
being supported by other developers and was simple to manipulate with scripts. Her bash script
also supported extensions. I love that multiple apps support this format.
Linux desktop Windows Android Phone, and of course she can use a simple editor. I believe that Apple
is also supported. I'm just not in that ecosystem. She has links on her page to folks that have
created them as well as extensions and plugins that folks have written to extend its capabilities.
So what apps am I using? On my Android phone, I'm currently using simple tasks. It's not the
most full featured of them out there, but it has been very solid and bug-free in my use case.
On my Linux desktop, I use q2dxt. The about page as multiple credits based on the original code
base by David Ellen Talk. On my NAS box, I'm running Genus to do dot txt bash scripts with some
custom add-ons. Dropbox hosts that to do dot txt and done dot txt files to keep everything in sync.
This is a very hackable architecture. Harry Larry would love this. It's a text file format.
Here's what I really love. I've got a low-end Synology NAS that lets me run nightly scripts
and the resulting files are synced to my phone, desktop, laptop computers, through Dropbox and the
network shares. It also allows me to grab the to do dot txt and done dot txt for information.
For example, if you've got a new year's resolution exercise three times a week, you can grab
done dot txt to see how many times you check that off in a year. Hopefully this gives some ideas.
I love this because if I'm not happy with how it works, I can change it. I want something new. I add it.
I've got a script that runs on my NAS and does the following every night.
First of all, it checks all the files into get and tags that with the day's date.
This is nice, especially when I develop a script and I can retrieve earlier versions when things go
south. And I have done that. Nothing like waking up to a wiped out to do file.
I secondly, I scrub all high-asky from the files. I'm living in a seven-bit text world. Your localization
may have different requirements. This uses a simple TR command. For me, one of the web-based
interfaces I had previously used with this file had problems with high-asky.
And with apologies to my international audience, I think these tools work with other encoding.
I just don't have any experience there. Thirdly, I insert a daily affirmation into the
to-do file. This simply selects a single random line for a large text file collection using a
quick and dirty Python script. It then is appended as a priority A to-do, allow me to read it
and check it off. Fourthly, I remove blank lines. It's really easy to add blank lines during
copy and paste yet I don't want to waste any time manually deleting them. This is a simple
grab command. 5. I reconcile merge conflicts. Dropbox occasionally can't resolve a conflict where
changes have been made, perhaps by the nightly script and something that I had just done on my
phone. Dropbox names this in a way that I can easily run automated diffs. This is gone by calling
to do underscoremerge3.py. I don't recall where I found this script. I don't believe I wrote it
and it doesn't have any attribution. Differences are added to the working file with a tag and
a priority. It allows me to decide whether I need them or not. 6. I add creation dates on any lines
that don't have them. Some of the apps will include how old a particular task is or allows you to
sort by creation dates. Do this you have to have them and not all the apps I use have the option
to fully add a creation date. This is a simple Python script I wrote. 7. I inject recurring events.
I found a wonderful to do.txt extension called ice underscore rec u r or ice recur.
I was using version 1.6 by Robin Lee Powell. The source is posted on GitHub include a link
in the notes. The basic idea is that you have a configuration file with one line for each to
do line with additional instructions to indicate when to add it. This would not only support
it complicated calendar recurrence constructs but it would also do a laugh time since the date
was last completed. To do.txt is the working file but when you complete a task in it and
it is archived it is moved to done.txt. This script would look at the completion date for that
text and done.txt. It would not add it until it defined time had elapsed. It also would not
all add task if you had not completed it. Solving the problem of not generating duplicates with
and with my former to do configuration I had to do that manually. Not a good use of my time.
This ran well for years on my low powered custom built DIY server. One day I had a hardware
failure and I took the easy route and bought this Synology. It's DES220J NAS as an experiment.
As a side note, it has been a pretty good experience with hardware for a limited
Synology. Since I bought it, Synology has since introduced some shenanigans requiring
Synology-branded drives that run counter to my DRM-free preferences. When it dies, I will likely
go to the container route on another custom server. One of my migration problems is that ice
recurrent needed Ruby. Ruby wasn't available on my budget. Synology box. So I converted it to Python 3.
This was fun. It was a good excuse to learn some Python. I also kept the original structure largely
intact and included a clumsy test environment. It is called PIE underscore recur and I posted
the source on GitHub. I'll include that in the show notes as well.
Eight. I would grapple report of everything I did yesterday for the Nile Report.
This is dead sample. I'm not using the S. at the moment, but I've considered
opinion it to my daily journal, text files. Nine. I removed duplicates from the to do.txt file.
I still managed to get duplicates occasionally. For example, my daily affirmation pulls around
the line from file of affirmations. It doesn't check for duplicates. Genus page had an extension
for this that worked. Well, 10. I bumped down the priority of task based on time. Now this
is an experiment that I've since discontinued. I use priorities A, B, and C. I use C for follow-up
items and none. Based on the creation date, this utility moved a week old A to a B. It would
move a month old B to a C. It would move a six month old C to nothing. This is an attempt
to emulate how the human brain tends to forget. If you have an A priority task that hasn't been
touched in a week, it probably isn't a high priority task. If you keep adding stuff to the list
the next thing you know you have just second nearly six hundred tasks, nobody wants to look at
that glance. So A priority stuff is stuff I checked during the day. Stuff I'm trying to get done
that day. B priority is just stuff that I checked once a day. This is stuff I'm trying to get done
in the next two weeks. C priorities are stuff that I checked once a week. This is stuff I'm trying
to get done in the next three months. C priorities, as I said, are checked once a week. These are
follow-up items largely. Blank priorities rely on having a project or a contacts tag to bring
them up. Might have a list of things that I wanted to serve for more information for example.
This prompted me to create a tag to accept items from this process. If during review of a lower
priority task and I decided it really needs to be higher, I can reassign the priority and add an
at NV tag. I call this utility fergesson.py, where fergesson is German for and to forget.
NV is nished for Gesson which is to not forget. Now I'm not German, but I live there for short time
and I love their culture. Recently I noticed that I had a lot of NV tags that were pluttering my
file. I decided to remove them and comment it out this utility while I rethink the process.
11. I air check for orphans. In this step I check for tasks that have blank priorities and
no projects. This would be lost from review in the unprioritized pile so this utility bumps
them to an A and tags them with at orphan. This allows me to review and tag them correctly.
Other fun stuff I've done with this. I have template files. For example I've got a packing list and
I can manually concatenate this file to my to-do.txt file and now the packing list is on my phone and I
can check things off as I stuff them into my suitcase. Frozen cons. This environment is robust
its flexible. It's not perfect. One of my prior Android apps had three variants. One for Dropbox
Anking, one for Google Drive Sanking and one that did no Sanking. Apparently app rather Google's
App Store declared that they were too similar in my choice. A Dropbox Anking version is no
longer in the Play Store. Yes I can sideload it but where is the motivation for developer continuing
to develop it? My fear is that something would come along and it would be broken without a
correction on the horizon. Google is tightening up their security on each release and it drives changes
in the apps. There's a lot of varieties of apps supporting multiple platforms and I believe
Google's changes are a threat to this ecosystem. I don't use Google to sync my to-do files but that
is likely used by many. I do use an Android app on my phone while I love the command line I
believe a phone for this use case needs a simple touch interface. A lot is easy for me to customize
a nightly processing of the files on my NAS box maintaining an Android app is another level
that I'm not prepared for today. Years ago I decided to minimize the overlap between my personal
and work lives and for a variety of reasons I stopped using this ecosystem at work and started
using Microsoft's to-do and yes it work where you are in a Windows Office 365 environment which
is an all-bad Windows 11 now. It work is much better than the Linux PC system that I last ran
at home. I'm happy with Linux at home and would not use Windows 11 even if it were open source
at home. I spotted a Python IPPI for Microsoft's to-do recently and I planned to start playing with it.
I'm a bit torn. I'm near retirement and unlikely to use this once I leave the corporate work
place. It's recurring capabilities are much weaker than what I have at home. Given my tendencies
toward procrastination it will probably still be on my work to do list when I retire. So,
what are other folks using in this space? I'd love to hear back in the comments if you've got
something that you prefer perhaps that should be a show. I know there's a lot of paid services
in this space that just goes against my nature to pay for something and be at the mercy
of their decision to continue to offer the service or not. Thank you.
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording podcast, click on our upload link
to find out how easy it is.
Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by an AnHonestHost.com, the Internet Archive,
rsync.net, and our mirror network.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
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Episode: 4555
Title: HPR Beer Garden 8 - Belgian Christmas Ales
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4555/hpr4555.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:13:51 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4555, for 2026-01-16
Today's show is entitled, "HPR Beer Garden 8 - Belgian Christmas Ales"
The host is Kevie and the duration is 00:34:03
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "Dave and Kevie talk about Belgian Christmas beers."
Hello and welcome to another episode of Hacker Public Radio and this is the HPR Beer Garden.
I believe this is episode 8, if my little abacus is working correctly.
My name is Dave and I'm joined this time by Kevy, good evening Kevy, how are you?
Good evening, I am well and whole whole Merry Christmas for their second of our Christmas
episodes.
Two Christmas is a year, lucky you.
Well actually, if you carried our tugs jam episode, that's actually four Christmas
a year.
We are spoiling you.
Excellent, dude.
Right, so on this episode, we're going to be continuing the Christmas theme, whereas we
did United Kingdom Christmas Beers on the last episode.
We are now going to pop across the North Sea and we're going to look at Belgian Christmas
Aels this time.
Now I'll be honest, I didn't even know that Christmas Aels was a style.
I just thought, oh, that's six of them extra spices in it will make it taste Christmas
eat.
But now apparently it is a thing, looking at the Belgian ones this time round and I believe
Kevy you have a little bit of speed to give us regarding Belgian Christmas Aels.
Absolutely, and I must admit, Belgian Christmas Aels have become one of my favourite
styles.
Now, technically speaking, there's a bit of, with the beer purists, there's actually
a bit of argument as to whether it's a style at all, I can't really speak.
So yeah, that was the problem that I found actually because I went to my usual sources.
I went to my beer Bible, I went to Roger Proz stuff and a few different other different
ones, a few camera ones.
And there was mentions of modern beers, you know, especially things like a Bustinuel
and all this.
It talks about them, but it's absolutely nothing but the history of the style.
And I know from kind of past experience that the Belgian Christmas Aels, they're normally
dark, they're heavy, they're multi, they're fruity, they're the very vast majority of them.
I usually like a dark mahogany or chesnut in colour, but I want to find out a bit more of
these that I've become honest with you, one of my favourite styles over the past 18 years.
So I started to enjoy the Christmas Aels on a visit to Tomlinson's Beer Shopping in
Venice, which I got very friendly with the owner and sadly they were tired in 2018.
They were getting older and the children didn't want to carry on the family legacy, which
I broke my heart, it was terrible.
But I wasn't really willing to move to the University to see a beer shop at the same
time, you know.
My dedication wasn't that good.
So until this point to be honest, they were actually the ones who had introduced me to
this a lot of the Belgian styles, because I, you know, I hadn't really had much in the way
a Belgian beer outside of what was available in the supermarket, it's the usual kind of
offering.
But thanks to the small shop, this took my Belgian beer shop totally new level.
The love of them was just through the roof.
So when I started to delve a wee bit deeper, what I hack to be found astonished me
about Christmas Aels.
The first reference made to Christmas beer in Belgium dates back to 20th of December, 1896,
when two cafes in Charlotte Roy, it was the La Chival Arab, which is literally translated
as the Arab's camel and the globe, I'll let you work with that one.
It's an advert in the journal De Chaleiroi.
This rate, now the interest in French, I picked up the re-tighted up the original advert
and actually put it onto a translate.
And it translated as Christmas beer has arrived at La Chival Arab and the globe.
These two establishments so famous for British beers go and taste it, because Christmas
is only sold for a short time.
So I was like, oh.
So this turned out to be Maccurin's Scotch ale sold as a Christmas beer with a Christmas
label on it.
And then subsequent years, this became actually really popular in these two cafes and
it started spreading to surrounding cafes as word got out in demand from the locals
became very high.
And of course the British brewer started to jump on this bandwagon.
William Younger started exporting a Christmas beer double Scotch ale in 1903 and there
was also all sorts of burden on print with Scotch ale Christmas beer and that was
bit later in 1911.
So to my hair had to have an basement, the very beer I thought is as fantastic.
I love this, it's a style which is actually grown from a Scottish wee heavy, which
actually was amazing.
But why, of course, you might ask, why would a country that exports 50% of its beer
want to import Scottish ones?
And this was another thing that actually surprised me, it turns out that at the time Belgian
beers were actually often very weak and made an old fashion methods that the amount
produced was actually quite low and exporting wasn't in an option because it would
have been highly unprofitable.
And at the time Belgium imported a lot with half of their beer imports coming from the UK,
their main styles that they liked were pale ale, stout and Scotch or the wee heavy.
And the Belgians sold Scotch ale with Christmas labels.
That's actually all the Christmas ale was, it was Scotch ale with Christmas labels.
As Belgium bar started to notice that this demand for the imported beers, they started
to panic up it.
But what they did was they actually started to imitate the British products and with
the first Christmas ale was released when I'm going to butcher this name, so I do
apologize if you can speak French, so possibly Dutch, I'm not sure what business.
Bodry Hay, Brewery in Liège, introduced its canterbody Christmas.
Now, that was the first one that was produced as a Christmas ale.
It is worth noting that Alfred Jaden Brewery in Damp Remi, near Charlie Roy, tried to sell a
beer called Beer Dennewell, but it was just simply their own trapele which was re-badged
and the locals didn't want it because it wasn't the Scotch ale style and that was in 1903,
but that was afloat.
Not the beer itself but just the Christmas edition.
A well known Belgian beer that still exists today and probably the best known is Gordon
Xmas which actually registered its trademark right the way back in 1934 and it was actually
by the imported John Martin and it actually still exists today and until relatively recently
it was made in Scotland and then exported out it was made in Scotland, exported only.
In recent times, production has been moved to Belgium, however, despite best efforts,
I spent about three hours on this yesterday trying to work this out.
They have kept it secret as to where it is and when the production was actually made,
it seems to be brewed under license by Palm Brewery.
Although that was only one source and I wasn't 100% so I'm not treatin' as gospel.
But Palm Brewery it turns out isn't a brewery, it's a bit like saying,
in Heinrich and Rekarsburg and the UK and it's a huge conglomerate which is worldwide essentially.
Or certainly, if it's not, maybe no, it's not one of worldwide but it's nationwide,
it's nationwide in Belgium. So as far as where it's brewed, I'm not really sure.
Now it's often referred to as the original Christmas beer,
the first Christmas beer which as we know from that and like I said, I've got the original
a scan of the original newspaper clipping. So I'll actually put that in the show notes because
I think it is worth including that. Like I said, that was 18, what did I say?
96, yeah, 18, 96. This was 38 years later that Gordon Xmas was actually registered.
So there's no way it can be the original one. However, it certainly is one of the Christmas
beers that is the oldest that it's been constantly produced. Now Belgium's gain is almost
so he puts like aerolossus, Belgium's gain because every brewery in Belgium pretty much has
Christmas beer. That is based around the wee heavy kind of the island he is.
The wee heavy is all but disappeared and it's so native country. There are a couple of places
you can get it. But generally if you walk into a shop in Scotland,
listen very specialized, you will not get a wee heavy off the shelf. But in saying that,
what's actually died off largely in Scotland has actually become a thriving business in Belgium.
And it's, I'd only be through Belgium that we can still get a wee taste of this through the
Christmas eel. Brilliant. So there you go. So there was my research. Actually this is a
best home work. I've never enjoyed home work so much. I found you all your homework was beer based.
Exactly. I would have had that first class honors. I'd probably gone from my doctorate.
Excellent. The beer I've got is from the brewery VERSET. I don't know how you pronounce it in Belgium.
Obviously. It's an imperial coffee porter that comes in at 10%.
Now, when it came to obtaining a Belgian Christmas eel, forget the supermarkets.
Because when I went around looking for Christmas eels, they just hadn't heard of them.
I would imagine they probably are out now but they weren't at the time.
So I went to beer's of Europe. Why not? So many beers. So many choices.
Except Belgian Christmas eels. The only two Belgian Christmas eels they had available were a four pack
plus a free glass of bush noel, which is a 12% Christmas eel and a dashed fine Christmas eel.
One of the best. Yeah. But not of that price. No. No. No. Wait, you said free glass. I'd
dubious of that free glass. I think the glass is probably what crank the price up to over eight
pounds of bottle. Well, it's yeah. One of you going to buy it normally is about five. So yeah,
you're spending so three, twelve pound in the glass. Yeah, it's actually not that.
Given how much my beers of Europe order had actually come to, I thought.
Oh, leave this for another day. And the other one they had is the one that I have here.
So I'm going to read you the translated description that it has on the bottle for this.
Halle Luja, hello. The savior of creation has arrived. A beer even darker than your darker
sides. An imperial porter that washes away your sins and purifies your little soul.
Coffee, bread crust and chocolate bring you into temptation. Caramel dried fruit and alcohol
keep you sweet until the day of judgment. The three wise men brought for this miracle, the things
that truly matter. Coffee beans from Mo. Carefully roasted and selected to let the best
aromas flourish in this beer. Give this beer to your loved ones and thus earn your place in the
hair after. I mean, that sounds good, right? Now, I really, I actually made a mistake and I actually
had a bottle of this deal today. Yeah, I didn't mean to spoil myself in that way. The beer itself
is and you cannot get a more Christmasy beer than name than this. It is called baby Jesus.
And it comes in a 330 bottle, which is as a brown bottle, very dark. The label has a bit of
irreverent is probably the right word here. Yeah, I can make it out beer. It's like a pencil
and drawing of a baby. Yeah, of a, of a, of a baby with a dummy with a cross on it wearing a pair
of 1980s slotted sunglasses. Oh, yes, okay. And what looks like a black current tart upside down
on his hair on his head. It is. The imagery is is unusual. Let's put it that way.
Yeah, like I say, Imperial coffee porter 10% I'm going to give this give this a pop and I will share
the, uh, the aromas with your work. Hello, call. That is, um,
misting quite significantly. So it's definitely there's a lot of coffee in there. No question at all.
But it does smell quite, quite strong. I think in my original review, I might have said boozy
and I think that's probably a fair description. So let's give that a pour and then we'll get
it up. Let me get a proper. That was a really odd pour. But as you can see, it's poured very cleanly.
It's got a slightly darkened head on it, which is going to probably last about another 10, 15 seconds.
So. Mm, the stigma knows in this. Mm, so that, that has got a really, really strong coffee,
uh, a coffee aroma, but it's just quite sweet coffee. Almost like a tiramisu. That kind of,
of aroma. The beer itself is absolutely opaque. No light is getting through that whatsoever.
Uh, maybe this is what they meant in the description by the dark side. So let me give this a taste.
Wow. So it said coffee, bread crust and chocolate. Yeah, I'm getting all of that.
Caramel dried fruit and alcohol. Not getting the caramel. They've dried fruit, certainly. I think
that's where the, the Christmas Eve flavor is coming from. But it's definitely a coffee
stout. There's no question in there at all. The bread crust is coming from,
it's almost a burnt toast flavor to it. But it's not, it's not unpleasant, like burnt toast
would be. And yeah, the chocolate, I don't know if I mentioned this comparison before. Do you
remember back in the 19, whatever it was? You used to get these little pencil erasers that was shaped
like Swiss rolls. Oh, yes. And they were fragrance. And yeah, that kind of, uh, right.
Okay, smell. So I think they were supposed to be vanilla-y. So there's a little bit of
that in there as well. But I haven't thought about them. No, yeah, like I said, that's a long time ago.
Yeah, a very long time ago. You're always just to get on a Christmas always. This is really nice.
There's, it's got the coffee is absolutely there. You get the bread flavors. You get the,
the chocolate caramel, not so much. I mean, it was often you kind of get a hint of
something that might be vaguely caramely to the dried fruit, the spice, the Christmas each feel
of the ale is most definitely there. There is bitterness, as you would expect from an imperial
porter. But given that this is 10%, I'm not getting the sweetness that you would expect from an
imperial porter at all. I would go as far as to say this is probably slightly thinner.
Then I would have expected. It's not watery, but it is thinner. But by goodness, is it
crammed full of a flavour and feel and, and after taste? I mean, there's almost a little bit of
spice left behind. Even, you know, a minute after you take it, you can still taste the, um,
the spices in there as well. But yeah, this is really nice. I mean, apart from the somewhat
questionable and, like I say, marginally irreverent imagery on the bottle itself,
this is a really nice beer. It really is. Good, good, good, good, good. Now then, now you've gone
for, um, yeah, what you've went for. You, you, you, you, you guys can see in the picture. Mine is
actually on the complete opposite end of the spectrum. Very classically styled Christmas.
It's got a lie on there with a gold rounded. It's got, uh, it's not what they're focused, um,
it focused a second. Oh, there we go. Yeah, there it is. Do not move. And it's kind of special and
well. Okay. And then an English artisan Belgian ale. And that is with the only English on this
entire bottle. Everything else is saying, no, oddly enough, I don't know if you can see it,
8.5% can you see that in the bottle. Okay. Right. On the website, they're all this that's nine.
So now as far as I know, this one, they'll look doesn't see it. This was ordered as a labonchoice,
labonchoa, labonchoa, labonchoa, labonchoa, labonchoa, labonchoa. That's not that special,
no, well, I got this one from the real-style store. So I got out of each selection, but I actually
ordered a box of Christmas beers that haven't come yet. This was the only one I picked up.
I purely picked up this one because I haven't never tried this one before. So this could be
great. It could be terrible. I don't know. So I'm taking a real gamble here. So let's go for the
pop-off. Oh, do you want to find out? Very lively and I'm so good. Oh, no. I can hear how fizzy that is.
That was dashed for Z. Right. There we go. He can see the head on that. Yes. It's like, no, this one's
like, oh, my word. It is so fizzy. This one is kind of like a dark amber ear. It's almost dirty.
Yes. A lot of silence. It's the camera. I don't know. That's what, no, no, you're actually right.
Now it's looking the same as I'm looking at if I look at the screen. Right. There's shit. Yeah.
Okay. Let's go in the nose and oh, you see, very, you see,
which are mild spice in there, but I'm not. I'm trying to identify it. It's just faint.
Now from the bottle, I'm getting what I'm all tea, bready,
liver or scent, shall see. My jeans are probably going to give me another scent in the morning.
I'm so glad I moved back from the keyboard there. Right. So this is you learning your lesson from
absolutely, absolutely. So I'm going to try this if I can get past this very frothy head.
That's almost like a laggy kind of head. I'm just saying, I'm not near me. No.
Ooh, that's really different to how it smells. Really different. That's, it's
it's got molds, but it's not multi, it's a biscuity. There's fruits coming out in the back end.
It's, you know the way you get dried fruits and normally it's, you get things like raisins and
dark dried fruits. Yeah. You know the dried fruits you get that are more like citrusy dried fruits.
You know, they're much lighter in color. Yes. That's what it tastes like. It's not that it's
dried fruit, but it's not dark dried fruit. It's a much lighter one. Again, there's, there's that
spice in there that I can't identify. It's not strong. That's why I'm not identifying it. It's just
there in the back end. Yeah. I really am struggling to identify it. Actually, I must admit, see if you,
if I hadn't seen no well on that, I would never have put that as our belt and Christmas be at
at all. It's so unlike anything I've had before. In that respect. Are you querying the
Belgian nature of it or the Christmasy nature of it? No, I think it's just that probably
then modern take on it. Right. You know, it's, it's that like I said, it's not what I would,
I mean, if I, my favorite, it is probably Saint Bernardes, Christmas sale,
Nishuf Gordon Xmas, which that glass is a Gordon Xmas glass, or a bush in the well, any of those
del much multiplayer, very, very, very strong multi character to them. This doesn't have that.
That is multi there in the beginning, but not all the way through. Interesting. So that's actually,
it, it is, it is nice. I'm not dissing it. It's just not what I was expecting. I can't get over the
composition of it. It, it looks actually quite unappealing. It does. It looks, it looks like
you say it looks dirty here. I've drank and you're actually that's something that's
worried. That's incredibly easy to drink. But I did 0.5%. Right. I am going to let you score
you, as I think. Right. So how would I score this? This is interesting. I'm still quite taken by
the flavors in this, and I would go as far as to say that this is quite a unique ale for me.
I don't think I've had anything quite, quite like it. It is incredibly strong. It tastes
quite boozy. And yet, kind of like Kevin said, I'm about halfway through it already, even at
10%. I think that's because it doesn't feel heavy. It doesn't taste heavy. It tastes boozy, but this
knot is not a way down beer. I think in the grand scheme of things, I would probably score this
quite high one second. So I mean, it is a very bitter ale, which I normally I wouldn't have
scored quite highly, but the flavours that are in there, and it kind of delivers what it says
it's going to deliver. I would score this. I'm going to go for 8.5. 8.5 out of 10. I think the
bitterness of it is something that I'm not not a great fan of, so that's probably lost it at
point. But I'm not convinced that it's a 9. So I think 8.5, 8.5 would be a good
score out of 10 for this one, definitely. Okay, so that was something that you actually
quite enjoyed then. That's good. I'm glad to hear it. And actually, who don't know on this
time last year, if I had a said you'd have enjoyed a Christmas port, or you probably wouldn't have
believed me. No, probably not. Particularly with my misinterpretation of what as port are actually
is. I think I've said for quite a few years to you, when we've had a conversation about this,
the port or is definitely not my favourite style. But now that I've understood it better,
particularly when we went through imperial styles, I have a more of an appreciation of it,
which is weird, because nothing's changed. Actually, I suppose that's a bit of a problem sometimes.
We've got to get beyond. Well, see, this is weird. A lot of people that can't believe
sometimes I'll actually enjoy a larger, because I will go on over the big companies. But I'm like,
well, wait a minute, that I'll actually go to a larger there. I don't want to go down the route of
a hit lag, so every lag is evil. I certainly wouldn't drink a lag in the middle of this
end, but it's got a land, of course. No, no, probably not. But I'm especially in the same way that
I never used to like whiskey. I never used to like red wine. I never used to like porters. And yet,
those are amongst my favourite styles of their category. So taste do change. Yeah, taste change,
but also just because you don't like one, doesn't mean you're not gonna like them all. Good
okay, but you could probably take that a step further in how many people who have had
a Guinness or a particular kind of coffee or a whiskey, have actually, can actually put the
hands on the hands, say they enjoy the taste of it. Because I think in some cases, there are some
whiskeys I've tried, where I don't enjoy the taste, but by goodness, do I enjoy the experience?
And that's the reason why I will go back to them. But yeah, I used to
vehemently dislike whiskey until I was educated and given, you know, guidance on what
we're good whiskey is, what you're looking at for, the taste profiles, blah, blah, blah, a beer is
no different. No, absolutely no different. I mean, I think that's half this probably half the
problem. People have tried a mass produced lag and because it's what's available. And the thing
with a mass produced lag or shard, a lot of them aren't offensive, they're just bland and boring,
a lot of them. Yeah, so people think, oh, it's just this yellow fizzy stuff that's got no taste.
And you're like, no beer, it doesn't make a lot of taste. I mean, I've got people who are swear
blind to be, oh, that beer is all bitter. And this is how powerful that mind is and you're
mind can be as well, of course. Anybody's mind is I've given somebody a dessert stout, which is
a bit of a sweet as you can get. I could have understood them saying, sickly, I could have understood
them saying, too sweet. What I got was, oh, that's bitter and sour. And I was like bitter and
bitter and no, this is not bitter and sour. But it was just that was what they're mind, but into it.
Well, as I'm struggling to rate this to be honest, because it's definitely lacking in flavors
for Christmas sale. They're there, but they're very, very subtle. It doesn't mean it's horrible.
But as you see, I've drank that. And it's incredibly drinkable. You know what I'm saying?
See, if you'd have had me a bottle, like this bottle in a, what do you call those sleeves,
you know, the kind of coolest sleeves or whatever you call them, you know, the jackets? Yeah,
but on a hot day, I think I would have knocked that back. I'm not thought anything of it. It's
immensely drinkable and chuggable for an 8.5% beer, which is dangerous. You wouldn't have known
by drinking it. No, I mean, certainly the strength is not there. There is no everything in
it's subtle. See, had you told me this is like a Belgian ale, which is a Belgian Christmas ale,
which is normally kind of between 8 and 12 roughly. See, if you had told me, oh, that's a
4% version, I would have believed you, because the flavors are subtle. Yeah. And it also,
it's body is light. So it's really, it's, how can I describe this? I would class this more.
More closer to our English bitter. That's what it actually is more like. Okay, you know, there's,
it does have the bitterness. There is, there's a biscuitiness to it. There's a light fruitiness to it.
And it's not a dark fruit, whatever, I'd expect from a Belgian ale. It's, it's light fruit,
dried fruit, actually. Because again, it's subtle. It's more subtle. It's not in your face. It's subtle.
And I have to put that through on my, and my recording as well, because I have to give the caveat
that I almost feel like it's a false advertising on the bottle. You know, for this one. But as far
as a pure beer goes, it's very drinkable. The flavors are a bit on the boring side,
as I'm going down, because they're just, they're not staying. There's no, there's no aftertaste for
me. It's, there's the subtleness to it. And I'm kind of wanting to constantly go back and go,
there must be more flavor to this. And there's not. It's a shame. It, yeah, it's not horrible,
but this really for me, it's maybe better than average slightly. So I'm going to go down
five and a half. I'm going to go five and a half for the tin. Oh, okay. Yeah. So it's not terrible.
Interesting. It just doesn't have flavor. And it, it's just especially surprising. Given this
one, this is a Belgian ale, and two, this is a Christmas ale, kind of, which should be exploding on my
taste buds. It's not. But even if I was just reviewing this as a normal bitter, I would say that,
okay, it's better than the likes of John Smiths, but I've had better bitter. I've had more flavor
for bitter than that. Hmm, yeah. I did notice on the side of the bottle it does say it's an Amber,
an Amber ale, or an Amber beer. Were they hecked, did you see all of this in the bottom left, yes?
Yeah, beer, beer, and breeze. And then underneath it, Amber beer. Yeah, which, which I would probably
associate with something like a dumbar or that kind of ale. And see, it's a step up from dumbar.
I mean, dumbar's fine. No, dumbar's one of those, it's fine. And it's available generally
most places and it's better than the mass produced lager. But it's nowhere near a good deal.
You know, that kind of way. Yeah. Yeah, probably wouldn't see it's too far off of a dumbar. Yeah.
But like broadside, broadside is another Amber ale. That will always get a five on
on tap whenever I drink it. It's a no brainer for me. But it just goes to go to show that
nor hope is at the same. No, definitely not. Definitely not. I was tempted to go from a regular
spathode. No, I want to try something different. And I'm glad I did. But from my past experience,
this is not what I would expect from my Belgian Christmas seal. That doesn't mean it isn't one.
It's just not what I would expect from one. Right. Yeah. Right. I suppose if it's something you've
never had before, and you're taking it at literally at face value, you're told that this is a
Christmas ale. But when you try it, you're like, this isn't a Christmas ale. Yeah. That's not your fault.
That's it. Absolutely. So I'm not saying that everybody, actually this would probably be
something special to give somebody who's a lager drinker at Christmas, because if they've never
ventured at a lager, this is probably quite a good addition. Let's see. But for them to get to the next
level. Well, you say that, but one of the principal characteristics of a lager is that it is crisp.
And by the sounds of it, that wasn't. No, I wouldn't see it was crisp. No. No. No.
Oh, but yes. Any living mind? That is us. So yes, so that this, yeah, I was on the naughty list this
year and Santa may be left me a bit of a lump of cool here. Oh, bless you. Right. So we have had some
feedback on a couple of our previous shows. The one we did episode four, which is where you and I
Kevin spoke about a vice beer before Paul came and joined us and actually told us the truth.
We've had a comment from T.A. Spinner, who said, great episode. I look forward to more. I thought
this was a good coverage of my current favorite style. I too, and constrained by what I can find in
America, but sampled and love both Erdinger and Franken Scarner whilst living in Germany.
They may be misproduced, but they are good. I look forward to reviews of new bruise to explore.
Yes, thank you very much. That was T.A. Spinner. No, the last one that was done and released
a time recording was the one yourself and Paul went on the time. It was because I had the cold
and it was Claudio M. And this is somebody we both know from, even going back to identical days,
I think. So it's both our tasty. Thanks again for this episode and this beer garden series,
fellas. Both of these have had hidden the USA and they are pretty good. My eldest sons like
chauffeur hofer and I'm quite fond of the Erdinger donkel. I only get the donkel every once in
a while as it's not something I'd be consistent drinking consistently. Just something to enjoy
every now and again when I'm feeling a little dark, winky face. I guess it about the donkels.
Yes, yeah. Foggy commented back on the vice beer one and he said Erdinger is good, which is
when I had, but when you get the chance you should test chauffeur hofer. And I can actually say
I tested chauffeur hofer myself and I did actually enjoy it. chauffeur hofer heffer vice.
So I did actually try that and yeah, I can recommend it. It was good. It was, I'd say it was an in-between.
It was to me, it was more tasty and erdinger, not quite as tasty as France's scanner.
All right, in-between. I would say it was more like a support I think of now after trying a few
of such traditional hair for vice and it had the banana, it had the weakness to begin with.
It lacked a clove that I'm peppering in there so that I've quite enjoyed with some of the
hair for vice and I've tried since then. So yeah, certainly very drinkable and the good news is
I can get the chauffeur hofer hair for vice and available locally at one of the local petrostations
of all things. Okay. That's decent. Of course, when you're talking about the chauffeur hofer,
you're not talking about the great breaches one that we had. No, no. I do have that chance
sitting at the garage. I am not touching the side of next summer. I thought you're going to
say the side of next Christmas, but I would imagine that we will be sitting here recording
I don't know if it's so 52 of the big garden and I'll ask you, I know. Oh yeah, it's
still in the garage. It's still the guy who's got a cobweb as a fan of his spiders thrown
at me, but it's still there. I thought that I would have got up and walked off by itself.
Probably possibly. There's a good chance of that actually. Yes, so yes, so please do actually
leave comments. If you, if you actually have one that beer that you'd like to review,
then please do, you don't have to actually leave it in a comment. You can actually go and review this
as one of the beer garden things. We don't have exclusivity on this. This is a community podcast,
so please do contribute. So tune in tomorrow for another exciting episode of Hacker Public.
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording podcast, click on our upload link
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Episode: 4556
Title: Nitro man! RC Cars
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4556/hpr4556.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:13:51 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4556, for 2026-01-19
Today's show is entitled, "Nitro man! RC Cars"
The host is operat0r and the duration is 00:16:12
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "I talk about run with Nitro RC Cars"
Hello everyone, I'm looking to the episode of PackUpUpGradio with your host Operator.
Today it's a special Christmas episode, it's such a kind of part for the RC cars.
So we're going to have to talk to them about the Metro cars.
The Metro cars are RC cars that run off of this like 20% oil gas thing.
So the oil is in the gas, it has a little motor and you can pay you know $800 for a motor
or you can pay, you know, the 50 bucks for a motor.
I got this Traxxas Rustler Nitro Older Style model for a second hand for free and the
nice perceived spin hundreds and probably all together probably $200 to $300 so it's not like
any hobby.
It starts to get expensive if you don't know what you're doing.
So I spent probably $200 because I didn't know what I was doing and I wasn't taking
my time.
So it can be a cheap hobby if you are affected that DIY and repairing your own stuff.
But I replaced the RC radio module twice.
First time I drove it in the rain the second time I shorted it out by plugging in it
incorrectly.
So I'm out $100 just because of not reading the directions and taking my time and crushing
through things.
I have replaced the little servo thing.
So there's servos which turn the gears and turn the wheels and those little servos you
probably see them if you've done like a Arduino kit, you've got a servo in there.
These are like kind of medium performance servos that come with this stock.
You can get all metal servos at then whatever I'll talk about that later.
But the servo thing has up a little like a servo protector or whatever.
So the drive pin that the servo is attached to that turns the wheels.
It is on like a little almost like a plastic circle with a bunch of fins attached to it
and those fins grip onto a surface.
And so when it rotates around the fins can sort of crack or break or tear and it won't
destroy your servos.
So if you have a $50 servo or a very expensive servo you can put the servo protector
on there and that will protect it.
It comes stock with it already.
That'll protect you from getting wrecked when you hit an obstacle or should like that.
So that's kind of one thing that I had to replace.
I put scholastics on the radio transmitter.
Once I plugged everything in and I knew I wasn't going to move any of the wires around
I just glued it all in here with electric tape or liquid electric tape.
You can buy various forms of cleaners.
Deoxet D5 is very expensive.
You can go to your local store and buy a carb cleaner.
But you want to be careful on electronics or plastic parts.
But chances are by the time you gum up a plastic part on this thing you're going to get rid
of it anyways.
So like the whole thing about not strain plastics on with a carb cleaner or something
it's I wouldn't really worry about on this.
I have a printed 3D parts for it.
The shock absorbers tend to pop off all the time so you have to check those all the time.
They pop off all the time.
You can 3D print those.
You can 3D print the brakes.
You can order like carbon fiber brakes pads.
I had problems with brake pads because I don't know what I was doing.
What other things I've done to this guy?
I put just regular silken oil I had laying around the house to fill this thing to fill
the shocks or the shocks are filled with like a silicone silken silken and it's they're
both about the same jumping this.
They both handle the same amount but I know the fluid in there is not the correct 0.02
whatever.
The fluid you put in there.
You have various exhaust things you can get in mind to stock plastic.
The thing with this one at least you can't go backwards and you cannot turn it off.
There's no like off button.
So your backwards is your brakes.
So most of your RC cars right you press the back button and that will be your brakes.
Well, you don't want to give someone that's used to using an ISO car and regular RC car
because they will destroy it because their first instinct is to like put the brakes on and
that bolts in the car and full speed backwards and run into something and the axle will
clip right off on somebody else's vehicle.
So be wary of if you're going to be racing somebody else's car and you're used to
an ISO cars you will destroy the other person's car oops sorry but they're in law.
So anyways, they have a little glow stick in them and that little glow stick is heated
by a battery pack that you put in the back.
They have hand crank once.
Nobody really does that anymore but you can buy kits just convert them back over to hand crank.
I had to mess with this one a lot so it doesn't run very well.
It doesn't start very well.
So I have to like start it way too long which you're kind of wear out your fuse, the glow
fuse thing in there or something.
So it takes a while for me to get it to start but when it runs pretty good and I had
problems with the idling well first I had problems with it it would really it was so it was
so fast like these things go and it's 90 miles an hour something crazy.
It would really and then when I had to replace the brakes like nine times it wouldn't
really really any more and then after a while it would it wouldn't idle it wouldn't
stay running because I'll fix my later so it wouldn't stay running it would there's three
different types of trim on the motor and that's really annoying it's it's it's an
arc form you got to be able to kind of understand the car and understand what each knob
does and play with it I've probably put an hour or two hours into just tuning it and I'll
get it perfect and then you know the weather changes or it's cold outside or you know
it's been sitting out and it's called gunked up and then God forbid you go in there
and start messing with the dials.
If you have it running and it's clean and it's nice and it's happy don't mess with it.
You're going to want to mess with it because it's not going to start.
If it doesn't start it's something else there's something else going on you don't have
fuel in it you the glow plug doesn't work there's it's not getting electricity there's
a little light at the top but it's fun it can be a money pit my brother-in-law went way
hardcore into it it's been a bunch of money and now he has a ridiculous car that you can't
even race anywhere because it's it's so fast you can't even do it in a parking lot it's
you go so fast this little guy you know I've racing around of I've like I said
I've jumped into two three hundred dollars on it what's all said and done but now it's
at the point where I know it enough to where I can fix most of the parts I haven't done any
of the transmission or the motor but I did replace the what happened was is it gave me a
fault since that idle and I took the whole thing apart and there's a thing called a
drive bill or a click clear drive clutch bill or whatever and the clutch has a spring around it
and when it when it spins at a certain speed the spring gives away and then that lets the car
move forward so if the car the car wasn't idling I had to like it would it would take off
and the only way to keep it running was just put my foot in front of it and while it's trying
to take off well the whole problem the whole time was one my slip slip clutch was really
which actually allowed me to run the car and not have the clutch even working so if you're
clutch spring dies you can actually just loosen your slip clutch like so loose that it just spins
around and it'll basically melt your clutch wheel your your fly wheel or whatever they call it
the gear wheel plus the gear wheel um and and that's how you can run it without a spring because
I ran it for probably I don't know 10 times without a spring and eventually it got so bad
that I would have to it would just take off on idle and I couldn't keep it running without like
it wanting to just run my foot over it was probably pushing two or three pounds of
of torque just trying to keep it running and then the the motor would crap out because it's trying
to push the the the motor and it would can't go anywhere because either I've tightened the
the fly wheel so tight it doesn't want to spin around so anyways I eventually realized that
the AI told me that it can give you a false sense of a bad idle if you don't have a proper
whatever I also ran it into a pull I full speed right in the middle and that shattered all kinds
of stuff I had to replace a bunch of stuff in the front I only remember what what I had to replace
but it broke a lot of stuff so you got to be really careful with the same thing with any kind of like
RC or helicopter that an RC helicopter for a very short time that's hard to do you got to
practice online with a simulator first but I'll say all and all you know you buy one of these for
like 600 bucks it's all plastic and then you're like oh well this plastic thing broke I'm
going to replace it with metal and then the problem with that is that okay you replaced the
the shock the what do you call the things that hold the wheel on the axles you replace the axles
or whatever with metal and then the thing behind that breaks and then your drive train breaks
and then the thing and then you now that all the your drive train all your tires and stuff
and your axles and all that stuff is all you know kind of glad then your gears are going to start
to open out because your tires and gears on the tires and all your supports for the tires are
stronger than the motor so then the motor starts giving out and yet the replace that all with metal
and then next thing you know you built what they call a bacher so which if you really want to get into
and you really think that you can fix it yourself and you've done RC before or you fixed small
electronics or even motors you're good at just by a thracer or bacher whatever because they are
much easier to take care of because they are stronger and they're all metal um this is plastic
there's some metal in it obviously but it's mostly plastic and it's you know 600 bucks for
the thing or so but the other ones are like you know 700 a hundred I don't even know three four
actually I think it's like three or four for this one and then your your bachers or whatever are like
you can go from five and up or four five six but if you want to not worry about having to fix it
as much and not having to worry about crashing in or whatever you want to get a bacher
or a thracer or whatever they call my brother-in-law ended up with one and it's kind of fun to play around
because it was all metal and you didn't have to worry about running into a tree as much
and you could actually do ramps and stuff with it which if I got one of those I wouldn't actually
do the ramps my wheel is really loose um so I've got it all put back together I thought I
lost this group and I would ape but it ended up being there is no there was no screw for it
but that's pretty much it you know it's it's fun to take out I keep it in the car mainly
so that I can use it but you kind of you kind of got to do of you know five point inspection
when you're you know you clean it up you clean it up and whatever and it's the whole thing takes
you know it's been hours and hours it's like any kind of RC hobby except for you had the
component of a motor and trying to get that fucker to work so if you want to skip the nitro
it is actually quite enjoyable and it gets people excited and riled up because you hear an actual
motor and like what and God's name is that it sounds like an alarm going off in the neighborhood
when it's going down street like I said they can go up to like the dining mouths and
hours I'm crazy and you can't really race these in the neighborhood so much
cold sack sort of kind of but they're so fast it's hard you'll hit a curb too quickly and if there's
any cars in the street you'll hit the car and the problem with the cars is that they will kind of
grab onto your tires and rip them apart and rip them rip the axles off so I've
wrecked two cars with just running into car tires um curbs will actually kind of bounce that
the thing bounce off of curbs but when it gets stuck under a tire it kind of grabs it and we'll just
rip it'll the car will rip itself apart anyways that's kind of where I'm at I put
rechargeable batteries in it I have two battery packs back up battery pack just in case it's dead I
keep plenty of gas the gas is stupid expensive you can buy it big size of it but they don't
really even let you order it like I guess because it's the giant thing of gas so the little containers
and they're still stupid expensive but it's fun to play around with like kids play around with
and they're pretty sturdy but you have to you know tell them hey no matter what happens just remember
to push this forward if something happens if it floats over or for anything happens if you don't
know what's going on or if you some of you get a wreck the only the best thing you could do is because
it'll spin and if the tires spin too fast they will literally rip themselves apart because they're just
kind of glued on there and there's a foam under them and when the tires start spinning when it's upside
down the thing will completely rip itself apart it's a little crazy so I've seen it have to
it and I've had to glue some of them back so I've replaced tires I think on once and of course I
bought the wrong tires and the wrong uh wrong sized tires and tried to make it up you know like a
third bike thing and I said no I'm not doing that you of course can replace the gears and
make the different strings so you can have it faster lower gear ratio or higher gear ratio if you
want what it revised or so if you want more torque then you can do that I did I just opted for more
torque because I don't want it to go as fast it's already stupid fast but the clutch slip thing I
did not have tight enough so it might actually do release now so hopefully it's all happy and I've got
the clutch spring on there and I've got the attention for the forever set correctly so it's it's
not difficult it just takes time a lot of time to learn so if you don't have a lot of time and you're
not really good at DIY but it'd be prepared to fix it a lot and it's in deal with that frustration
it just take it slow um if you want to you know go fast and hard I mean I've got like zip ties on the
thing because when I run into it my my exhaust falls off so I've zip tied the exhaust essentially
too the vehicle so that way when it gets a forward impact it doesn't fall off because it is so out
the exhaust is incredibly loud if it ditched detached to the point where you don't even want to be
next to it when it's running normally but if the exhaust comes off like it blows your ears out
especially indoors you don't want to do it indoors obviously for the reason of you know gas
fumes and whatnot but it's fun and hopefully this will work and maybe we'll go to the park
here in a second if I can make sure it works and and ride around you to big open space to
drive this thing you can't really drive it in a normal streets but anyways take it easy my
Christmas and happy new year and happy holidays and all that stuff take it easy
you
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Episode: 4557
Title: Why I prefer tar to zip
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4557/hpr4557.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:13:53 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4557, for 2026-01-20
Today's show is entitled, "Why I prefer tar to zip"
The host is Klaatu and the duration is 00:32:52
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "The ways tar is better than zip as a command and archive format"
Hey, everybody, this is Clat 2. I'm gonna talk about archiving specifically with tar and even more specifically why I prefer tar over zip.
I think it's fair to say at this point that especially in the world of open source, we are spoiled for choice when it comes to archiving files.
On my Slackware system alone, I've got tar, zip, gzip, bzip to x, z, a, r, zoo, packs, and 7 zip, p7 zip, whatever it's called, and probably more that I've forgotten about.
Just as obvious as that statement has been that we're spoiled for choice, I think it's also pretty obvious that out there in the real world, zip has gained ubiquity.
Everyone's got zip, it's the one that you can count on to archive and extract data on nearly any system.
I'm talking Linux, Unix, Freedos, Android, Windows, Mac OS, it's everywhere.
For a very long time now, I have defaulted it to tar over zip and there are several reasons for that.
One is just sort of habit. I mean, tar is, when you're learning Linux, tar is one of those commands that you learn pretty early on. I don't exactly know why, but at least when I was learning Linux 20 years ago now, if you can believe that, it was, it was one of those introductory lessons that you just for some reason got taught real of frequently and early.
So I've been using tar for a long time, and I do believe it's the superior choice out of all of these other choices, and I'm going to tell you why that is in this episode, but first let's just kind of set the, set the foundation.
So first of all, each archiving format has an associated command. So there's the tar command for a tar archive, there's zip for a zip, there's G zip for a dot G z file and gunsip to un to un to extract the data from that there's x z for and dot x z file and so on that's just a note because it's kind of, it's important to remember that the command and the format.
are two different things. It's a little bit of an esoteric differentiation, but it does matter a little bit, and you might see why later as we talk about what commands do and what actual file formats are able to do.
So anyway, in terms of compression, they all tend to be honestly in my tests, and I did some pretty rigorous tests on my old podcast, the getting world order.
I did actually do some pretty rigorous testing of compression algorithms, and in terms of compression, I found they basically broadly speaking, they're basically all the same.
Now, you might save a few kilobytes or megabytes even with one compression algorithm given a specific combination of file types, but it's fair to say that very broadly, the the end result is basically the same.
You're going to get a file object that contains lots of files and the size is going to be smaller than what you put into it, usually again, there are a lot of variables here.
So if you're if you're compressing and already compressed file, then you're not going to see a lot of compression because there's just not that much there that's to be compressed.
Whereas if you do if you compress something that has not been compressed, then you tend to see larger larger differences in file size, but between two algorithms, like the G-Zip and A-Zip, you're going to look at the if you do an L-S-L and you look at the factual file size of the end of the zipped object.
You're going to be within you know kilobytes or within megabytes depending on what file sort of category we're in here, but you're not going to it's going to be very rare, I think, for you to try a tar G-Z and discover that you've you've gotten something down to let's say 10 megabytes and then you use zip and it's like 50 megabytes like that kind of order of magnitude delta is not something that I tend to see.
So colloquially, casually, we could simply say it doesn't really matter what compression algorithm you use, they're they're all basically that they're all modern algorithms, they've been updated, they're they're doing the best that they can and they're basically all the same, but now let's talk about how they're not the same because in fact, the commands are quite different, so the end result might be basically the same casually speaking the same.
But the commands that you use to get to the end result are drastically different, but wait, I hear you say I've used both tar and zip and they're basically the same as well and you know what you're right at first glance tar and zip are pretty darn similar in capability, so by default the tar command generates an archive that's not compressed it's just a single file object that contains smaller file objects within it.
The result, the the tar file archive dot tar or whatever is going to be the same as the sum of its parts and you can try this out with both tar and zip it's an interesting experiment not because it's just super obvious and true, but but there is an edge case here that that I might as well mention so let's do a dd BS equals one, so this is bite size of one count equals let's do one at 1024
in file i f equals slash dev slash u random out file o f equals file dot txt okay, so we've just created a one kiloby file and if you do an l l you see file dot txt exists and it's reading is one dot zero k that's it's perfect or I guess that was an l l h was er yeah l s dash l h that's what we've done and now let's create
a larger file to the tune of one megabyte, so we'll do a dd BS equals one count equals one m in file equals dev u random out file equals let's do dot slash file one dot txt and we'll do an l s dash l h and there's file one dot txt is one megabyte and one file I guess I could should have called it file zero dot txt is one dot zero k let's tar that up tar
dash dash create dash dash file archive dot tar let's call it and we'll include file dot txt and file one dot txt in our in our object in our archive okay and
let's do the same thing really quick well no let's let's stick with tar for now so l s dash l h one dot one megabyte is what archive dot tar is so I mean
really almost sort of exactly what you would have expected one megabyte one kilobite put them together add some some some kilobites of header in you know file header information and that's
sort of thing and you get an archive dot tar that is one one plus one one point one megabytes pretty much what you'd expect because there was no compression involved in
fact if anything where we're probably adding some bytes to these objects by combining them in some format that then needs magic cookie and kind of
information about where to find the next file and so on now you can do basically the same thing with zip and zip to do a zero compression zip container you use the dash zero option so that's
zip space dash zero and then the name of the file that you want to create which we'll say in this case is archive dot zip and then the names of the files that you want to include so again in this case we'll do file one dot txt and file dot txt and it tells me that it's
included those two files with zero percent compression if I do an LS dash LH I see that archive dot zip does in fact exist and do exactly the same size as the archive dot txt one dot one megabyte again this is the kind of a
demonstration of my of my initial point which is the end result is basically the same that that's the commands are really similar on at first glance you mean they're practically the same
target requires a few more options zip you just do zip and maybe an option of compression level and then the name of the archive and then the files but I mean they're really really similar and the
end result is really really similar the end result is a little bit deceptive the way that I'm presenting it I'm doing an LS dash L for human readable so it's kind of rounding up around and down whatever and and so that's that that's
giving us a very clean one dot one megabyte result for this demonstration if you do look a little bit closer LS dash L without the H you do get numbers that are a little bit different so you get one million 54,720 bytes for archive dot tar and one million 49,912 bytes for archive dot zip so
tar is a little bit bigger than the zip in this case because of the header information I'm assuming so that there is a slight difference but as I've said
basically casually we can say they're the same result and in both cases casual they're not it's it's that they're really really similar like both of them
tar no compression one file object containing lots of little files zip zero compression can contain lots of files one one file with lots of little files in it but the most common use case of each command
definitely includes compression so let's talk a little bit about compression and how that how each command handles that because that's where there what that's one place where the difference really comes into play
so the balance in choosing either an algorithm a compression algorithm in the case of tar or a compression level in the case of zip is a trade off between compression speed and the end result the size of your file object in the end in theory
the slower you let the command compress the smaller your resulting archive the faster the compression the bigger the archive so in
other words the more work it has to do the slower it runs or you could say at the other way the faster it goes the less work it's going to do both commands
strive to provide you with some control over this and we've already kind of mentioned the the zip control which is a dash zero for zero compression and you can go all the way up to dash nine for nine compressions or for you know maximum compression really more accurately it's not really nine compressions it's it's it's lots of compression like do lots of compression don't worry about speed just make it really good
default level is dash six according to the man page so whatever you use zip just kind of on its own without specifying anything you're getting a dash six which you know if you think about it it's
it's basically middle of the range but leaning toward being slower and smaller than faster and bigger which seems like a reasonable default now to add compression to the
tar command you have a couple of options and it's to me this is already one way that tar is superior to zip for me because with tar you do have this choice zip you're doing you're doing exactly the same thing with this command every time you're you're creating a singular object a file object and applying compression to it with tar you do have a choice you can either
use a separate command entirely to compress the resulting tar file so you can do the tar command and then take your tar file and run it through some compression or you can
you can use one of several options to choose a compression algorithm to integrate into the tar command while you are creating your tar file so dash z or dash dash g zip uses g zip dash j or dash dash b zip to uses b zip to dash capital j or dash dash x z filters your archive through x z dash slash l zip does that dash capital z or dash dash compress
filters it through the compress command dash dash z std filters the target through the your archive through z std and dash dash no dash auto dash compress prevents tar from using the archive suffix to determine the compression program so you can specify one or not yours yourself so you've got access to one two three four five six seven at least seven that I that I can think of seven compression algorithms
as part of the tar command so that's pretty convenient I like that level of choice and I mean heck you could even not use one of those options create your tar file and then run that through zip you can zip a tar file like
you you can have you can literally have the best of both worlds if you want I see this as a real bonus like the decoupling of
the process of archiving from compression I think that's a real power feature that tar kind of just casually gives you without making a big deal about it but if you think about it having that that option
like literally those options of seven options and the other that extra option of not using option and just using some you know just taking your tar file and running it through a compression
program of your choice that gives you a lot of flexibility so in some cases you might make the determination of which algorithm what compression to use based on maybe the type of data you're compressing
maybe you've done some tests and you found that this algorithm does text better and this one does I don't know music
better or something like that I for the record I've not done those kinds of tests or I haven't made note of the results of those kinds of tests
I think I did actually have a bunch of different file types in my tests but I never I wasn't monitoring like oh what how did how did this compression algorithm treat
this specific file type so I don't know if that's even a thing but it might be you might try it or you might be limited by capabilities of your target system
you maybe you know that your target system doesn't have XZ so you could choose GZIP instead or something like that or you might just want to test you know a really cool new algorithm
compression algorithm that you've heard about or that you didn't need to try you can try you know you can you can do that all with tar because tar gives you the option to either opt into a specific compression algorithm or
forgo it entirely and I guess technically in a weird way zip dash zero kind of gives you the flexibility to opt out
but it doesn't it absolutely does not give you the flexibility of changing what compression algorithm you're using
okay so I want to do another demo but I'm going to have to use different files for this because trying to compress stuff from you random is not really practical
so I'm going to get rid of file zero no file one and file dot TXT and I'm going to generate well you know what I'm just going to search my logs
for something that's suitably, suitably large yeah here's a 44 megabyte log so I'm going to I'm going to cat that log file into a new file called
log dot TXT I guess so now I've got a 44 megabyte file here in my directory and I'm going to do a zip dash nine so that's maximum compression I'm going to call it archive dot zip and I'm just going to include log dot TXT and that took I mean that took noticeably longer to compress I mean it took like a moment but I mean I saw the moment okay so gotten that down to four dot four megabytes down from 44 megabytes
it's four dot four megabytes so let's take a look at what TAR can do and again I've already said they're all basically the same right that's what I'm saying I might my premise and my my belief is
that like my sincere belief is that casually speaking they're all the same so this is not like a let's see how much we can compress things compared to other things this is just a demonstration of flexibility
so don't worry so much about the numbers worry more about the the way we got there so zip that's the one way we can get there right zip dash nine full compression of this file we've gotten it down to four point four megabytes
which is really really good 44 megabytes to four dot four megabytes that's a huge improvement you could email one and you could not email the other I mean you know on most emails systems
okay so let's do a tar dash dash creates dash dash jz dash dash file archive dot tar dot jz and will include obviously the log file because that's what we're
compressing all right now if we do an LS dash LH on this folder we got the archive dot zip at four dot four megabytes and the archive dot tar dot jz at four dot six megabytes so I know I said they're basically the same
right 4.6 megabytes 4.4 megabytes that's basically the same but what if what if there was a flex what if you had some flexibility here and we said well
jz is okay but it's kind of old I've heard a lot of great stuff about this new x z compression and when I say new it's like you know 10 years old now but anyway
let's try the x set one so we go tar dash dash create dash dash x z dash file archive dot x z and then log dot tx t you know that's taking a little bit longer and there it goes archive dot tar dot x z
LS dash LH we've got our archive dot zip at four point four megabytes we've got archive dot tar dot jz at four dot six megabytes and look at this one archive dot tar dot x z three point three megabytes again
basically the same it's only a difference of like a megabyte well one dot one megabyte compared to zip but I mean and that's that's not going to make her break something but the cool thing about what I just did really
is that it's the same command I just used tar and a different option and got a very sort of a a noticeably improved result now obviously that's not going to always be the case we can't predict what everything that we try to compress is going to
is going to be and and how well it's going to compare to some other algorithm but I think that's kind of my point is that with tar you have a bunch of different choices going in
you can choose the algorithm that you want whether it's for the end result file size or whether it's because of compatibility with other systems or whatever it might be you do have that option whereas with zip you're always going to be using the zip compression that that's your one choice with zip
there's no other choice there is no other algorithm to try or to fall back to or to opt into it's always zip all right let's talk about output manipulation because this is probably even a bigger deal for me so when you extract data from a tar or zip archive you can choose to either extract specific files one by one or to extract everything all at once and I think I will say casually it's most common to extract everything I mean that is certainly the default behavior on the major
desk tops like genome I think macOS probably still does that I think maybe one does I'm not sure but it usually if you right click on a file and you tell it to extract or if you double click on it in some the desk tops the default behavior is just to extract the whole thing that that's a very very common kind of thing now with both the tar and unzip commands even when you choose to extract everything all at once you still have a choice of where to put the files you've extracted and that is the that's the
default behavior on some desktop as well to prompt you where do you want to put the things that I'm about to to extract for you but with the commands you definitely have that option so by default both
tar and unzip extract all files into the current directory if the archive itself contains a directory then that directory serves as kind of a container for the
extracted files otherwise the files appear in your current directory this can get messy and it is a common sort of frustration we we've probably if you've I think
probably everyone is at some point opened a an archive and ended up with a directory full of files that you didn't expect it to be full of um that is like I mean not not a directory
but like you know in your current place you've suddenly all all the contents of that archive just go everywhere it's called a tar bomb
I mean maybe a zip bomb if it's a zip file I don't know it's it's not uncommon it does happen it is frustrating and it's so frustrating to the point
that the plasma desktop at least has an option when you extract an archive you can right click and choose to extract and auto
auto auto detect the subjectry and if there's no subjectry if there's no directory sort of sheltering your files from just going everywhere it creates a
directory with the name with the same name as the archive had before you extracted it so it's quite a useful tool I use it all the time when when doing this in the GUI
but the command of course you you have you have control to to decide these things before before you actually do something
the important thing here to note is that a tar bomb or probably a zip bomb it's not inherently bad it is a valid use case when you want to
essentially I think of it as an overlay you're kind of overlaying maybe updated or additional files into an existing file system for example
suppose you have a website consisting of a bunch of PHP files within lots of different directories you know you've got a config directory and a
data directory and lots of different directories and and there's PHP files all over the place you could take a copy of your site
maybe take it off the server copy it from the server put it on your development machine make some updates and then you create an archive of the files
you've updated so now what you've got essentially is a you've got a patch you've got an archive that contains all of the things that need to change
or that need to be changed on the server so if you extract you put in that archive back up to your web server you extract that archive in your web directory and each
new version of any file that you've changed is extracted exactly where it originated from because both tar and unzip or rather tar and zip retain the file systems structure.
I use this feature all the time when doing like a dot release update of a couple of different content management systems I mean I I administer on servers and it's a great trick.
It's like it makes it updates really really easy both unzip and tar the commands provide an option to change directory before extraction.
So you can store an archive in one directory but send to the extracted files to a different location here's how you do that you use the dash dash directory option with the tar command.
So let's say you do you've decided that you want to send all the files into a folder called my tar.
So you make directory my tar tar dash dash extract dash file archive dot tar dot xz dash dash directory path to my tar you do that and then you do you do a list of your path to my tar and sure enough there's file dot txt and pick dot jpeg and file dot php and whatever else you've got in there.
Okay, so for unzip you do the same thing basically except it's just dash d there's no dash dash directory it's just shortcut dash d so you make sure my zip somewhere on your system you unzip archive dot zip dash d path to my zip and then all of the files that was that was in the zip archive file dot txt pick dot jpeg file dot php appear in my zip now the feature unzip does not have.
is the ability to drop directories from the archive before extraction like excluding a directory clipping a directory off of the archive so for example suppose you want to extract files directly into my zip but you've been given an archive containing a leading directory called.
Chaff so you could do unzip archive dot zip dash d to my zip and then you list my zip and there's a directory called chaff do a list of my zip slash chaff and there's your file dot txt and your pick dot jpeg and your file dot php that's not what you wanted right you don't want chaff that's not the director you need.
Chaff was the directory that whoever sent you these files had to roll everything into in order to sort of cleanly zip them up.
Well there's no option in unzip to skip it and the worst thing about this conundrum is that the unzip command is essentially encouraging this anti pattern.
In order to avoid delivering a zip bomb to someone because you you don't want to do that you know how annoying is it bomb is so you very thoughtfully nest your files in a useless folder call it chaff but by nesting everything in this useless folder you've also prevented your user from extracting only the files they require to the location they want to extract to.
The tar command solves this problem I think pretty elegantly you can protect your users from a tar bomb by nesting your files in a useless directory we can call it chaff because tar allows any user to skip over any number of leading directories.
For instance tar dash dash extract dash dash strip dash components equals one dash dash file archive dot tar dot xz dash directory path to my tar this strips the components the first component of of whatever gets extracted it strips that off so while tar is extracting it it detects that there's this folder called chaff but you have passed the option dash dash strip dash components equals one.
So it it drops chaff as if though it just didn't even exist and everything in a side of chaff gets extracted to your target directory.
If if if chaff isn't the only useless directory maybe there's wheat slash chaff slash archive or no slash file dot txt log dot txt then you could dash dash strip dash components equals two and then you would be dropping the wheat you would be dropping the chaff and you would only be getting log dot txt to your target directory.
Which is exactly what you want so that level of control for output is I mean, it's for me is priceless. I mean, that's the kind of thing where you can do a tar.
Tvf whatever that stands for what is that something like list probably tar let's do man tar what is dash t list yeah dash dash list so tar dash dash list dash dash file archive dot tar that gives you the whole that give you the structure of everything inside of that tar that tar ball and if you see directories leading you know leading directories that you don't need then you can strip those components and extract the files where you want them to be.
Right final final thing is permission and ownership this is another kind of big deal the zip file doesn't preserve file ownership the tar file format does it's kind of as simple as that I'll elaborate a little bit but I mean it is what it is you might not notice this when you use zip or tar just like sort of on your own personal systems because once a file is extracted from an archive you own the file you've just created that file object on your system you it just inherits the normal.
ownership sort of policy that you have to find on your system but when using tar as a super user you might notice or with the option dash dash same dash owner.
Then when you extract each file it gets the same ownership it had when archived assuming that the same user and group is available on the on the system where you're you're extracting it to so by default when you extract a file from a tar archive.
It reassigned it assigns those files to you, but if you do if you extract something with from a tar archive as with pseudo or as root or with the option dash dash same dash owner then the original ownership policy the the the ownership of that file that you're extracting gets carried over onto the target system there is just no option for that with the unzip command because the zip file format itself.
does not track ownership it just drops that information the zip command can preserve file permissions but again tar offers a lot more flexibility you have options like dash dash same dash permissions dash dash no dash same permissions dash dash mode where you can change things so you've got a lot more control.
with for over permissions in the with the tar command and the tar file format I guess well no really the tar file the the command because the file formats both of them preserve file permissions the command the tar command gives you the ability to alter them so those are my sort of three big reasons why I keep.
I it's not that I just default the tar or it's not that I just prefer it on principle there's it's just it's feature for feature there are some really good features in the the tar command and as it turns out within the tar file format that zip the the command zip unzip and the zip file format simply don't have zip won't the command will not let you change.
your compression algorithm which could mean that you don't get as as good results or maybe that you don't have the same kind of flexibility depending on what system you're trying to target although let's be honest it's zip it's probably going to work on any system so.
it's mostly I think about flexibility in terms of of the end result for that one unzip doesn't give you any control over the permission file permissions and it does not give you any permission over any flexibility or control over.
I'm leading directories sort of the the way that you strip components you can't do that the tar command gives you that ability and then finally ownership zip doesn't do ownership tar does those are really good reasons to use tar.
I think tar is clearly the the technically superior choice here whether it is the quote unquote correct choice for your use case depends I think entirely on your target audience.
There's really no doubt that zip has greater support I mean like I said at the top zip is basically everywhere a lot of people if you told them that you were going to send them a tar file they wouldn't know what you were talking about and then once they got it they wouldn't know what to do with it.
I mean trust me a lot of people are not going to know what to do with a tar file so zip is obviously the superior sort of like choice for you I guess universal compatibility but tar the tar format and the tar command are definitely the compression algorithm and archiving tool.
of choice for me thank you very much for listening I'll talk to you next time.
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
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Episode: 4558
Title: YouTube Subscriptions 2025 #14
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4558/hpr4558.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:13:54 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4558, for 2026-01-21
Today's show is entitled, "YouTube Subscriptions 2025 #14"
The host is Ahuka and the duration is 00:17:06
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "Part fourteen of my list of subscribed channels"
You are listening to a show from the Reserve Q. We are airing it now because we had free slots that were not filled. This is a community project that needs listeners to contribute shows in order to survive. Please consider recording a show for Hacker Public Radio.
Hello, this is Ahuka, welcoming you to Hacker Public Radio and another exciting episode. And this one is coming to you from the Reserve Q. So you know what that means. It means there aren't enough shows.
Hacker Public Radio is a community project that relies on members of the community to record and submit shows if it's going to continue.
If at some point the shows are just not coming, we close the whole thing up and that's the end of it. I don't want that to happen.
I'm assuming if you're listening to this that you don't want it to happen.
But the only way to make sure that it doesn't happen is to record and submit shows.
So, with that, I'm going to continue what I have been doing for the Reserve Q this go-round.
And in January of 2025, I sat down with all of the YouTube channels that I subscribe to and I've been going through and talking about them.
And I'm going to do more of that.
So, the first channel I'm going to talk about is called The Bulwark.
And it's another one of those political and news-related channels.
It's kind of interesting.
It says their mission is to provide analysis and reporting in the defense of America's liberal democracy.
That's it. That's the mission.
This is interesting because a lot of the people involved in this are Republicans, which in the United States would be the conservative right-wing party.
But there's a difference between being conservative and being far-right.
And they're not far-right.
They see the far-right as a big danger.
And so, they are doing what they can to prevent that from happening.
So far, we haven't been terribly successful.
But, you know, what can you do?
The next channel is The Fab Foe.
Now, this is a group of musicians.
Many of them are fairly well-known as studio musicians.
The bass player, Will Lee, was in David Letterman's band when Letterman had his show on television.
And basically, this group of people, they're huge Beatles fans.
And they go around and do concerts.
Typically, what they'll do is they'll do an entire Beatles album from start to finish.
Even the ones that you would think, how are they going to do that?
Like they did the White Album and they were able to cover Revolution No. 9.
They travel with a horn section and a few strings players.
So, they were able to replicate to a reasonably good degree what the Beatles did.
It's interesting because the Beatles stopped touring because they didn't think they could do on tour what they did in the studio.
To some degree, I think the Fab Foe disproved that because they're able to do it.
But, anyway, it's a fun little channel.
They don't put out a whole lot of videos.
And I think their touring thing slowed down a lot when the COVID pandemic hit.
But, I enjoy them.
So, they're on my list.
Next one is called The Great War.
Now, we talked about this before.
This was the real-time look at World War I.
And this was the group that, in 2014, started doing weekly videos covering the corresponding week in 1914.
And continued up through 15, 16, 17, 18.
So, it was a really in-depth coverage of World War I.
And then, they split into two other groups.
One we'll get to is Time Ghost.
And one we've already looked at is Real Time History.
So, there's not a whole lot new coming out.
But, they do still put out new videos from time to time.
The last one was about two months ago on the major battles of World War I in 1916.
Okay, the next channel is something called The History Guy, who is a fellow who is into history.
And, his tagline is that, you know, history deserves to be remembered.
And, so, he'll post, you know, new things, generally three days a week.
Monday, Wednesday, Friday.
And, he'll take something like, let's see, Benedict Arnold's Raid on Richmond from the American Revolution.
The Stand at Elson Bourne Ridge from World War II.
Mutiny of the Pennsylvania Line.
That was another Revolutionary War.
So, just anything that he thinks, you know.
And, I think the thing is, he'll look for the stuff that happened in history, but is not well known.
And, so, he'll do something on that and say, you know, this really deserves to be remembered.
And, most of his videos, I would say, are about 15 minutes.
So, that's a decent time.
Then, there is The Immediate Family.
Now, The Immediate Family is a group of musicians who are famous for their studio work.
They, you know, they've worked with a ton of people.
So, we're talking about people like Leland Sklar, who played bass with, I think, half the groups out there, probably.
And, Russ Kunkel.
So, they're well known within the music community.
They're not necessarily well known to casual music fans.
But, they're really good.
And, so, they're putting out their own music now.
Well, and, I have gotten some of it.
The next one is The Korean War.
Now, this is from TimeGhost.
That one of the groups that came out of that Great War thing.
They did World War II.
And, then, after wrapping that up, said, well, you know, maybe we should do the Korean War.
The setup is the same, okay?
So, what is happening is, right now, they're going through, they went through 1950.
And, it's like, okay, if we're in the first week of January right now, then, you know, what happened in the first week?
So, like, they just released, as I'm recording this, the Third Battle of Seoul, which was January 7th of 1951.
So, and, I'm recording this in January of 2025.
So, you know, it's just going to go through the whole war week by week following what's going on.
Interesting approach.
Then, there's a channel called The Language Tutor Spanish.
The Language Tutor has several channels.
It's a fellow named Danny Evans.
He's a teacher and teaches languages.
He has a doctorate.
And, he does podcasts or videos, what have you.
I mean, you can get them as podcasts.
You can get them as videos.
And, they're topic-oriented.
So, something like, lo or le in Spanish.
Learn the difference in five minutes.
Or, your regular verbs in the subjunctive.
And, that's a nine-minute video.
So, each video is really a topic-oriented kind of thing.
But, if you follow them all, you would certainly get a lot of education in the language.
Now, he also does one in French.
And, an interesting reversal.
He's got a channel he started up on English for Spanish speakers.
I'm an English speaker who's learning Spanish, but it can go the other way.
Now, the next channel I want to talk about is the Lincoln Project.
Lincoln Project.
Lincoln was the first Republican president of the United States.
He was the president during the Civil War.
In fact, you could make, I think, a pretty good argument that it was the election of Lincoln that caused the southern states to embark upon secession and war.
So, they're naming themselves after Lincoln because, again, these, again, are people who were traditional Republicans.
You know, many of them worked for Republican presidents.
And, they just don't like the direction that the country's going in with Donald Trump.
And, so, they're trying to do something to stop that.
The next channel is the Planetary Society.
And, that is the world's largest non-profit space interest group.
That's what they bill themselves as.
And, I'm a member of the Planetary Society.
And, that means I pay a membership dues.
Because, I'm a big space geek.
So, a lot of their videos are rather long.
I tend to skip over some of those.
But, the shorter ones I'm okay with.
Now, the next channel is called the Saxxy Gamer.
The Saxxy.
S-A-X-Y.
And, it has pictures of saxophones and stuff like that.
Now, he's a gamer.
And, does a number of things.
But, mostly Civ.
Which is my interest.
So, I watch his videos on Civilization.
And, you know, he's got some stuff up there about Civ-7 already.
But, he's been doing all of them going on.
He had a whole series on Civilization VI tips.
And, those were, you know, average maybe 10-minute videos.
Then, there's a channel called The Ship Life.
This is about cruising.
And, so, there's a fellow who was a crew member on cruise ships.
And, then got into being a travel agent and a YouTube vlogger, as the term is.
So, that's, you know, a few times a week.
Commentary, news, what's going on in the world of cruising.
Typically, eight or nine minutes long.
Then, there's the spiffing Brit.
Who is, he's got an act of being outrageously British.
And, it's very over the top.
I have no idea what his nationality actually is.
I wouldn't be the least bit surprised to discover that it has nothing to do with
Britain.
But, he does say his location is the UK.
So, whatever.
Now, he's a gamer.
He does sometimes do something about Civ.
But, he actually does all kinds of videos.
And, they're interesting because what he does is he finds ways,
to basically break the system, you know.
Go into a game and say, all right, if you do this, it's not what they intended to do.
But, look what happens when you do it.
And, you can basically get a gigantic victory out of it.
Okay, next one is The Vintage Space with Amy Shearer Title.
And, her whole thing is, it's space, but she really focuses on the earlier years.
So, there's a lot of stuff about the 60s, you know, Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo.
And, that's really her strongest focus.
Videos, most of them are relatively short.
You know, occasionally, she'll do a longer one.
But, the majority of them are probably, you know, 15 minutes or so in length.
And, the next one is called The Friel Sisters.
F-R-I-E-L.
I hope I'm pronouncing that right.
They are Irish musicians.
And, as I've mentioned before, I really love traditional Irish music.
And, that's kind of what they do.
So, it's a nice channel.
They put out videos.
Typically, you know, their typical video might be them doing a song.
So, you know, four or five minutes is probably enough.
So, I think that's enough for now.
So, this is Ahuka, signing off.
And, as always, encouraging you to support free software.
Bye-bye.
You have been listening to the Hacker Public Radio podcast, at hackerpublicradio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording a podcast, then visit the HPR site to find out how easy it really is.
Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by anhonesthost.com, the Internet Archive, rsync.net, and the HPR Community Content Delivery Network.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
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Episode: 4559
Title: Enkele off line vertaaltools
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4559/hpr4559.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:13:55 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4559, for 2026-01-22
Today's show is entitled, "Enkele off line vertaaltools "
The host is Ken Fallon and the duration is 00:03:54
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "Ken presents two offline translation tools for phone and desktop that just work"
hi everybody my name is ken fallon you're listening to another episode of hacker public
radio today a little episode because i'm posting a show to fill a free slot otherwise you would
have three a hookah shows one after the other so as some of you might be aware i live in the
netherlands and here they speak dutch as well as english but occasionally i come across dutch
articles that i want to translate or i don't know a word or something so rather than using
online tools i've never felt super comfortable with that i have some translation tools that i use
on my phone and on my desktop so on my desktop i use a tool called local translate which is from their
description on flat hub it is local translate is an offline translation application that uses
firefox's neural transmission models from mozilla firefox transition models project
to perform high quality translations locally on your device it's not affiliated in mozilla in any way
it says when you open it you get a very very simple window doesn't have anything really anything in it
you select the language that you want to translate from and it gives in the text up there enter the
text to translate so you there's even a paste button in there so you can just press paste and then
translate and then underneath the language that you selected appears and we've got bulgarian bosnian
dutch estonian greek hindi japanese loads of languages and the translation appears there and then at the bottom
once it's translated you can press the copy button and it's genuinely that simple um it's all local if
you want to switch from one to the other so now i have a piece of text i'm maybe replying to an email
and i just want to get the wording right so i'll write it in english and then try and press the up down
button or swap button which will just swap nothing in it that gets in your way it's just simple it works
it's fantastic little app then i was thinking on my phone i have the need to have something similar
and i wanted to see was there anything available on the fdroid app store for my android phone
and there is and it is called offline translator or just translator in the fdroid store links to
everything here will be in the show notes um and the description says it is a translator app that
performs on-device translations of text and images without sending your data to external servers
it uses the same mozilla translation models it does translation of non-latin script it does optical
character recognition for translating text and images it does automatic image detection it does image
translation overlays that prefers preserves original formatting and it supports multiple language
pairs no internet is required for translations once the models are downloaded all translations happen
locally both of these applications are available the source code is available both of them are under the gpl
v3 license with the offline translator for android being version three or later that's it invaluable little tools
if you respect privacy and need to translate from one language to another super handy to have in your toolbox
tune in tomorrow for another exciting episode of hacker public radio which will be a hookah
for this long Ephesus
Paul
Paul
You have been listening to the Hacker Public Radio podcast, at hackerpublicradio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording a podcast, then visit the HPR site to find out how easy it really is.
Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by anhonesthost.com, the Internet Archive, rsync.net, and the HPR Community Content Delivery Network.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
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Episode: 4560
Title: Arthur C. Clarke: Other Works, Part 2
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4560/hpr4560.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:13:56 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4560, for 2026-01-23
Today's show is entitled, "Arthur C. Clarke: Other Works, Part 2"
The host is Ahuka and the duration is 00:14:19
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "A look at some of Arthur C. Clarke's other works."
Hello, this is a hookah welcoming you to Hacker Public Radio and another exciting episode in our science fiction and fantasy series, and
This time what we're gonna do is we're gonna wrap up our look at Arthur C. Clark and
You know, we spent some time on this because he's a very important author in the history of science fiction
And there's a lot of good stuff there to take a look at
And so what we're gonna do now is sort of get some of the other miscellaneous works
That are perhaps worthy of a little attention and
Bring some attention to them and then at the end we're gonna cover
Arthur C. Clark's three laws
That should be fun
So the first story we're gonna talk about is a time Odyssey now
This is a collaboration
between
two of
science fiction's best authors
What could possibly go wrong?
Well, something went wrong.
This series is not bad, but I hesitate to describe it as good
This series was described by Clark as neither a prequel nor a sequel, but an Arthur quail
A name quaint from orthogonal which means something roughly like at right angles
Though it is also used in statistics to denote events that are independent and do not influence each other
And the relativity theory time is orthogonal to space
And in multi-dimensional geometry we can talk about axes in each dimension is orthogonal to all of the others
It's something I can't picture being pretty much limited to three dimensions, but it can be described mathematically
Anyway back to time Odyssey. It's
Has a small resemblance to the 2001 series, but not really
It has globes instead of monoliths
And the spheres have a circumference and volume that is related to their radius not by the usual
Pi but by exactly three
Just what this means I am not sure
Other than they are not spheres in any usual sense of the word
In this story the spheres seem to be gathering people from various eras and bringing them to some other planet which gets
Kristened mere
Though not in any way to the Russian space station
It is a Russian word that can mean peace, world or village
I've seen it used a lot to refer to a village in my studies of Russian history
Anyway the inhabitants include two hominids
Mother and a daughter a group of British red coats
Mongols from the Genghis Khan era a UN peacekeeper helicopter a Russian space capsule an
Unknown rigid kipling the army of Alexander the Great
Well at least they have a lot of characters to throw around
They end up taking sides and fighting each other in the end several of the people are returned to earth in their own time
But the joke is on them
The beings behind the spheres call themselves the firstborn because they were the first to achieve sentience
They figure that the best way for them to remain safe is to wipe out any other race to achieve sentience
It kind of makes them the polar opposite of the beings behind the monoliths in 2001 for whom the mind is sacred
Anyway the firstborn have arranged for a massive solar flare that will wipe out all life on earth and completely
Sterilize the planet but conveniently it will happen in five years leaving plenty of time for plot development
Of course the people of earth will try to protect themselves
Then in the third book of the series an ominous object enters the solar system
This is of course they call back to the Rama object
It's like they wanted to take stuff from the Rama series and twist it
So I love a lot of Arthur C. Clark's worth works
I like a lot of Stephen Baxter's work
But somehow I think this is eminently skippable
Now the two of them also collaborated on the final white heart story which isn't bad
And that brings us to tales from the white heart
Okay white heart in this case heart is H.A.R.T. so they're talking about a type of deer
So it's the name of a pub and in this pub there you know
There's a character who tells outrageous stories
Now other characters are thinly disguised science fiction authors including Clark himself
A Clark mentions he was inspired to do this by the Jorkins series of Lord Dunceney
Which are also outrageous tall tales but lacking the science fiction aspects of Clark stories
Of course this type of story has a long history in which we could do well to mention
For instance the stories of Baron Munchausen
And of course the stories that El Sprig de Camp and Fletcher Pratt has found entails from Gavigan's bar
And spider Robinson would take this basic idea and turn it into a series of books about
Callahan's place also known as Callahan's cross time saloon
The stories of this type are at least as much fantasy as anything but quite enjoyable
And I think I can recommend all of these as worth the time to while away and a cold winter's evening
while sitting by a warm fire with a beverage of choice
Now some of these are short stories such as the nine billion names of God
Now this was written in 1954
In 2004 it got a retro-spective Hugo as the best short story of 54
The idea is that a group of Tibetan monks believe that the purpose of the
Universes to identify the nine billion names of God
And once that has been done the universe will no longer have a purpose and will cease to exist
They have been identifying candidates and writing them down but the work is very slow
So they decide that maybe with a little automation they can speed it up
So they get a computer
Now this is 1954 so you should be picturing a room-sized mainframe
And then they hire some Western programmers to develop the program to do this
Now the programmers don't believe the monks are on to anything here, but you know a paycheck is a paycheck
They finish the program and start at running but decide they don't want to be there when the monks
Discovered their theory doesn't work
So they take off early without telling you and it had down the mountain
But on the way they see the stars go out one by one
The next classic short story
Is called the star and this one the Hugo for best short story in 1956
The story opens with the return of an interstellar expedition that has been studying a system
Where the star went Nova millennia ago
But the expeditions astrophysicist who is a Jesuit priest seems to be in a crisis of faith
And if you think it implausible that a Jesuit priest could be an astrophysicist
I would suggest you look into the case of the Belgian priest George Lenneth
Who first developed the theory in the big bang
Anyway, in the story they learned that this system had a planet much like earth
It had intelligent beings much like earth who were peaceful
But in a tragic turn of events they knew their star was going to explode and they had no capability of interstellar travel
So they created a repository on the uttermost planet of the system that was survived the explosion and left records of their civilization
And when the Jesuit astrophysicist calculated the time of the explosion and the travel time for life
He has shaken and says oh God
There were so many stars you could have used
What was the need to give these people to the fire that the symbol of their passing might shine above Bethlehem
And
Now the often island
The often island is a young adult novel is
I think what we would say today
Probably what a call to the juvenile back then
So the people of the sea are dolphins
They save a young boy who had stowed away on a hover ship that subsequently had crashed
And because no one knew about him he was a stow away
He was left among the wreckage when the crew takes off in the light boats
Now from here it is the typical
Buildings robin you find in most young adult novels
The dolphins bring him to an island where he becomes involved with a research community led by a professor
Who's trying to communicate with dolphins?
He learns various skills there survives dangers
And in the end has to risk his life to save the people of the island
Now if you have a 13 year old in your house, this is worth looking for
It's a very good young adult novel and
You know 13 is probably just about perfect for this
Now we're going to discuss a novella it's called a meeting with Medusa
And this one the 1972 Nebula award for best novella now remember the Hugo awards are voted by the fans
The Nebula awards are voted by other writers so it's the science fiction writers
Association
So meeting with Medusa Nebula award in 1972
It concerns one Howard Falton who early in the story has an accident involving a helium-filled airship
Is badly injured and requires time and prosthetics to heal
But then he promotes an expedition to Jupiter that uses similar technology a hot
Hydrogen balloon supported aircraft
This is to explore the upper reaches of Jupiter's atmosphere
Which is the only feasible way to explore given the immense gravity of this giant planet
Attempting to land on the solid surface would mean being crushed by gravity and air pressure so that is not possible
The expedition finds there is life in the upper clouds of Jupiter
Some of it is microscopic
Like a kind of air plankton which is bioluminescent
But there are large creatures as well one of which is like a jellyfish
But about a mile across
This is the Medusa of the title
Another is a mantle like creature about a hundred yards across that praise on the Medusa
But when the Medusa starts to take an interest in Falton's craft
He decides to get out quick for safety safe and we learned that because of the various prosthetics
Implanted after the airship accident Falton is really a cyborg
Which must faster reactions than ordinary humans
As we discussed previously Clark loved the sea
And in this novella he is using what he knows in that realm to imagine a
Possible ecology in the atmosphere of Jupiter of course when he wrote this novella
No one knew about the truly frightening level of radiation around Jupiter
But then a clever science fiction writer probably could come up with a way to work around that
So that concludes our look at Clark's fiction
But we couldn't look at Clark without also
Bringing up his famous three laws
I don't know why laws always have to come in threes as a mob had his three laws of robotics
And Arthur Clark had three laws of technology and they are number one
When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible
He is almost certainly right
What he states that something is impossible
He is very probably wrong
Number two
The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible
The number three
A sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic
So this concludes our look at Arthur C. Clark the second of the big three of the golden age of science fiction
We first looked at Isaac Azamov
Now we've covered Arthur C. Clark and you know what that means
We are ready to tackle the dean of science fiction
Robert A. Heinlein and boy do we have a lot to talk about there
So this is a hookah for hacker public radio signing off and as always
Encouraging you to support free software
Bye bye
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording podcast, click on our upload link
to find out how easy it is.
Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by an AnHonestHost.com, the Internet Archive,
rsync.net, and our mirror network.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
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Episode: 4561
Title: A bit about Mission:Libre, a new project for 11-14 year olds in free software
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4561/hpr4561.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:13:56 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4561, for 2026-01-26
Today's show is entitled, "A bit about Mission:Libre, a new project for 11-14 year olds in free software"
The host is Carmen-Lisandrette and the duration is 00:02:15
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "Carmen talks about her project for 11 to 14 year olds in free software"
Hey everyone, my name is Carmen. I like to have a chat with you about Mission Libre,
which is my project for 11 to 14 year olds who weren't interested in Free Software.
I've chosen 11 to 14 year olds because that's when I got into Free Software.
I first learned about Free Software at age 13. I knew from the moment I heard about it that I
really wanted to be involved. Unfortunately, back then there weren't any projects from
people my actual interest in Free Software. I didn't really know who to ask or where to go
if I wanted to be involved. It's been about 20 years now and things still aren't much better.
I know there are some excellent projects like you've hacking the freedom but there's nothing
comprehensive or works of young people long term. Free Software needs young people and young
people need Free Software. This is my I'm starting Mission Libre. It's early days yet but I'm
still really excited about the future and I'm already hard of work. Mission Libre does several things
already. I've made materials to introduce young people to Free Software. I put out a cute little
zine every one or two months. I also help out young people who want to join the movement
individually or in small groups. In the near future I'm looking at studying some clubs.
There'll be hard of agencies so people can participate in a matter where they are in the world.
I'm really excited about these and I have a mountain of plans and the clubs still be
some programming tutorials, some opportunities for young people to share their projects
as well as discussions about how we can spread software freedom and near-run communities.
If your kids might want to join the clubs, please ask them to email me. My email address is in
the show notes. I can back to them as soon as I can. I'm also writing a book on everything and
you come at a free software my like to know. That's where it came from. Why it's important?
How to live your life without non-free software? How to tell others about software freedom?
It's one of lots of fun projects to do with free software. If you think Mission Libre is cool
and you'd like to see it succeed, there are a couple of things you can do to help. You can donate
on Mission Libre's Libre's Libre Pay which is linked in the show notes so on Mission Libre.org.
You can also help spread the word about Mission Libre and get it in the hands of young people who
might want to join the community. There's more information about Mission Libre on Mission Libre.org.
My email address is Carmen at Mission Libre.org. There are more links in the show notes. Thank you for
listening. Bye!
You have been listening to the Hacker Public Radio podcast, at hackerpublicradio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording a podcast, then visit the HPR site to find out how easy it really is.
Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by anhonesthost.com, the Internet Archive, rsync.net, and the HPR Community Content Delivery Network.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
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Episode: 4562
Title: Software development doesn't end until it's packaged
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4562/hpr4562.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:13:57 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4562, for 2026-01-27
Today's show is entitled, "Software development doesn't end until it's packaged"
The host is Klaatu and the duration is 00:11:16
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "Creating an installable package for your application is a great quality assurance step"
Hey, everybody, this is Clattu. Most software development I've done has been utilities for highly specific workflows.
I've written code to ensure that metadata for a company's custom file formats gets copied along with the rest of the data when the file gets archived or
code that ensures a search field doesn't mangle its input. Lots of git hooks, file converters, parsers, and of course my fair share of
dirty hacks. And because most software projects I work on are designed for a specific task, very few of them have required packaging.
The utilities that I've written have often been just integrated into a larger code base that I'm not responsible for or else distributed across an infrastructure by some admin.
It's kind of like a magic trick which has made my life conveniently easier, but as magic does, it is also tricked me into thinking that my development work is done once I can prove that my code does its job.
The reality is I humbly submit that code development isn't actually done until you can deliver it to your users in a format they can install.
I don't think I'm alone in forgetting that software delivery is the real final product. There are many reasons some developers stop short of providing an installable package for the code they've worked on for weeks or months or years.
But first of all, packaging is work and after writing and troubleshooting code for months sometimes you just want your work to be over just as soon as everything functions is expected.
Secondly, there are a lot of software package formats out there regardless of what platform you think you're delivering to.
It's just not reasonable to expect any developer to be able to package for every single platform that might benefit from the code.
However, I view packaging as part of quality assurance. There are lots of benefits you gain by packaging your code into an installer and you don't have to target every package format.
In fact, I think you get the benefits of packaging by creating just one package.
If you package your code as an installable file, whether it's an RPM file or a bash script or a flat pack reference or an app image or an EXE or MSI or anything else, you're checking your code base for consistency.
You know it or not, possibly more likely the packaging tool that you're using is checking your code for consistency.
You can pick whatever package format you're most comfortable with or the one that you think represents maybe the bulk of your target audience.
And you're sure to find that the packaging tool expects to be automated and like nobody wants to start packaging from scratch every time they update code.
So naturally, most packaging tools out there, the vast majority of them are designed to be configured ones for your code base and then to create updated packages for you each time your code base is updated.
If you're building a package for your project and discover that you have to manually intervene, then you've probably discovered what you have discovered a bug in your code.
Imagine you've got a project repository with a name in camel case.
And you hadn't noticed it before, but your code refers to itself in a mix of lower case and camel case depending on where you know what the reference is.
Your package build grinds to a halt because a variable used by the packaging tool suddenly can't find your code base because it was set to a lower case title, but the archive of your code is titled with camel case.
There's a difference there case case sensitivity matters and in most cases I guess I guess there's probably some packaging managers that don't care or packaging tools that don't that don't do that.
But I mean certainly on the vast majority of on a sensible system there's case sensitivity let's put it that way.
So if that happens to you if this example happens to you and it doesn't have to be case sensitivity you could be underscores dashes whatever.
It's also going to happen to every software package package or trying to take your code and package it up for their users so if you fix it for yourself once you fixed it for everyone else another benefit is dependency management believe it or not for decades one of the most common problems of software troubleshooting has been the phrase well works on my machine and no matter how many tools we developers have our disposal to make it easy to build and run software on a clean system.
It's still common to accidentally deliver software with surprised dependencies that you would forgotten about it's really really easy to forget to revert to like a clean snapshot in your virtual machine or to a to a fresh container or or maybe to a maybe not to a fresh container that tends to happen on its own but although maybe not depends on how you're running it.
But I mean maybe you're container the container that you you're using happens to have like a more recent version of a library then you'd realize or maybe you get the path of an important executable wrong and a script or you forget that not all computers ship with the thing that you take for granted most packaging tools won't stand for this they will break if this happens.
I can't count the number of times I've tried to deliver an RPM only to be reminded by RPM build that I haven't included the dash developer version of a dependency that's because many Linux distributions separate development libraries from the binaries so little things like that they get caught by the packaging tools and you would not notice it during development because obviously you would have all the development tools right that's just something that you would have on your.
development machine you may not literally fix every problem with dependency management by building a single package because again different systems might require different things and maybe you don't know about that but you can clearly identify at least what your code requires.
It only takes a single warning from your packaging tool for you to add a note to other packages about what they need to include in their own builds in terms of like dependencies or be sure to include the development libraries or whatever as an additional bonus it's also a good reminder to double check the licenses your project is using.
I know that in the haze of sort of desperate hacking to try to get something to just work it's it can be helpful to get a gentle reminder that you've linked to a library with a different light license than everything else or something like that.
A few packaging tools if any detect like the actual licensing requirements directly but sometimes all it takes at least for me is a reminder that you're using a thing to then trigger that sort of thing in your head of like oh right that that's that one thing with with a different license or that has a license that I should double check about or whatever and then finally.
I think every package that you make for your code base is an example package every meaning any package is an example package.
Once you've packaged your code you create an example for everyone coming to your project to turn it into a package of their own.
It doesn't matter that your package might be an RPM or a dead or just a TGZ for a front end like Slack build or arches a you are.
It's just the interaction between a packaging system and the input script that really matters and I think even a novice package maintainer is likely to be able like if they've gotten that far to like investigate you know how to package something they probably could can generally reverse engineer or tell.
what a packaging script is doing not maybe maybe not exactly what it is doing but they can see sort of the flow of data like if you look at a just a sample RPM for GNU hello that they're kind of everywhere online you can see the the spec file for them and then look at like an arch build for GNU hello again that's online it's easy to find.
Not that dissimilar that they have a bunch of header information about sort of the name of the application the version where to find the applications code the will maybe the license of something like that and then they have the build section and that's usually filled with like either macros or functions like percent sign prep percent sign auto setup I don't know what those are you what I do but pretend like we don't know what those are.
look that up online what what is percent prep in an RPM build spec well it's a it's a macro it's got a bunch of like things that it does automatically auto setup again it's a macro it does stuff percent build a macro it does stuff and so on until you kind of understand the flow you see there's a setup there's a which is configuration there's like a build step and then there's the install step and then there's a post install step and sure enough if you look at the arch a you are for this there's the sort of the setup.
that there's the the build function and there's the package function and those are doing things like dot slash configure dash dash prefix equals slash USR make and then eventually there's in the packaging section section there's the make destitor equals your package directory install a slack build again would be quite similar to all of that so.
Once you kind of see one or three of them you've kind of seen all of the rest you still have to cross reference the actual documentation and the specifications of that packaging format but you understand the the flow of logic that happens there there are differences between the mall a lot of them can leverage sort of the the built in.
benefits of of other systems like auto make or and build or may sound or ninja all all of the different sort of build sort of systems that exist out there so sometimes a packaging is simply just a matter of like getting files into the correct place you know maybe it's in the.
maybe it's in a specific RPM build directory or maybe it's in a specific directory with with other assets right next to it like in a slack build whatever the the setup it's just a matter of getting things into the right place and then triggering.
the the extraction of the source code and the building of the source code and then kind of package packaging it all up into a well a package so seeing that as an example is is I think really helpful for people because if they can read around.
whatever you chose whatever packaging format you chose to set as an example that they can take that away as kind of a quick start for their own package again I think packaging really is a step of quality assurance even though a packaging system is.
really just a front end for whatever build system your code uses anyway the rigor of creating a repeatable and automatable process for delivering your project is a helpful exercise for both you and for the people who come after you to try to help distribute your software it's it's kind of a form of of documentation quality assurance and it really is I think part of software development software development it's not over until it's package.
Thanks for listening talk to you next time.
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording podcast, click on our upload link
to find out how easy it is.
Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by an AnHonestHost.com, the Internet Archive,
rsync.net, and our mirror network.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
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Episode: 4563
Title: Nuclear Reactor Technology - Ep 5 Fast Reactors
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4563/hpr4563.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:13:57 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4563, for 2026-01-28
Today's show is entitled, "Nuclear Reactor Technology - Ep 5 Fast Reactors"
The host is Whiskeyjack and the duration is 00:12:07
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "Fast neutron reactors"
This episode is the fifth in an eight-part series, a nuclear reactor technology.
In the previous episode, we discussed some of the less common historical reactor types.
In this episode, we will describe fast neutron reactors.
Definition, fast versus slow neutrons.
Fast neutron reactors are ones which use the fast neutron reaction.
This is as opposed to slow or thermal neutron reactors which use a slow neutron reaction.
Nearly all reactors in use today use a slow neutron reaction.
Moderators. The normal nuclear reaction is the fast one.
However, reactors which use a slow reaction are simpler and cheaper to build.
Therefore, most reactors use a moderator to slow down the fast neutrons to bake them slow neutrons.
The most common moderators are ordinary light water, heavy water, and graphite.
Light water is not the best of moderators, so reactors which use it need to enrich the uranium fuel
to a higher percentage of U235 to compensate for this.
By their nature, fast neutron reactors do not use a moderator.
Indeed, a moderator is detrimental to the operation.
However, since even the coolant could moderate the reaction, fast neutron reactors generally use something other than water
to act as a coolant and carry the heat from the fuel to the steam generator.
Burners versus breeders.
While fast neutron reactors can produce more fizzile material than they consume, not all designs do.
Once which produce more fizzile material than they consume are called breeders.
Once which produces less fizzile material than they consume are called burners.
This described by the breeding ratio.
A reactor with a breeding ratio of less than one consumes more fizzile material than it produces.
A reactor with a breeding ratio of greater than one produces more fizzile material than it consumes.
Fast-fission fuel cycle, typical fuel.
Uranium visions more efficiently with slow neutrons than fast neutrons.
However, plutonium visions better than uranium does with fast neutrons.
Also, plutonium 239 produces 25% more neutrons than uranium.
Fast neutrons are more efficient at converting U238 to plutonium than slow neutrons.
There are multiple ways the fuel can be arranged in the reactor with different arrangements
giving different characteristics.
Other methods.
India are apparently working on fast neutron reactors that produce plutonium from uranium
and U233 from thorium at the same time.
The plutonium and U233 are then used with thorium in slow neutron reactors.
Reprocessing.
Reprocessing with spent fuel is fundamental to the fast-fission fuel cycle
in most fast reactor designs, as that is how excess plutonium is harvested and used in other reactors.
Reprocessing involves chemically separating different elements from one another
in order to keep the desirable ones for recycling and getting rid of the undesirable ones.
Fuel types.
Here are the common fuel types for fast reactors.
Oxide.
This is similar to how fuel is made for most reactors.
It has low thermal conductivity.
It does not react with sodium or lead.
The characteristics are well known.
Metal.
It has a high thermal conductivity.
It is easier to reprocess.
It has a tendency to self-regulate.
As temperature increases, the metal expands.
This causes the reaction to slow down as the atoms get further apart.
If the coolant stops flowing, the reaction tends to shut itself down.
This acts as an inherent safety feature.
Nitride.
Nitride fuel, that is fuel incorporating nitrogen, has a much higher thermal conductivity
than oxygen fuel.
However, this fuel is more difficult to make, and is still subject to further R&D.
Carbide.
Carbide fuel incorporates carbon.
The pros and cons are similar to those of nitride fuel.
Coolant.
Fast neutron reactors are generally categorized based on the type of coolant they use.
Coolant are generally either liquid metal, gas, or molten salt.
The coolant will transfer the heat from the reactor to a steam generator to produce steam
for the turbine.
Liquid sodium.
Liquid sodium is a common choice for fast neutron reactors.
Sometimes a sodium potassium alloy is used instead.
It does not interfere much with neutrons.
It is a good conductor of heat.
It is non-corrosive.
Premium cooled reactors are good for producing plutonium for further use in fuel.
It has a high boiling point, so the reactor can operate at ambient temperature.
On the negative side, sodium reacts chemically to air and water, meaning that a coolant
leak can result in a chemical fire.
Liquid lead or lead bismoth.
Lead or lead bismoth fast neutron reactors have advantages similar to those of sodium cooled
ones.
However, they are not as good at producing plutonium for fuel.
Helium gas.
This uses helium gas as a coolant.
This is subject to ongoing research and there isn't a lot of information about this
style.
The main advantage of gas cooling is to avoid the potential chemical reaction problems
of sodium coolant in the advent of a leak in the steam generator.
Maltons salt.
This uses a molten salt as a coolant.
I will discuss Maltons salt reactors separately, so I won't go into a lot of detail here.
History of fast neutron reactors.
The origins.
More than 2 dozen fast neutron reactors have been built.
The earliest ones date from the 1950s.
Most have been small to medium sized research or prototype reactors.
Several, though, were large power reactors.
They have been built in China, France, Germany, India, Japan, Kazakhstan, Russia, the UK and the US.
Reasons for developing them.
Interested them originated from a belief that uranium supplies were limited, so there
was a desire to design reactors that could use fuel more efficiently.
However, after the discovery of very large, high-grade uranium deposits in a number of parts
of the world, such as Australia, Canada, Kazakhstan, and other places, interesting fast neutron
reactors waned as it became evident that fresh uranium fuel would be abundant and inexpensive.
Reasons there are still being developed.
Interest remained in some quarters for two reasons.
One is that some countries, such as India, have much more thorium than uranium, and they
wish to be able to produce plutonium in order to enable a thorium fuel cycle.
The other area of interest isn't using them to burn high-level waste in order to get rid of
it.
A fast neutron reaction can consume radioactive isotopes that cannot be consumed in slow neutron
reactors.
Fast neutron reactors are proven technology.
However, they are not currently an economic technology compared to slow neutron reactors
in a era of abundant fresh uranium.
They were developed to solve a problem that hasn't arisen, which is assured as your fresh
uranium.
plutonium stockpiles, several countries built up stockpiles of civil plutonium, with the intention
of using it to fuel the start-up of fast neutron reactors.
However, the canceling of plans for fast neutron reactors left these stockpiles with no immediate
purpose.
This led to the pursuit of plans to use these stockpiles in Mox fuel for slow neutron reactors,
or finding other ways of getting rid of it.
Pros and cons of fast reactors, if fast reactors are more expensive and difficult to operate
than slow reactors, why is there any interest in them?
Pros Fast neutron reactors can use all of the uranium supply by converting the U238 to plutonium
as well as using the U235.
The new neutron reactors can only use the U235, plus converting a very small proportion
of the U238 to plutonium.
This means that a given amount of fuel will go much further when used with a fast reactor
than a slow one.
Some, but not all, fast neutron reactors can produce more plutonium than they use.
This extra plutonium can be used to bake uranium plutonium mixed oxide or mox fuel to be used
in slow reactors, or can be used to power a thorium fuel cycle.
So the higher cost of the fast neutron reactors can be offset by having to produce fuel
for several slow neutron or thorium reactors.
They can also use up or burn radioactive waste.
That is, highly radioactive elements, which are a byproduct of fuel use, but not usable
as fuel by themselves, can be separated from the spent fuel and fed back into the reactor
where the additional radiation will convert them into elements or isotopes, which are
either not radioactive, or which are otherwise easier to dispose of.
Cons.
There are a number of cons, however, as otherwise there would be a lot more fast reactors
in the world.
Since water, evens, light water, is a moderator, fast neutron reactors cannot use water as
a coolant.
Other alternatives, coolants, must be used, and these complicate the design of the reactor
and make it more difficult to operate.
Alternative compatible coolants may be corrosive, and so new materials may need to be developed
for both the reactor vessel and the fuel cladding.
Alternative coolants are often opaque, making it difficult to inspect the reactor.
The fuel cycle requires reprocessing spent fuel, which means that reprocessing facilities have
to be set up, which is an additional expense.
Fast neutron reactors were primarily developed on the premise that uranium supplies were
limited and would soon become very expensive.
However, new very large and very high-grade uranium deposits were discovered in Canada, Australia,
and Kazakhstan, causing uranium prices to fall rather than rise.
As a result, it is much cheaper to operate a once-through fuel cycle than to build fast neutron
reactors.
After prospects, currently, fast neutron reactors are not economically competitive with
slow neutron reactors for electric power generation, so there is a lot of interest from
prospective customers.
Originally, interest in them was driven by a belief that the world would prud short of uranium.
However, higher uranium prices sparked increased mineral exploration, which resulted in finding
large high-grade reserves of low-cost uranium, undercutting the need for economic use.
There is still ongoing R&D, though, as they offer several other use cases.
One is to get rid of radioactive waste elements by turning them into non-radioactive or less-radioactive
isotopes or elements.
The other is to provide a supply of plutonium for fueling thorium reactors.
Conclusion, this has been a short overview of fast neutron reactors, including their history,
uses and underlying design features.
In the next episode, we will describe the use of thorium in nuclear power, including what
thorium is, how it differs from uranium, and what sort of reactors can use it.
This concludes the fifth episode of an eight-part series on nuclear reactor technology.
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording podcast, click on our upload link
to find out how easy it is.
Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by an AnHonestHost.com, the Internet Archive,
rsync.net, and our mirror network.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
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Episode: 4564
Title: MakeMKV error
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4564/hpr4564.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:14:00 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4564, for 2026-01-29
Today's show is entitled, "MakeMKV error"
The host is Archer72 and the duration is 00:03:55
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "Archer72 leaves a solution to a problem with a Blu-ray drive using MakeMKV"
Hello, this is archer 72 for hacker public radio.
In this episode, I would like to leave myself a reminder of how to fix a problem I had
before I had upgraded an NVMe drive and then I hadn't used MKV in a while, so I had to look
up the solution again.
I'm using version 1.18.2 as of this podcast.
Before coming to the conclusion that I did, I did a couple of troubleshooting steps.
One was to try a different drive, which was a much-eated drive, it was a pretty common drive
that you can get on eBay for about $20, and it did work with a Blu-ray without hanging
up the problem I ran into was a set of Blu-ray drive from HP, where it would start looking
like it was loading the disk and just hung there and stalled.
I read a couple of forums, and I checked the, what I thought was the fault disk with handbrake
and it read it just fine, and then I also checked to see if there was enough power and there
was because I was using it an adapter to provide 12 volts.
As of this recording on January 22nd, 2026, I needed to revert to version 1.17.7 to successfully
rip an MKV, because that was the one where it finally loaded up, and I will leave links in the
show notes of where I, in which form I found this information about the older release,
and also the repo where I would find it, and then links to the very specific ones of
1.17.7, the specific two files that need to be installed to make this work.
To install this version, you will have to go into the MKV-OSS directory and perform a dot slash
configure first, and then a make, and then a pseudo-making stall, and then go back into
the previous directory and go to make MKV-bin, and then perform make, and then pseudo-making stall,
and then the program will function as expected. I hope this tip helps somebody else to
and if you're interested in what I am recording this on, it is a Zoom H1 essential,
and I'm monitoring the recording with a sound core, open air earbud.
Feel free to leave a comment on this or other hard public radio shows, or even record a show of your
own. This has been Archer 72 for Hacker Public Radio.
You have been listening to the Hacker Public Radio podcast, at hackerpublicradio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording a podcast, then visit the HPR site to find out how easy it really is.
Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by anhonesthost.com, the Internet Archive, rsync.net, and the HPR Community Content Delivery Network.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
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Episode: 4565
Title: HPR Beer Garden 9 - Barley Wine
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4565/hpr4565.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:14:02 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4565, for 2026-01-30
Today's show is entitled, "HPR Beer Garden 9 - Barley Wine"
The host is Kevie and the duration is 00:27:21
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "Dave and Kevie talk about Barley Wines."
Hello and welcome to another exciting episode of Hacker Public Radio, and this is the HPR
Beer Garden episode 9, my name is David, I'm joined by Kevin, Kevin, how are you?
I am very well and I am also excited because I am got a very special Beer tonight, this
is a one-off, I will not be getting this again, I don't, so I'm very excited, I've
been saving it for this episode.
I'm keen to understand why, but I'm sure you will tell us, well why it's so exciting
and why you'd never have it again, but I'm sure you'll tell us later on, I'll be revealed.
On this episode of The Beer Garden, we are going to be exploring Bali Wine, which is
a style of beer that I was only recently introduced to.
But before we go and crack open these, well this one I've never had before, not what I've
never seen before, probably going to that, I'll just give you a little, little potted history
of Bali Wine from my not unreasonable amount of research, thank you Wikipedia.
So Bali Wine dates back to the mid-19th century when Bass or Bass Rat Cliff and Gretton, as
they were called at the time, based in Burton on Trent, here in the UK, they began
a production of a single brew Bali Wine that they simply called number one, that was
the name of it, Bass number one.
And the label was adorned with a single red diamond, and this single red diamond was actually
Britain's second registered trademark ever, which I didn't know and I find that quite interesting.
The first one was Bass's red triangle that you can still see on Bass beers even today.
Number one, as it is still known, was brewed almost continuously from 1854 through to 1995
when it was discontinued.
There was a 10 year break between 1944 and 1954, but even though it is no longer being
made, it still is the gold standard of Bali wines, which other Bali wines are measured
against, which is really intriguing because up until the time I started to put this together,
they've even heard of Bass number one.
But Bass number one was not distinctive only for the method of production, but also because
it was so pale.
The reason it was so pale is because of the maltz that it was using.
Prior to this, Bali wines had mainly been like a dark amber to dark browning colour,
which were made with much cheaper and darker maltz.
But this pale Bali wine was quite novel at its time, but then after Bass started producing
their pale Bali wine, there were some other brewers that followed suit as well with pale
versions full of gold and pride, and also tenants gold label.
By the way, that's not tenants of Glasgow, that's tenants of Sheffield, so it's completely
different brewery, just seems to have the same name.
And as it happens, Kevin had mentioned gold label to me before, and I did manage to
bag an amazing deal on Amazon for 95, I think it was for four cans, but they arrived
tomorrow, which is really sad because I could have reviewed them tonight, had they arrived
sooner.
So, little bit disappointed, but I'm sure I'll enjoy them when they arrive.
But believe it or not, it wasn't until 1976 that the style was introduced to the United States,
with the anchor brewing company producing its old foc horn, Bali wine, or it says
it, Bali wine, style, ale.
Old foc horn was styled as Bali wine with what Bali wine one word rather than two, out
of fear that the mention of the word wine on a label would annoy the regulators, because
wines and beers obviously treat it separately.
Then in 1983, was that 70 years later, the Sierra Nevada brewery released a big foot
to Bali wine, becoming only the second Bali wine label in the United States.
With in Britain, it goes back to the 19th century, but in the US, well, it's less than
50 years old, it's really interesting.
Bali wine typically has an ABV of between six to 12%.
The use of the word wine is actually due to its strength, a good proportion of Bali wines
actually have a similar ABV to that of wine, but because it's made from grain rather than
from fruit, it is characterized as a beer.
This distinction blew me away.
My first encounter with the Bali wine was actually only three years ago at a beer festival
in Sheffield, and I had its life gym marked to from the Little Earth project.
And this one was 15.2% ABV, and it was divine, it was so, so nice.
So nice, in fact, I did actually give it a 5.0 on untapped, and I also managed to persuade
a friend of mine to buy me a bottle of it when they made an order with a retailer that
actually sold it.
So, yes, I did enjoy that.
From a brewing perspective, Bali wine is actually quite a difficult beer to produce, and
also very expensive, great amounts of materials, vigilance, and time, their time is said
to be the fifth vital element of Bali wine, malt, hops, water, yeast, and time.
But like it's early cousins of old and strong ails, Bali wine is intended to be stored
with the development of its flavours, sometimes requiring a year or so to mellow.
The alcoholic strength of a Bali wine also prescribes its sale in small glasses, and also
small, it's just how it's just a six ounce bottles, and I presume that's going to be six
US ounces, so that's probably going to be around 200 mil, I would say, but it could be called
a nip bottles.
And nip is a shot, isn't it?
Is that nice?
Yes, nip is called under certain me, I had a drum, you know, we, yeah, 30, 35, 25 if you're
old, right, the old school pubs were forced to actually change them under recent laws,
clubs can still sell quarter-gills, or 35, that's right, but not the bargees.
The sixth, the sixth, the sixth, yeah, yeah, noise, so there are, according to my research,
two primary styles of Bali wine, there's the American style, which tends to be hopier
and therefore a lot more bitter, but the colours tend to range from amber to lighter brown,
and then there's the English style, which tends to be a lot less bitter, and therefore
a lot less hopier, but with a lot more variety in colour, ranging from a ready goldie colour
through to black, it's not just between the British and American styles, but also if you look
at the North American continent, there's quite a wide variety of variations of style from
one side of the continent to the other.
So for example, the barley wines of the west coast of the US are substantially hopier than
the ones you find on the east coast, where British examples of barley wine are noted for
alcoholic and sherry and fortified wine style flavours, a pure bread north westeastern version
is very hoppy, very bitter, and full of aroma. The north-eastern Americans, which it suggests
has a stronger size to the UK brewing traditions and tastes of barley wine, generally produces
a barley wine in a kind of mid-Atlantic style, tending to be more sweet and strong, but with the
additional flavours that you would only get by storing and laying down a bottle for a long period
of time. Now I've got here a couple of quotes from her who I believe are established
beer commentators, as one called Michael Jackson, I don't think it's the singer. He referred to a
barley wine produced by smithics, which was actually brewed in Ireland until 2001 when Guinness,
who owned smithics at the time, decides to kill off that particular brew. He said, it's very distinctive
with an earthy hoppiness, a whiningness, lots of fruit and toffee flavours. I mean, I want some of
that, but I can't, I'm now 25 years too late. But then Martin Cornell, who again, I probably should
find out who he was, is then quoted as saying, there is no historically meaningful difference existing
between barley wines and old ales. He then later clarified, I don't believe there is actually
any such meaningful style as barley wine. I mean, that's rude. Yeah, Martin Cornell was a very
much a purist. Well, I'll maybe give a wee bit more background there. Sorry, I hope I'm not stepping
it over here. But no, no, no, there is reason, the actual original reason you said about old
old and strong ales. The original reason apparently according to Roger Prott's and Martin
Cornell, they both said that barley wine was just purely an invention, a name invention of bass
for the strong old ales. And it was done purely because people were starting to get interested
in French wines. And this was a way to keep them on the beer of Britten, rather than
sampling stuff from across the channel. So it was all they did was the aged the old wine, old
beers, even older. So Martin was very much a, it's not a style, it's a name that bass gave it.
But right, that's apparently the first time although bass had been producing number one since the
1850s, bass didn't actually call it barley wine until 1872. Right, that's the first ever time
is recorded as using the term barley wine. That's interesting. Okay. I'm not so much of a beer
reader at the moment. That will change. I'm sure, particularly as we said, we're going to do
some book reviews as part of this as well. For me, the whole concept of barley wine, you could
probably say that it's just a standard beer that happens to have a higher EBV. I would imagine
I will get a smack around the head for saying stupid things like that, so I'm not going to.
But I'll be honest, having had at least one barley wine consciously, the time will wear of.
I am really, really interested to know what this one that I've got in front of me is going to taste
because the ABV on this one is about half of the one that I mentioned earlier on.
But it's not all about the strength in the alcohol. It's more about how it's made and the
compounds that make it up. What I'll do is I'll end with something else that my research gave me,
which is there is an alternative to barley wine called wheat wine. So it's still made in the same way,
but then a large amount of wheat is added to the mash, creating what is referred to as wheat wine.
And that style actually originated in the United States in the 1980s. So by the same token of the
definition that I gave you a few moments ago that I'm now dissociating myself with, it's basically
it's a strong vise beer. I was going to say that wheat wine is actually German in its origins,
but it was made in the US. There's also a rye wine which I've never been able to get a hold on.
I know what exists, but I have that mess and never, ever been able to get a hold on.
Right. All right. So what did you tell us about your beer then, Kevin?
Oh, well, those of you have listened to this for a while now, we'll know that I am a beer reader.
Unlike my good friend, he had who, but we'll convert him yet. One of the guys who I really
respect as an author is Roger Protz. And I do like the children brewery.
Okay. Yeah. Some familiar with them. They do bodges barley wine. That is a standard barley wine
I've had it before. I like it. But in honor of Roger Protz, they have produced a limited run
of Roger Bodges barley wine. And that's him on the front. Excellent. So this is why I probably will
not be getting this again, because this is probably going to be very limited. I would to be honest,
I was delighted to actually get a bottle of it. So after I drink this, I am not throwing his bottle
away. It's going up there and try to place on the shelf. So this is a Roger Bodges barley wine.
So I'm really looking forward to this. So again, learn my lesson. I'm taking a step back.
Yes. We bit of spray there, but it wasn't it didn't fool me up, thankfully. Right. Oh, okay.
That's good. Oh, no. Quite a light barley wine this one. This must be a totally different
race because that other one is dark. So this must be purely a race before him. So this is that actually
looks a bit darker on the screen there, but it's more an amber light amber. That's a nice colour.
So that is quite a lively head. So I've stopped pouring. It's 8.4% actually not an awful lot of
scent coming from the glass. There is a mild barley note. There's a faint sweetness of kind of
toffee and then there's a grape scent. It's not citrus, but it's like a kind of green grapes.
I can do scent. Hmm. So just noticing, actually, I didn't notice that the first pour, it's not clear.
It does have quite a hazelnut. Cheers. Cheers. Hmm. That's nice. That's far too refreshing. That's
far too drinkable. That's got quite a hobby front end. Hopy front end. Develops into
toffee, not burnt toffee. It's not like a scorch shell. It's like a sweetness of toffee and then
there's something lingering. There's a fruit in it and I'm not quite deciphering what it is.
I'll maybe need to come back to this in a second. After you've probably said it,
I'll probably write, shout it around and fruit. But something better, but it's not citrusy
bitter. Maybe something like passion fruit. It's a passion fruit you know it on the end of that.
It's not a sweet fruit. Hmm. It's not citrus. I think, yeah, so I'm going to put down. So
it's good. Like I said, it's an initial hobbyness. If you were to actually take on the first sip,
you would probably think, you've got an old-fashioned IPA there. Not a session one, not a kind of
I think, but like a dad. Click a whole pool kind of IPA. That can away. Yep. Then it goes to that kind of
kind of toffeeish, sweet toffiness. And then it goes right back to that kind of passion fruit in
it. Oh yeah, that's something that I'm glad it's winter. Because I think if somebody handed me
a bottle of art, without looking at the label in the summer, I could quite easily chuck that down.
Because it's very, very refreshing. That's not a good thing. Well, it is, but it isn't.
Yeah, exactly. Not an 8.4. You don't want it to. You don't want it to be just refreshing as
a lag or something. No, no, probably not. No. So there you go. So I'll sound nicer. It is.
And I'll come back to the score at the end. No matter, I shall let you get to Euro snow.
How could you docus? So I teased this with Kevin before we started recording and he's probably
not got a clue what it is I've got here. I bought this from Biz of Europe before we started
doing the Christmas ails one. So it was probably either very late November or very early December.
And it was the only barley wine they had in stock. Now, bearing in mind for the time of year in which
I bought this, it will not come as too much of a surprise. This is actually a Christmas barley wine
from Richway Brewery in Oxfordshire. I think I know which one this is. You probably do.
I'm not want to to one up somebody. So I'm going to 0.1 up somebody instead. This is 8.5%
ABV. And it is called criminally bad elf. Noticing notes on the bottle at all. But actually,
it is incredibly clear that almost look at what you've been seeing through it. Almost like a
logger in terms of transparency. But let me pop the core on this and we'll see what we've got.
That's very sweet. I'll be very honest. I don't know what I'm smelling for.
But again, this is very, very sweet. There's actually a similarity here to some
loggers. And I don't mean that any disparaging whey either because there are some
loggers that as you smell a lot nice and they taste. I can't discern anything specific
from this at all. So I'm going to pour it and see if I get something else once it's poured into
the glass. And I'm getting the whole bottle as well. Oh, that is a beautiful color. It's almost
kind of an orangey pink. So again, we've both gone for a lighter and barley wines. I mean,
as you said, barley wines can be practically black like a stout or they can be really
kind of the light amber. No, I'm really not getting anything out of this. So what what would
the sweet but the sweet is becoming from the barley? See it depends. I mean, there'll be relatively
high sugars and as well. Doris, the stuff has become high sugard. Just to get the the alcohol
part. So that could be part of it. If British ones would rarely infuse them with fruit. It's
just more a fruity taste to get off it. You can actually something maybe we didn't mention. I've
noticed that if you go to like our Eastern Eastern Europe place, I think Estonia as a place where
I've had the most they tend to have barley wines that are quite fruity but the fruits added. It's
made from fruit. The fruit is added and you get like a plum barley wine or a peach barley wine.
It's a the polliala brewery there from Estonia and I'm sure I've also had one from
a round kind of Ukraine, Georgia that kind of way. I've had one from them and the person it was quite
strong fruity as well. But they were definitely darker barley wines. Right. Right. Okay.
Well, let's give this us wagons to see what we've got. That is incredibly bitter. Oh, what was
that? Oh, that's that's really odd. So it is very bitter. Possibly more bitter than I would like.
But weirdly, once the bitterness passes, it leaves behind quite a sweet post taste but all I've
got now that that's gone. It is just the the immense bitterness. Now I can't measure bit bitterness
to a scale that would fit anybody else because everybody's taste works differently. But I am
very much aware of actually got two more bottles of this to go through and I'm not too sure about it.
I'll be honest. Oh, well, I've got one in the cupboard which I haven't had yet and yet despite all
of that, I really do like this. Oh, that's good. There's not a lot going on in it. It doesn't seem
to have much character. Yes, yes, there is a sweetness but I can't articulate where that sweetness
comes from. There's a bitterness that seems like it's more than just the hops that's providing
it. So I don't know whether there's some other essence or or something that's making the bitterness
appear more harsh than it actually should be. But there is zero fruitiness in this at all. There's
no fruity flavours for a tea or fruitier roamers. It doesn't really smell anything much now. Oh,
that's a bit of a shame. Now one thing that's I've always found in Barney wines is
because it's a slow, long developing one. They're different in the stout and that you never get
anything like coffee or toastiness. You know, like I said, there was toffee in it but it wasn't
burnt toffee. It wasn't like a burnt toasted caramel. And that's one thing they will generally
despite their age, despite their strength. Be a bit more mellow compared to the likes of an imperial
state, you know, which is compatible, you know, in ABV. So you tend to find that a lot of them are quite
mellow. Going back to bass again, bass number one. Apparently the original one two three four five
it was purely based on number one was the strongest number five was the least strong. It wasn't
actually chronological order, but they released it. And there was one thing actually made to
say just to correct you slightly. It's not that I'm correcting you, you know. But there's a weak caveat.
Sure, weak caveat. We asked for a skier. They still producing it in 95 caveat. You can actually
still get it. If you go and do the bass brewery tour, they still have that as what you go
around. They are doing bass number one, barley wine. And you can get it on the tour. You can get
a pint of it. And that's the only place you can get it. They don't export it outside of the brewery.
Right. And I'm assuming here this is one they've made recently, not 25 plus years out. No, no,
this is one that they do brew it. Apparently they brew it. I can't confirm this. I've just read it.
But apparently they brew it in like the old fashioned style of brewing. So it's much
smaller. So that's the reason they only produce smaller amounts. So you're going around and you're
actually seeing the old fashioned brewing happening, brewing happening. And then at the end, you can
buy a pint of it if you want. But again, I'm just not not sure how to interpret this one. It's
not disgusting. But it's also not one that I would necessarily push people out of the way to get to
the front of the queue to buy it. Let me read you what it says on the front of the bottle.
Where it says 8.5% alcohol by volume it then says barley wine style L. Oh, okay. That was maybe
that's that meaning of the thing. Well, it's not a barley wine. It's a barley wine style. So I'll tell
you what that probably means is that it's not been aged. That's probably explains why you could
the bitterness or it's not been aged as long as a barley wine would be. All right. So
go back to your beer then. How would you score? Where would I put this? It's very good. I would
like the nose to be a bit more pronounced. The nose is very, very much kind of mooted. The flavors.
I mean, for me personally, I would like a barley wine a bit sweeter. But that does I'm not going
to knock that down. It's not that style of barley wine. As one thing you probably noticed when Dave
was talking about, but we didn't talk about the profile very much because barley wines don't
actually have an official profile. They just have to be aged for over a year. That's actually the
definition of the barley wine. So I'm going to score this and 8.5. 8.5 for the team. Okay.
I'm liking that. Like 8.5. That's good. So as far as minus concerned, I have a
quantity. I've learned over the years. I'm actually your partially to take the credit for this
penny. It's not just about whether you like the flavour a bit because there are some beers that
don't taste particularly nice. You still enjoy them. A lot of the the alcoholic drinks that I consume.
You couldn't say, oh, I like that. It tastes amazing because most whiskeys, you're like,
doesn't taste amazing. However, what I do enjoy is the experience and what it's telling me.
I have to rate this based on that because this doesn't taste very subtle. So I'm basing it on the
experience. So when you're rating something, if it makes you go, ooh, then that's above the average.
And I think for me, this has made me go, ooh, because I've stopped and I've thought and I've
considered what I'm actually getting from this beer. The fact that it's really bitter, I'm not
going to market down because that maybe what it was intended. It doesn't tell you, unfortunately,
it doesn't help. But I think that maybe what it was intended to be. So I'm going to start at 7
and a half, but I'm going to knock it down to 7 purely on the basis that it doesn't taste of much.
But the experience of it, the fact that it's bitter, the fact that it's made me react to the
bitterness. I'm taking that as a positive. Does that make sense? Yes, I think so. So I'm going to,
I'm going to say 7 out of 10 for this. Well, so there we have it then. That's our
barley wine or in my case, barley wine style. Star review. No, before we go, Ken actually said to
me on the last community news that he would like us to announce the next style that we're doing,
so that people who don't want to listen and actually enjoy it with us can. And I thought,
okay, I never actually thought of that, but that's probably not a bad show. That's a great idea.
Can you remember what it is? Yes, it is. The Scotchale or we have it depending on what you want to
call it. It's they're both interchangeable names. It's the same drink. So Scotchale or we have it.
Notice I said Scotch, not Scottish. Yes, it is Scottish, but specifically Scotchale and we
heavy mean the same thing. So yeah, so that's what we've been looking at in the next few weeks.
Thank you very much indeed for listening. If you've got any comments, please leave them on the page
on Hackerpubby Radio for this episode. And of course, please feel free to record your own review
of a beer style as part of the Hackerpubby Radio beer garden. This is not just us. It is a,
I don't project for anybody within the community to contribute to. Absolutely. And the other
thing that we haven't had now, we while as a recommendation. So we've got the next few shows set up,
but please do give us your recommendations for beer styles that you would like us to look at.
Indeed. So then, join us tomorrow for another exciting episode of Hackerpubby Radio.
You have been listening to the Hacker Public Radio podcast, at hackerpublicradio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording a podcast, then visit the HPR site to find out how easy it really is.
Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by anhonesthost.com, the Internet Archive, rsync.net, and the HPR Community Content Delivery Network.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
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Episode: 4566
Title: HPR Community News for January 2026
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4566/hpr4566.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:14:04 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4566, for 2026-02-02
Today's show is entitled, "HPR Community News for January 2026"
The host is HPR Volunteers and the duration is 00:55:13
The flag is Explicit, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "HPR Volunteers talk about shows released and comments posted in January 2026"
Hi everybody, my name is Ken Fallon. I'm here all by myself doing the HPR Community News for January 2026.
Everybody's probably all talked out after the New Year show.
And thanks to everybody who was involved in putting that show on and who came on to say hi.
This is the Community News for January 2026 and HPR is a community podcast where the shows are produced by the community.
For the community and by the community.
And this is the Community News show which is usually recorded on the Friday before the first Monday of the month.
And we record it on a Friday so we have time to process it and send it out. More about that later on in this episode.
So first things that we do is welcome our new hosts and I'm thrilled to say we've had two new hosts.
Jim DeVore and Carmen LeSyndrette.
So let's go through the shows that were aired last month so we can read out some of the comments and give some feedback.
The first episode that we had was 4544 and it was on the Thursday the 1st.
Uncommon Commands Episode 2 by Delta Ray.
Some of the commands here were MTR, SCROT and ZLESS for example.
MTR is one I'd come across before, haven't used it as much, prompted me to do so for tracing routes on the network.
So it's a network scanner.
Then we have SCROT which is a minimal command line screen capturing application.
Something that I will be definitely using and something I use all the time is ZLESS.
So fantastic tools, links in the shows there.
And there were no comments on that episode.
The next episode was from the Reserve Queue and it was YouTube Submissions Part 12.
And no surprises here for us.
There was no comments either but NASA, SCIENCE and the Beatles featured heavily in this one.
I am enjoying these subscriptions.
Then we had the Community News show itself and we had some feedback on that from Archer72.
Nuclear Reactor series, hi all, a show with Whiskeyjack as Homer Simpson and on the Beer Garden series would be interesting I'm sure.
Cheers, clink, says Archer.
Henry Cameron says Linux, nice Community News as usual, thanks for this one.
Kevi says that to encourage someone to migrate to the Linux desktop, it's best to start to use software available on Linux already when on the other desktops.
Then the hurdle to step over to the Linux OS will be relatively low.
Good advice.
Absolutely.
That is correct.
Then we had part six of the cheap yellow display project, the speed and timing of Morse.
And this is one where Trey is making a Morse practice tool from a cheap yellow display.
And this is a fantastic explanation to the timing of Morse, which has always confused me.
Absolute must episode for listening and why Paris, the word Paris appears so often in the timings.
Great episode there.
Makes me pity I can't put it into the Ham Radio series as well, as it's got its own series now.
YouTube subscriptions part 13, another of Ahooka's emergency shows, coming from the reserve queue.
Civilisations, Space again, some history stuff and more about the Beatles.
Quite a good episode.
There we have it.
The following day, just checking to make sure there are no comments on that, and there were none.
This one, there were also no comments on deprecated Promodoro task tool.
So this was a little timer script that Kendi Kinator sent in, telling himself to take a break and when the break was over.
Nice use of loops and stuff in there.
It's interesting to see other people's way of formatting episodes.
So Civilisation part 7 of Civilisation 5 by Ahooka was on the next day, Computer Strategy Games.
In this case, he was chasing down a science victory.
And it's nice to see him walk through this.
Fantastic explanations.
And the show notes are very detailed, taken from his blog.
There was one comment in the following episode, Elisabeth, Elisabeth, sorry, in IT since 97 part 2, where Lee and Elisabeth talk about their experience as a woman in IT.
There was one comment by operator, white male.
Not that anybody cares about the angle of a white male, but I did an episode on some of the stuff.
Let me know if I can help in any way.
Anyway, I was thinking about this episode today, actually.
It's one of these impactful episodes on how lucky I was to have a career where there was a nice balance of male and females.
It gives a completely different picture when you're working in a male-only environment.
So, the following day, we had Printer Conspiracy by Mr. X.
Is it possible that there is an Epson Print Driver Conspiracy?
And KandikaNature7 says,
From what I've heard online, printers infamously have tons of issue with wasting link and forcing vendor lock-in.
So, I would not be surprised if the official drivers do intentionally destroy output to force you to on the upgrade thread mill.
The next one was from Whiskeyjack Nuclear Reactors Part 4 The Less Common Types of Reactors.
And this series is gaining a lot of traction also on the Mastodons and in other locations.
And it was great to hear an explanation of some words that you hear going past,
give you a little bit more depth into the type of reactors and how they work.
Jim DeVore sent in an episode on how he manages his personal to-do lists.
Daytimers, Palm Pilot, Ginger Trevani's to-do list, etc, etc, etc.
Links in the show notes.
Brian in Ohio says,
Welcome. Great show. I'll have to try it out.
And KandikaNature says,
Good first show.
I think this is really a good first show.
And the way you covered it was pretty cool.
I used Task Warrior from mine, which I covered in another episode.
Then we had, slightly late, Belgian Christmas Ales from the Beer Garden 8.
And it was interesting how the Belgian beer actually originated in Scotland.
But I won't ruin it too much.
I would advise you to go listen to the show.
Even if you're not a huge big alcohol drinking fan.
I think the history around the beers is one of the things I enjoy the most about this.
There was one comment from Carl Duttec.
Christmas Ale.
In the States, several breweries have Christmas Ales.
My favourite is Old Fizzwig Ale.
Not very spicy.
Malty.
Has a chewy quality.
Thanks for the show.
Then we had Nitro Man.
RC cars.
Where Operator talks about Nitro RC cars.
And there was a comment on Mastodon.
I think it was from Kevi or somebody.
Where they said that I'm glad I got the background on this.
Because it's so expensive.
I'm glad I don't get into it.
But one of these episodes where I really got pulled in by what he was doing.
So much so that I had to turn it off for a while.
Because I was making something in the shed.
And then I had to turn it back on again.
So great episode.
Well done, Operator.
So from down under.
Or a little left of down under.
We have Tlaatu with Why I Prefer Tar to Zip.
And this is basically a rundown of why Tlaatu prefers Tar to Zip.
Tar being a Swiss Army knife.
And Zip being a one trick pony.
Candy Canater says.
Interesting experiment.
I never realised that Tar compressed files are better at compressing than Zip files.
In my humble opinion it's more a mentality thing.
Like Tar is literally just a series of files stitched together with some headers.
Meaning it makes a lot more sense to apply a single file compressor to it.
Than something that is already applying some level of compression.
There's also a bit of a compatibility issue.
Since most non-technical users don't know what a Tar file is.
Or even what a Zip file is.
So Zip is the lowest common denominator.
On that note.
I think looking at 7-Zip would be an interesting experiment.
Which is newer and more well known.
And from the reserve queue we had YouTube subscriptions part 14.
And this is from Ahuka.
Some history stuff here.
Many of which I am following.
The Great War.
And we also had some science.
And of course some Beatles in there as well.
I chucked in a show here that I'd just decided to do because it was a free slot.
And it was about some offline translator tools that you can use without having to go online.
And Claudio M says.
Just what I needed.
Looks like you uploaded this episode the day after I was looking for a solution like this.
Thank you for the episode.
I gave Local Translate a go.
Though I would prefer something that I could install outside of a flat pack.
And would run on the BSDs as well.
NMW says.
Great recommendation.
I was chatting on Mastodon and was directed to this episode.
Great one.
I have downloaded and tried out the Android app.
And it works as you described.
They all have all the big glamwages I would need and want.
Just brilliant.
Thanks for this episode.
The following day we had.
Ahuka with Arcee Clark's other works.
Some of which I had never heard of.
And weren't familiar with.
A Time Odyssey.
And Tales from Whiteheart.
Joseph Jorkins.
Etc.
Etc.
Etc.
Links in the show notes.
And full details in the show notes as well.
I know people are also enjoying these.
Seeing them on the Mastodon comments as well.
Then we had the first show by Carmen.
Welcome Carmen.
Thank you very much for sending in this episode.
And this sounds like a fantastic little project.
Mission Libra.
Getting 14.
11 to 14 year olds involved in free software.
Always kind of a difficult age.
And there's a new Libra PDF.
Links in the show notes.
Very well done.
Very cool looking.
You can just print it out.
And you're ready to rock.
So have a look at that.
Henry Cameron says happy to learn about the project.
First welcome as a host here on HPR.
And interesting and encouraging to learn and hear about more.
More about Mission Libra.
Which is new to me.
Best wishes to you and your mission.
Candy Canater says.
Cool project.
This seems like a promising project.
I think you explained it well.
Despite it being your first episodes.
Best of luck.
Then we had another episode from Clat2.
Making the valid point.
That software development doesn't end until it's packaged.
Creating installable packages for your application.
Is a great quality assurance step.
So it actually brings out quite a lot of points.
There were no comments on this episode.
Checking for consistency.
Looking for dependencies and stuff.
So it's basically a free quality control step that you can get.
Following day we had fast reactors.
Again from Whiskeyjack.
And this time we were talking about fast versus slow neutrons.
Burners versus feeders.
Etc etc.
NMW says.
Great series.
I'm enjoying and looking forward to the rest of the series.
Do you think the US will ever wake up and start recycling its spent fuel?
It seems like a huge waste just to try and keep a small amount of fuel away from the bad guys.
Or whatever they're imagining.
And then we had a response from Whiskeyjack himself saying.
Spent fuel from civil nuclear power plants is not suitable for making nuclear weapons.
As it has the wrong proportions of plutonium isotopes.
Plutonium comes in isotopes just like virtually all other heavy elements.
And weapons requires a high percentage of one specific isotope.
Which you don't get from spent civil fuel.
Weapons grade plutonium is made in military reactors which are designed for that purpose.
And the fuel is rapidly cycled through to minimize the buildup of undesired, for nuclear purposes, isotopes.
As such, there is no direct connection between recycling commercial fuel, I covered a number of different recycling techniques in one episode, and nuclear weapons.
I don't live in the US, but is there a public perception that there is such a connection?
Then it is likely this is a result of misconception about the nature of the different isotopes of plutonium.
The main reason that most countries don't bother with recycling spent fuel is that once through the fuel cycle is cheaper.
Most countries that do recycle fuel do so mainly for the reasons of national security of energy supply.
They simply wish to minimize the uranium imports by reusing fuels they already have.
The secondary reason is to reduce the amount of high level waste that must be stored by burning up the fissile isotopes of plutonium in a reactor.
Much of the long-lived part of nuclear waste is simply fissile isotopes of plutonium which can be reused in the reactor as fuel.
If enough people have questions on this series, including topics that I have not covered, post them as comments on the HBR, and I will be willing to do a follow-up episode covering those after the end of this series.
Well, you heard that there, folks. You know what to do. Put your comments over here, and then we'll get even more episodes.
We had another episode by Archer72 about MKV and a proprietary application to burn Blu-rays, and it didn't work.
So he had to jump through a few loops to get it working here on how to download an older version.
And then, we have episode, let me just check, were there any comments? In other words, no comments on the Make MKV episode.
On the Barley Wine episode, which is the last episode of the month, Dave and Kevi talked about Barley Wines, and as luck would have it, I actually happened to have a bottle myself about Barley Wines.
And it was interesting, again, I keep saying it, about the history of the different types of beers, and how relatively new some of this stuff is in the swing of things.
So, as luck would have it, I happened to have a Barley Wine in the fridge, and yeah, I could take it or leave it, to be honest with you.
Mostly, I would probably leave it. That would be my summary of Barley Wines.
But, as Dave says, it's about the experience of doing it, going through it, the taste, and the experience, rather than liking it.
So, nice one there.
So, that was all the shows. We moseyed through them pretty quick.
Then we have some of the comments for previous episodes.
And the first one was on one I made, on why I made a one-episode podcast about a war story.
And there were a few spam comments on this one.
So much so that I almost, almost improved them, but I didn't.
So, well done to the person who did that, and I've now been thinking of a few more ways to stop spammers getting through.
So, well done you.
And as I said before, if any spammers want to record an episode, feel free to do so.
Then we had a comment on how I use Newsboat for podcasts and Reddit by Archer72.
This was back in July 2017.
And that was the link to the bug that I opened last month about HPR not having the download format.
Archer72 replies back saying, for short-term use, use download format filename and forces an MP3 file at the end using Newsboat and gives the configuration file in there.
This one turns out to be quite a complicated little issue, actually.
And I'll just open the bug real quick.
Some podcast aggregators show cdn.php as the filename.
Now, you can try using content disposition as a header, which we've tried, and that doesn't work.
The reason that doesn't work is because the underlying libraries need to support it.
And I realized during this week, because I'm following curl and masternull,
that the content distribution header has just been added to curl now and needs to be rolled out.
So our options are we can use Apache to redirect traffic, Apache redirect.
Now, the issue with that, though, is that then all the traffic will be routed through AnonymousTools.com servers,
completely defeating the purpose of what we're trying to do here.
What we're trying to do is spread the load so that if we have distributed community content delivery network,
say we have 10 different servers around the world, we don't have that.
But if you do have a server, say you've got a, in my case, I've got a fiber connection with a gigabit Ethernet fiber connection.
And on top of that, connected to that, I've got a small, low-powered PC with a 4TB hard disk.
And I can serve all the files from there using just Apache, straight Apache files, or Nginx or some other server.
It doesn't really matter.
But if we want to, say, redirect traffic all over to different hosts on the Internet,
then we don't want it going back through the central node because we don't want all the bandwidth costs coming on AnonymousHost.com.
The majority of the bandwidth costs are from the media, as you can imagine.
So what we could do is, and I was talking to some of the guys at work and the platform and the content distribution team as well.
And so it's a bit of a puzzle because it's not normally what they come across.
So the other option will be to change the feeds in the RSS so that it gets a full feed to the server in my house.
And then the next one will be to the server in the U.S.
And the next one will be to the Internet Archive.
The thing is, if you do that round-robin, you need to maintain a sort of a hash of the people's IP addresses.
And if you do that round-robin and somebody's IP address changes, which happens all the time,
then you would end up re-downloading the episodes.
So that's not ideal either.
So the best way to do it would be to have a DNS entry.
And just straight entry like hub ccdn.hackerpublicradio.org for sashing the path to the file.
And that lookup would go to my server, and the next time it would be Rhone's server, and the next time it would be US server.
But the only way that that can work is if all the files are everywhere, and that the path is consistent everywhere as well.
So we have a bit of work to do there because some of the hosts only host the MP3 files and not the FLAC and the WAV files.
And also the Internet Archive, which we're slowly migrating from, has a different file naming structure than what we're using.
So that was that.
That was a bit of a puzzle.
But if we get enough people contributing nodes to the content distribution network, say four nodes,
I need an additional two or three nodes, then we could do that.
We would have enough redundancy that we could host everything everywhere and then just redirect people to those hosts, and that would fix that problem.
Otherwise, it's like podcatcher by podcatcher that you need to fix the file name extension, so it's not linked to us.
Okay, that's a huge, big, huge, big detour there.
I also put a comment in to Trey's episode on GPL-loaded displays, and I remember when I heard this that I was a bit disappointed that there was no free Libra open source graphic display thing.
And so I say, possible graphics library, having done zero research, I submit a link I got from Hackaday.
Roo display is a feature-rich, easy-to-use library intended for building smart home and similar controllers with graphical UI and optionally touch controls,
with a link to the Hackaday link and a link to the GitHub where you can get Roo display, which is D-E-J-W-K, Delta Echo, Juliet, Whiskey, Kilo, Roo display.
So that was that.
And welcome to the Linux community by Delta Ray.
Archer74 says, re-talk by command line magic.
Hey, Moorhook, quite a variety of subjects that would sound great on a recording or three.
Cheers, Archer72.
This is, Moorhook did a comment there about other tools like Gemini, CLI and Cloud Code, etc.
So asking for episodes as he should.
Kevin O'Brien, giving some feedback to Reactor Basics episode three, saying,
really enjoying this episode and saying,
I find I'm looking forward to each installment of this series.
Well done.
So that was it.
Let's mosey over to the mail list and have a look for the thread in this month.
So we have a comment from Vance and it says,
Hi there, I'm new to HPR and have been inspired by the presentation Murph gave at OLF conference a few months ago about contributing.
I started listening to some episodes and get to get the feel of things before trying to record myself.
I noticed that there seems to be an inconsistency in how licensing is presented.
The website is very clear that the Creative Commons attribute to share alike international licenses default and metadata in the audio I downloaded.
It likewise references CC by SA.
Discussions in HPR episode 4538 about the outro also states the license is CC by SA.
However, the actual outro voiceover instead states that the license is Creative Commons Attribution International,
aka CC by, lacking the share-like requirement, which is a different license.
Is this intentional or an oversight?
From an outsider's perspective, it seems like the latter, but perhaps there's a reason.
I know licensing isn't a fun topic and I'm sorry, I'm the one starting this conversation.
To which I reply, Hi Vance, welcome.
Sad to hear, sad to say that you're wrong.
Licensing is a fun topic and a very important one.
Our approach is detailed here on a link to the branding page.
Also sad to say that you're right, there is a bug in the outro.
Well spotted.
I opened an issue on it, issue two.
I contacted our voiceover department and will record it at the first opportunity.
Thanks for the link to Murph's video from OLF.
Amazing, this is not a HPR episode.
Fantastic to get the experience from somebody else using the site.
Food for thought on how to improve it there.
To answer the question about transcriptions,
this was not in the comments, this was in the video.
If you upload an SRT file with the same name as your show, we will automatically use that.
For example, if your episode is Murph underscore talk underscore at underscore olf dot flack,
then you would run whisper space and the Murph underscore talk dot flack space dash dash language space English space dash dash output underscore format space SRT.
And that will produce an SRT file and then you can upload that with the script and we'll just use it automatically.
So that's what's that.
And then I respond back saying we have a new outro recorded and ready for the next episode.
See what I did there.
And Vance replies,
Thanks so much for the quick turnaround on the outro and the information about the uploading transcript.
Perhaps you can convince Murph to turn this presentation into an HPR episode.
I can't speak for the whole OLF team, but it would surprise me if we would have a problem with him using the audio from the YouTube stream in the event he doesn't want to make a new recording.
He can work out the details with us.
And then I had the sad task of announcing to the community that K5 Tux Russ from the Linux in the Hamshack passed away and I supplied some links to that.
Claudio M says,
Wow, I lost touch with him years ago, but I remember meeting him in person at Self 2021.
My condolences to his family.
I left a message on his wife Cheryl's page, passing on our condolences from the HPR community.
And Klaatu says,
K5 Tux was such a great guy.
He'll be sorely missed.
I saw him often at OLF and Self and was hoping to see him at a St. Louis convention.
He was trying to get off the ground.
I think I designed the logo involving the gateway arch at some point.
He was a really nice guy.
Gave me lots of tips about Linux and sometimes life in general.
Klaatu.
Okay, there was a discussion on Telegram about the reserve queue and I asked Kevi and Dave to put it onto the main channel.
I don't think I was clear enough to them about what I, why I wanted that.
But, okay, it is what it is.
In response to another of Ahooka's fantastic YouTube subscription episodes being released from the reserve queue, Kevi said on Telegram.
And this is Dave Lee from the Love Bug posting.
Kevi said,
Whilst I enjoy these shows, it's a shame that we are seeing another one being released.
Personally, I think the shows from the reserve queue are being released too early.
Reserve queue episodes go in to fill a gap one week before release,
which means that another one will go in the queue from next Thursday,
if someone doesn't submit show 4564 by tomorrow.
I wonder if the role from the reserve queue has evolved into something that removes the criticality of submission.
Because, for as long as there are episodes in the reserve queue,
there will never be a gap in the next five weekdays.
Of course, once the reserve queue starts to empty, then there will be major panic.
But I think it's often the fact that there are empty slots in the next day or two that spurs hosts into action.
It's all about optics.
If it looks like there are episodes posted, where is the urgency?
Thoughts?
And Klaatu chimes in.
I think you're making an interesting point, Dave.
I wonder if scheduling could be opt-in, for example.
What if we could contribute an episode and leave it to fate to find the time for it to run?
But when you have a specific date in mind, like May the 4th for those clever Star Wars episodes and so on,
then you have the option to define a specific date.
In other words, everything goes into the reserve queue by default and posts on a first-in, first-out basis,
unless the contributor chooses to override the reserve and gaps are available date.
He goes on.
Or maybe psychology of seeing available days prompt more contributions,
and a big bucket of reserve shows doesn't have the same effect.
I understand that part of the structure of contribution is about tricking our brain into feeling urgency about contributing.
I respect that and benefit from it, probably.
John Spring says,
I must confess I wasn't bothered by when my two episodes were playing,
so I just put them into the reserve queue.
One of them still hasn't made it out yet,
and the first one played almost immediately because I was a new host.
Mark Rice says,
The opt-in idea might work.
Also, it might help, as Dave implies,
to release the shows from the reserve two to three days before we run out.
Okay, and then I go into what I didn't intend to be a rant, but apparently is a rant.
Anyway, I would like to take some time to thank, this is me,
I'd like to take time to thank Kevi and Dave for moving the conversation from the mail list.
The response brings up several points that I would like to address.
Reserve queue.
I'm glad to have the opportunity to discuss how the reserve queue is going.
The rationale of using the reserve queue is not new and was discussed by Dave Morris on the July billing-free slots from the reserve queue.
I go into more detail about the mechanics behind this in HBR 4195, Hacking HBR hosts.
Too long, didn't read.
It is that we use it as a mechanism to control the unstable nature of submissions versus the stable nature of postings.
And then I go on to quote Kevi's comment about,
Here, Kevi and others before him see shows coming from the reserve queue as a failure.
This is not the case.
We needed extra shows, so we took them from the reserve queue.
This is the system working exactly as it was supposed to do.
And in response to Dave saying,
I think it's often the fact that there are empty slots in the next day or two that spurs hosts into actions.
I reply saying,
The statement is predicated on the assumption that hosts monitor the queue and act once it is empty.
This is not the case.
We have had 51 times where the queue was so low that we needed to issue a call for shows.
In 2013, there was one.
2014, 12.
2015, 2.
2016, 6.
2017, 2.
2018.
And 2019, 3 each.
2020, 2.
2021, there was 5 call for shows.
2022, there was 10 call for shows.
2023, there was 4 call for shows.
And in 2024 and 2025, there were no calls for shows.
Who reading this, or even listening to this, can tell me now, without checking, when the next free slot is.
Not many, given that the calendar page is only being accessed by less than 200 unique IP addresses this month.
Many of those IP addresses are suspiciously in the same IP assignment range.
As in, it's 1, then 2, then 3, then 4.
Anyway, my feeling is that most common case for opening up the page is when you already have recorded a show and you're looking for the next free slot.
There are, of course, those people who engage in the unhealthy practice of tracking the queue.
At any given time, there may be one or two hosts who feel the responsibility to rush in a show to fill empty slots.
This is not good for HPR listeners.
This is not good for HPR, as listeners complain about too many shows from a particular host, or the quality of the rush shows was poor.
Worse, it's not good for the hosts in question, as it creates a never-ending, unnecessary stress on what should be an enjoyable project.
Just a side note, I am the first one.
In fact, I'm the one who's most susceptible to this because I'm constantly checking the queue, which is actually, in hindsight, which is why I only check the queue on a Friday.
Because then it's one day a week that you do it.
Okay, back to the comment.
Over the years, I have had to advise several hosts to stop looking at the queue, as it can become addictive.
If any host has submitted a show in a given year, all calls to action no longer apply to you.
Okay, back to the chart.
In the chart above, you may ask, if the reserve queue was so brilliant, why did the problems persist after 2022?
So, 2022, there were still calls after it, and there were four calls in the following year.
So, if you've ever had to deal with network congestion, you will know that at some point you'll need to signal back to the source, either to slow down or speed up.
In our case, we signaled back to the hosts to speed up by sending out a call for shows to the mail list.
Now, a mail list outage in 2023, in July of 2023, made me realise that a call for shows only reaches the 214 people on the mailing list, which is a small subset of the HPR listeners.
So, any episode gets maybe 10,000, 8,000 to 10,000 downloads, and a tiny link of the active subscribers, which is 130,000.
So, we're missing a large number of existing, and more importantly, potential hosts.
From then on, I added the warning, you are listening to our show from the reserve queue.
We are airing it now because we have free slots that were not filled.
This is a community of projects that need listeners to contribute shows in order to survive.
Please consider recording a show for Hacker Public Radio.
I'm happy to say that at least five new hosts have reported that they've joined HPR specifically because they heard the show from the reserve queue.
Therefore, I believe we should keep the urgency where it belongs, out in the open, spurring people who have never contributed to do so.
If the project cannot continue without intense intervention from a small subset of hosts, then we should wind it up as it's no longer functioning as a community podcast.
So, basically, it's not a community thing.
It's just a core of central people releasing episodes.
Choice of scheduling.
This is Klaatu's dump everything into the reserve queue thing.
Again, I say this is not the first time that this was discussed and we support it already.
The very first option on the upload page is add to the reserve queue.
Post your show to the reserve queue if you don't care when it will be released.
Only after that are hosts given the option to pick a slot.
We do require that hosts put their first show in the main queue so that they get issued with a host ID in the database.
But, other than that, we do what you want to do today.
And, in the case of John Spriggs there, I posted the show on his behalf to the next available slot.
With his permission, obviously.
Just on a side note, if people want to subscribe to the shows as they're posted without having to wait for them to be released,
there's also a link on the subscription page, hackerpublicradio.org, rss-future.php, into your podcatchers of choice.
Okay, and then we go on to the actual topic of Dave's point about the reserve queue that posted them on Thursdays too early for next week.
And, I say, you have a point.
During the weekend, I fill the free slots that were not filled in the next week.
This means that, in practice, there may not be a free slot available in the next seven days.
The question is, what's a reasonable time to call it?
I post a reserve show in that free slot.
In my experience, excluding the queue watchers, it's very unlikely that somebody will rush in and fill a free slot, let alone multiple.
Over one-third of the reserve shows posted have been in weeks that there were multiple free slots available.
We need to have such a large delay due to the nature of HPR versus other podcasts that have control of their entire workflow.
And, what I mean by that is, if you're recording a podcast, say, the New World Order or whatever, you're recording it, maybe you're doing an interview with somebody else, you have control over both sides, you listen to the audio.
If there's a problem, you can go back immediately and get somebody to re-record it, you put it together, you upload it.
It's your big thing.
That's not the way with HPR.
We have a lot of issues.
And, I'll list just some of them.
For example, missing audio.
Slots kept open without posting.
Invalid links to the audio.
No permission on the link given to get the audio.
The link turns out to be a tar zip file requiring manual posting and hackery.
The audio for the wrong episode.
Audio with missing sections.
Audio with copyrighted content.
Audio with no show notes.
Audio that breaks FFmpeg or socks.
Audio that is in Audible and requires fixing by Audiophonic.
Audio that's actually an image.
An image that's actually an audio.
Show notes in HTML that is actually markdown.
Show notes in HTML that is actually rendered HTML code.
Show notes in format of your choice.
Show notes that contain UTF-A characters not supported by MSQL.
Show notes that refer to sites but there's no show notes there.
Show notes that refers to show notes but they're not licensed CC by SA.
Show notes with broken links.
Show notes saying there were no show notes.
Show notes with misspellings.
Show notes with breaks and images.
Show notes that refer to images but contain none.
Show notes that are just images.
Broken libraries for audio, transcripts, images, subtitles, metadata, pandoc, internet archive being done due to DDoS.
Internet archive bugs with their API.
Honesthost.com migration are running out of disk space on rsync.net.
And since I sent this out another one where a host sent in an image and the image broke the extraction tool because there was an embedded thumbnail in that.
That host was me.
And on the same episode that I sent in we had a holdup on the internet archive where the workflow stopped and I had to log in and restart the workflow over there.
And that cleared it after an hour or two.
And then we go on to say not to mention anything that involves the auditors.
Each and every one of these things cause a delay.
While I can fix some myself, some just have to wait for the service to be up or for me to come up with a workaround.
But by far the biggest delay is getting in touch with the hosts.
If you have a question tonight, I can expect an answer tomorrow and then at least a day to wait for a fix.
And only then is it resolved.
And in some cases the fix may need another fix, etc.
And it can go back and forth, can extend to weeks.
Waiting to the last minute to post the show means there is not time to resolve any given issue when they arise.
The situation is actually made worse when somebody has just picked a slot.
As then they need to get the auditors and or the list involved to release it.
That may take days to come to consensus when urgent action may need to be taken immediately.
And we saw that previously with somebody who was trolling us taking advantage of the summer period to mess around with shows like that.
So I go on to say posting to the reserve show can also close to the deadline can also be problematic if there are issues with it because the host needs to be available to deal with episodes that were authored a year ago.
So what I mean by that is if you dump everything into the reserve queue, they're not processed immediately.
They don't have a number.
They're not an episode.
They're just sitting there in limbo.
And any of the errors and bugs and issues that there are with them remain there and will not be fixed until I process them.
And if we're saying the first in, first out into the queue, then I can't post another episode because that episode needs to be fixed first.
So that host needs to be contacted and that host maybe have changed their email address, which has happened also quite often with the host might not be available, might be on vacation.
Who knows? And yet our queue is held up.
So lots of lots of issues around posting shows that we don't actually go into a lot of detail with.
But, you know, if you want, thankfully, Dave used to do this and I didn't need to bother with it.
But now I'm having to deal with it quite a lot.
So, OK, before we spend a lot of time on this, can I ask if this is a real issue people have faced?
The reason I'm asking is because we come up against this during normal operation all the time, even when there is not a reserve show posted.
So has anybody ever posted a show to a slot that was occupied by a reserve show?
Then, as soon as I said that, I realised I could probably have phrased all of that a lot better.
But anyway, I replied to the mail list saying,
As there was no response to this thread, I'm worried that the tone of the email may have offended some people.
If that's the case, I would like to unreservedly apologise.
It is definitely not meant to criticise or attack in any way.
When I get a question, I feel the need to give a detailed answer as to why it's been done the way it is.
But are the assumptions correct if we've already tried something or not?
This should never be done in a way that will alienate anyone in the community.
Everything we do should have a reason, and if it's not working, we should change it.
All the issues I pointed out below have happened since the start of the project,
and I, as much as anyone else, have done them.
I'm sure Dave Morris will testify to that.
My only intention in listing them was to explain why there can be a delay in posting the shows.
And as far as tracking the queue goes, I am and was the number one offender there as well.
I'd appreciate it.
People would call me out on stuff like that when they see it's happening.
So, that.
And Kevi says,
Hi all, just to be clear, I'm not offended.
I have a thicker skin than that.
However, I subscribed to the Digest version, so only we received all of them combined.
My comments about it is a shame to be here another show.
It was purely because I felt there had been a lot pulled in that week.
Not that it was an any failure.
Just wondering if the algorithm to pull the show could be reduced to what, or was it this an essential minimum.
I do think that things should be discussed and reasons given, and I'm always happy to hear feedback.
We don't have to agree with each other 100% of the time.
We often disagree a bit, but that doesn't mean we're falling out.
I'm actually quite happy at Ken's frank discussion and an explanation, and I'm not offended.
Again, thanks to all who contributed the feedback, and I continue to feel the openness is important.
Leander says,
Hi Ken, I want to at least speak my voice in agreement.
You say very clearly, and with good data and examples,
much of what I was feeling but struggling to articulate,
at least without calling myself out for not having submitted a show recently,
might just as well own up to that up front.
For me, the urgency comes from the automatic notice at the start of the shows.
We had free slots that were not filled.
But I do wonder if the way we talk about the urgency,
or the, at times, desperately sounding pleas,
included by hosts when recording a show for the reserve queue,
are a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy.
We talk about the project as if it's struggling or even dying,
and I think that might come across to listeners and potential hosts
in a way that actually discourages them from submitting a show.
I generally don't like to speculate this way about,
without offering solutions or ideas, but I don't have one.
Probably best just to clear the clutter off my PC
and get to work on a show for 2026.
I just heard a new host,
and perhaps the variety of hosts is the best encouragement
to keep that happening.
To which I reply,
that is a very valid point.
With currently 28, five and a half weeks of shows in the reserve queue,
more sedate explanation is called for.
Actually, before that, I want to talk to Kevi's point,
because I only realised now,
doing the HPR community news,
how many shows we had from the reserve queue,
and we should maybe flag that up,
that there are periods of time
when we're getting a lot of shows from the reserve queue.
I wouldn't have normally expected January to be a month
where we would get a lot of shows from the reserve queue.
People tend to have time off over the holidays
and submit shows.
So there were quite a few, actually,
and Kevi does indeed have a point.
Anyway, going back to my comment about Leander's thing,
we could change it that if there are 15 or more shows in the queue,
we add something like,
you're listening to the show from the reserve queue.
This show was submitted, you know, however long ago,
to cover occasions like this where there are gaps in the queue.
Then when we get to under 10 shows,
you're listening to a show from the reserve queue.
We have now less than two-week shows in the reserve queue.
This would be a good time to consider submitting a show.
This show was submitted blah, blah, blah long ago.
And then when we get back to five,
we put in the topic that we have now.
And then when we go to zero,
we say thank you for listening to Africa Public Radio.
We're shutting down the project.
Goodbye, and thanks for the fish.
I like the idea of a more granular approach.
I think we should put things like,
should we put things like when the next free slot is,
there are 10 free slots coming up in the next week,
or something like that, ideas.
Roan says,
I'm up for this approach,
you know, having the granulated one,
and vote for adding the message urgency ramp up as described.
And then about,
goodbye and thanks for the fish.
I mean, if you're going out,
let's make sure we get the exact quote,
smiley face,
so long and thanks for all the fish.
And about adding more information in there.
I don't know if that would encourage more queue watching,
giving the exact count,
or maybe help with the urge,
since they know about it.
I'm okay with adding it.
Might try it out and see.
Sporless says,
I'm also in favour of Ken's purposeful plan
for increasing the urgency message
as the reserve queue empties.
And Jim Leonard says,
second it,
if it's not too difficult to implement
from a technical span point.
No, actually,
it would be quite easy to do.
I need to automate that anyway,
and that's a good way to do it.
Good reason to do it.
Henry Cameron says,
I can thank you for your,
the depth of explanation and reasoning,
and of course,
thank you to all who discuss and read this matter.
It's about two years since I gave my first show,
and somewhat longer since I became a listener.
Over time,
I've come to understand better
how the reserve queue works,
about the urgency of more shows,
and not to see the slots as too problematic.
The mail below helps me further to understand that,
so thanks.
I think looking back at my experience,
that at the same time as new shows are important
and essential for HBR to continue,
I have a minor feeling of urgency crisis
has been received to me
as somewhat more alarming than intended.
Thanks for all this discussion and clarification.
Good, good, good.
Jim Leonard also says,
I was saying,
if it has offended people,
no, not at all, he says.
However,
it somehow got flagged a spam for me,
so I had to give it,
and a few more replies to the thread,
out of my spam folder.
While I've only contributed a handful of shows,
and I'm not sure if my opinion has any weight,
I think the system is working as intended,
and don't see the need for changes,
especially since the upload hints text
on the website was clarified 18 months ago.
Okay, and that was it.
We had a community news message
asking people to come to the community news recording,
and that's it, I think.
Speaking of the queue,
maybe we should have a look at the queue.
We have some free slots.
One show just posted for next week,
and we have a free slot the week after,
and then after that,
it's pretty much lots of free slots.
There are still Kevies and Whiskey Jacks,
sorry, Ahookas and Whiskey Jack shows in there,
so you have plenty of slots
if you've got an episode.
Okay, with that,
tune in tomorrow for another exciting episode
of Hacker Public Radio.
You have been listening to the Hacker Public Radio podcast, at hackerpublicradio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording a podcast, then visit the HPR site to find out how easy it really is.
Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by anhonesthost.com, the Internet Archive, rsync.net, and the HPR Community Content Delivery Network.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
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Episode: 4567
Title: Movie Recommendations for Hackers
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4567/hpr4567.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:14:05 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4567, for 2026-02-03
Today's show is entitled, "Movie Recommendations for Hackers"
The host is Deltaray and the duration is 00:30:44
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "An overview of movies related to cybersecurity and hacker culture."
Just a forewarning about this episode, it contains spoilers for the movies that I'm
going to talk about. So if you don't like spoilers, you might consider skipping this
episode. The show notes will have a list of the movies that I talk about, so you can watch them
on your own and then come back to this episode later. Hello everybody and welcome to another
episode of Hacker Public Radio. This is Delta Ray. I want to talk today about something a little
different than normal tools or commands, but still very much related to tech and cybersecurity.
I want to talk about movies. So where I work, I actually create a cybersecurity movie library that
has about 40 movies in it, all on DVD or Blu-ray, and I just put it on a shelf and I don't have any
requirement to like check it out or write your name down or anything like that. You just pick it up
because I want to try to reduce the friction it would take or cause somebody to want to watch
a movie, you know, so it's like it's, I want to make it as easy as possible for them. I do put
stickers on the movie cases that say, hey, this is from work so that hopefully they'll bring it back
sometime. But the original reason why I put this cybersecurity movie library together in a list was
pretty simple. I realized that I and a lot of other colleagues of mine would casually reference movies
when talking about cybersecurity. Stuff like, this is like what happened in war games, or it's like when
they magically decrypt the network stream in sneakers, or I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do
that. I started noticing that the younger colleagues often didn't have these reference points, not because
they weren't interested, but simply because they had never seen those movies or they didn't know
about them. So I created a small cybersecurity movie library at work to help reduce that friction.
If someone wanted to understand a reference, they could just borrow the movie, or hopefully they would
just watch through a whole bunch of the movies so that the next time they heard one, they'd realize
it right away. What I didn't realize at the time was a lot of people don't have DVD players anymore,
or Blu-ray players. So they didn't really know how to consume the movies. Unfortunately, I can't just
upload rips of the movies to someplace because this is a work-related function and stuff. And I don't
want to get in trouble with the law at work, or at all, really. But it also helped me to step back and
think that these movies weren't just about nostalgia. They're part of how our field developed a shared
language and even some of the technology and techniques that we use. Movies and TV shows that
are about computers and security do a few things for the public. They put a face on cybersecurity and
computers. They can show the motivations of attackers and defenders. They demonstrate the
threats and the exploits in a way that can be seen visually and better understood. And they show
security controls, even if they're not perfect. Sometimes they will show controls that are hard
to demonstrate, or even you'd only read about them in a textbook, but the movie will actually show how
they work. One example of that is in Mission Impossible. In Mission Impossible, they're trying
to break into the CIA into a protected computer enclave. And the system administrator, when he
needs to get into that room, he has to go through several security checks. And so you can just
plainly see this is how like an eye scanner works, or this is how a pressure sensor works, and so on.
And sometimes they even prophesize about future concerns, like, you know, the next movie that I'm
going to talk about. Another thing they do is they give us a common vocabulary to use when talking about
these things. For instance, War Games, you know, War Games was one of the early computer hacker
movies, but the term war driving, actually, and war dialing, comes from that movie. That's the war in
War Games became war and war dialing, and so on. And also, these movies can be entertaining to watch. You
know, you can watch it with friends and family, and it feels less like you're learning something, and it
usually takes less time than reading through a textbook or something like that. So the first movie
I want to start with is, let's go back to nearly the beginning of things. And this is a movie called
2001, A Space Odyssey, in which it talks about what it might be like to, when man ventures out into
space. And in the movie, there's a high-powered computer called HAL 9000, which runs the life
support systems and the communications for the spaceship. And it has some problems, or it makes a
mistake in the movie. I'm not going to give too much away, but basically, you know, it has some problems, and
they have to deal with those problems, and so on. It raises some ethical and social and
technological questions that we're still wrestling with today. Should AI be implicitly
trusted? What happens when it lies? Should it manage life-critical systems? What happens when
corporate pride overrides safety? You know, and we're still, you know, even though it's 60 years
later, we're still trying to figure these questions out. So HAL 9000 isn't necessarily evil,
and in the traditional sense, it's just constrained and conflicted and operating under bad incentives.
That alone makes the movie endlessly relevant. And culturally, references like Open the Pod Bay
Doors How are still shorthand for when automation goes wrong. You know, you'll hear professionals make
that reference. Or, I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that. Fast forwarding about 13 years to
the 80s. And one thing you have to understand about the 1980s in society, it's when everybody started
to, you know, think about computers a lot more. You know, they started really showing up in people's
daily lives. And I mean, I'm kind of biased because I was young in the 80s, and so it just always seemed
like people were talking about computers to me and stuff. But from what I can tell, this is, the early 80s
is when people really started to fear, you know, what could happen with computers and how we're putting all
this data everywhere. And they're, you know, connected in our lives and so on. And you're basically just
turned into numbers in a computer. You know, your bank account balance and so on are just numbers in a
computer that can be modified and so on. And so Tron, which came out in 1982, kind of took that in an
interesting way. I would argue that Tron is kind of a, even though it's thought of as a digital
gladiator movie and stuff, and I think a lot of people don't quite get it. But I think it's actually
a modern telling of Jesus Christ as a digital form because there's a lot of things that actually
happen in the movie that, but I mean, it's just kind of obvious that, you know, it's making these
religious references and everything. But Tron isn't necessarily focused on being a cybersecurity
movie, but it does introduce a lot of security concepts. You know, passwords are in it, they break
into systems, they talk about access levels and so on. And of course, Tron is most known for being a
trailblazer of computer graphics before he is even called CGI. In fact, the movie was so far ahead of
the game that they were disqualified at the Oscars for special effects because they said, well, they
cheated by using computers, which is pretty funny now. But for a lot of people, it was their first
exposure to seeing terminals and mainframe and hearing about access levels and monitoring of
computers and command injections and passwords and so on. The AI concepts were pretty advanced for the
time. You know, the master control program, Intron, was basically a form of AI. And the guy in the real
world that communicates with it, he just talks to it plainly the same way we would talk to like chat GPT
now, and so on. And so that was not possible at the time, right? It was, you had to suspend your
sense of disbelief about that being a possibility. But of course, fast forward to today, that is a
possibility, except for the MCP had its own motivation and stuff. And we haven't really seen that play out
with computers yet. It was able to punch its own buttons, essentially. Tron helped normalize the
idea that computers are environments with rules and permissions and consequences, and that matters. And
people refer back to it. For a lot of people, it was very influential, myself included, and it kind of
kicked off having computers as themes in movies. The following year, a movie with very relevant
concerns came out called War Games. Now, one thing you have to understand, if you didn't grow up in the
80s or before, and maybe you were born in the 90s or something, you probably don't have the latent fear
about nuclear war. But back in the 80s, we were very worried about the escalation of nuclear weapons and
how the world could basically have ended in about 15 minutes, if, you know, one side, either the Soviet
Union or the US started launching nuclear weapons. And so this movie, it explores the idea that nuclear
weapons were starting to be, I don't want to say automated, but they were starting to be hooked up to
computers. And there was a lot of concern about that, you know, could somebody dial in to a computer
at a military base and start World War III? And that's basically the theme of this movie. And so
in the movie, David Lightman, he dials into just a random number, which he thinks is something else,
but ends up being NORAD, the, you know, the North American, I can't remember what the acronym stands
for. But it's basically where we control, you know, the nuclear weapons from. The movie was so
influential that Ronald Reagan, the president at the time, he approached Congress about it after
having watched the movie. And he asked if the scenario was possible. And essentially, his chief
of staff told him, yes, yes, this is technically feasible, I think is what he said. And that led to
some of the first presidential executive orders on computer security. So this movie had quite an
influence. But it introduced concepts about computer vulnerabilities, remote access, ethical
dilemmas, it showed some social engineering, which was great. One of the scenes that I really like is
in the movie, David Lightman, he gets into trouble in class in high school intentionally, they don't really
say that. But I think that he intentionally was getting himself into trouble so that he could be
sent down to the principal's office, so that he could actually see where they keep the passwords
on like a sheet of paper, because he knew where these, these passwords were kept for the school's
computer. So he gets himself into trouble so that he can go down to the office and see that list to see
what the latest updated password was, which was pencil. And they had basically crossed out all the
previous passwords. They had this practice of changing the password, which is good, but they
kept it in a place that was known. So that's, and that's bad. But so he sees it, and then he later
uses it to actually log in and change his grades. So it's, you know, it's this interesting social
engineering type of thing. And also like an insider threat, you know, you have to worry about who already
has access and what they can do. And also kicked off kind of a generation of hacker culture. You
know, lots of things in that movie became references. I remember even when I was a kid, I was about
seven or eight when this movie came out. I remember hearing about it at the time, and one of my friends
saying something, you know, he was trying to show off or whatever and talking about like, oh yeah,
our school has a computer too. And his password is pencil sharpener. And I'm just like, I'm like,
okay, probably was making that up. But yeah, but I mean, it shows how it was so influential that kids
were even talking about this movie. And unfortunately, nuclear escalation still remains relevant and a
concern, maybe even more so now. I don't know whether younger, the younger generation isn't probably
going to think of it as that big of a deal. But I mean, we went through a time that it was very
scary. That same year, and like I said, in the public mind, computers were starting to become
dangerous, you know, to them. And that same year, a movie called Superman 3 came out. Of course,
this was the third episode, you know, the third movie in a series of Superman movies from the 70s to
the 80s. People probably don't think of it as the computer Superman movie, but really it kind of
was. In the movie, he has to deal with computers kind of wrecking the lives of people and stuff like
that. And also, he has to deal with a supercomputer at the end that kind of takes over things and he has
to try to defeat it. You know, it shows lots of things about computers in people's daily lives and how
they're like doing things wrong, like spitting out money onto the street from ATMs, or the wrong
account balance was put into somebody's account or something like that. Among other things in the
movie, it demonstrates data manipulation, rounding errors in computers. It also shows two-factor style
controls. So there's a scene that's kind of interesting where one of the guys has to use two
keys at the same time to get access to this computer. Like you have to actually be two separate
people because it's too far away. You know, you can't reach out both hands and touch both key
spaces. So you need two people at the same time. So you kind of jury rigs this contraption to help
them to do it. But you know, that's like a two-factor control. So that's Superman 3. I think it's a good
one to watch. There are probably other movies in the 80s, you know, that dealt with computers, but
none that I could really think of until 1990. It's called The KGB, The Computer and Me. And this is
based on a book called The Cuckoo's Egg by Cliff Stoll. It's a movie that was made for PBS,
the program Nova, which was a popular science documentary series back then. But it's based on
a real event that happened at Lawrence Berkeley National Labs back in 1987, I think it was.
It's where Cliff Stoll, who is, you know, a system administrator at the time working at this national
lab, he finds a 70 cent discrepancy in accounting, and he tries to track it down. And he ends up on the,
you know, on the trail of trying to figure out how this hacker was gaining access to their systems.
It's really interesting. And I highly recommend reading the book, The Cuckoo's Egg, because it
goes into a lot of detail about how computers worked back then. I feel when I read that book,
I feel like I'm reading Genesis for cybersecurity, because so many of the concepts in there are like
the first time it was used. You know, it's like, you're reading about this stuff, and you realize,
oh, wait, Cliff Stoll actually came up with this, or something for tracking this down. So it's a
pretty interesting book. And the dramatization, you know, the KGB, the computer in me is a pretty good
representation of the events that are documented in the book. And it's actually reenacted by the
people who actually were there and doing it. So it's really cool to watch. You can find that
movie on YouTube. And, you know, you can get the Cuckoo's Egg, you can like buy it off of
online used bookstores or something. In that movie, you know, he talks about real networks,
how they're interconnected, how they worked, real accounts, how phone tracing worked back then,
how the investigative process took place, and how you have to be patient, and so on,
and looking for clues, and so on. And it does, it does it all pretty realistically.
If you only watch one thing on this list, on this list of movies, this might be the one.
I don't want to say you should skip the other ones, but this is definitely a must watch.
And then two years later, a movie called Sneakers came out. This was pretty prophetic as well.
It introduced to the public concepts like cryptography, and trust models, and who we're
trusting with our information, and unintended consequences of all that. Ethical dilemmas,
you know, like if you have access to be able to decrypt stuff, should you be allowed to do that,
and so on. And many of these issues it raises are still ones we're actively dealing with today.
You know, so it's fun. It's a nice movie. It has Robert Redford, Dan Aykroyd, and some others in it.
It's a good ensemble cast movie with an interesting story behind it and everything, and still relevant.
A few years later, and thinking about the actual history of the world at the time, this is the mid-90s,
is when the World Wide Web started showing up, and people started getting access through stuff like
AOL, and BBSs, and so on. And so people started getting access to the internet. But really,
1995 was still just about a year too early before you start really thinking about the broader adoption
of people getting access online. That probably didn't happen until 96 or 97.
But so in 95, this movie called The Net came out, which was a Sandra Bullock. At the time,
a lot of made fun of that movie, The Net, and I think it's because they felt like some of the
representations of computers were unrealistic and stuff like that. But it's funny, in hindsight,
this movie, The Net, was very telling of problems that we would face later, because it deals with
things like identity theft, isolation, what happens if, you know, the dangers of remote work,
and having all our data in computer systems that could be manipulated, and the importance of knowing
real people in real life, and not just living your entire life online. So this movie talks about
those kind of issues. And those are really relevant today, because today we have problems with identity
theft, and we have problems with all our information is only in digital form. And changing that could
really cause us problems. And it might be really hard to prove your existence if you don't have some
kind of reference of a person or somebody that can vouch for you or something like that. My dad just ran
into this. So he needs to get like a real ID star on his driver's license. He needed to look for his
actual birth certificate from, you know, a really long time ago. And in order to prove who he was,
so that he could actually get a real ID star on his driver's license. Well, first of all, I mean,
those can be faked, right? But second of all, it's like, some people don't have those anymore.
And so what are they supposed to do if we suddenly depend on everybody having a real ID star on their
driver's license? And they can't, you know, like elderly people can't get it because they don't
have their birth certificate anymore. That's not fair to them. So, you know, the net deals with these
kind of issues. And it's kind of fun. Yeah, it's a good movie. And then the same year, a movie called
Hackers came out. And this is basically a Hollywood portrayal of what computer hacking is like.
Very 90s in its visuals and everything. And, you know, like the hackers, they use rollerblades and
stuff like that. And they're dressed like it's the 90s and it's in New York City and stuff. The
visuals are very flashy. You know, it's the way that they represent certain things is so far-fetched.
You know, it's just like computers aren't really like that. I did leave off Jurassic Park from this
list, but that's another one that maybe you could have on this list. But that would be in 93. So I
didn't include Jurassic Park there. But that's another one where she uses a 3D file system viewer,
which really did exist. So, you know, the whole thing in Hackers where they show them going through
the file system and it's in 3D. Yeah, one could argue that that actually was possible, but it wasn't
how normal computers were. You know, you'd had to have a Silicon Graphics workstation to be able to do
stuff like that. But the movie does demonstrate real vulnerabilities. It talks about real things that
end up being cybersecurity terms. It demonstrates shoulder surfing. It's subtle when it happens,
but there's a scene in which you see somebody shoulder surfing to try to get somebody's password.
They talk about worms and viruses and that there's a difference between the two. And they show,
you know, like proxies and internet routing and so on. It also talks about operational technology risks.
You know, what happens if a computer is in control of a large ship and what that might mean. Its plot,
maybe at the time, seemed unrealistic, but it's really not. One of my roles in my professional
job as a cybersecurity researcher was talking about operational technology. And some of the stuff
that's shown in the movie Hackers from 30 years ago, I would say is not out of the realm of possibility.
Now, you know, computers are largely, I mean, ships and, and so on are largely computer controlled. And
this is obvious to us now, but back then it was maybe not so obvious and it seemed a little far
fetched. And it's funny because Superman three deals with the same thing. All the ships are computer
controlled and they all end up going to the center of the Atlantic ocean or something in the movie. So
it's kind of interesting throwback there, but it's, it's imaginative, it's stylized, and it was
influential. I think that if anything, it's kind of like a music video, you know, hackers was influential
at the time to the up and coming real hackers and techies of the day as to, you know, something to
have on in the background. So you can like, you know, enjoy just killing time or something like
that, or maybe while you're actually hacking or something like that. Again, some of the stuff is
not super realistic in it, but there is a lot of stuff that is. The next movie is not necessarily
a computer movie, but it does deal with stuff that we care about in cybersecurity. And that's
Gattaca. Gattaca was a movie from 1997. It looked at a future society, kind of like a dystopian
society in which everything is controlled through your DNA. Like they, your access to buildings is,
is done through like a pinprick on your finger to get a blood sample. And then they allow you in based
on that, you know, what jobs you're given and stuff is based on your DNA and your genes and so on.
And in the movie, somebody who wants to have, you know, they aspire to do something great is not
allowed to do it because their genes, you know, basically indicate that they wouldn't be able to do
it or something. So they overcome that. But it's a great movie for thinking about things like privacy
of health information and genetic data and how that can be misused and identity theft and stuff like
that. So it's, it's a cool movie to watch and kind of scary, honestly. And it, it really drives home
the idea of what is it that we're really protecting in cybersecurity when we're talking about things like
PHI and so on. And then two years later in 1999, a comedy came out called Office Space. Office Space is
great to watch just if you work in an office, you know, and if you work in IT, it's a great movie to watch
just so that you kind of, you know, you'll relate a lot to a lot of the things that happen in that movie, the
way different employees act and so on, and frustrations with corporate policies and stuff like that. Did you
remember to put the cover letter on your TPS report? You know, you'll finally understand that
reference. But in the movie, it also deals with several cybersecurity concepts, insider threats,
viruses, rounding errors. And this is, it's funny, in this movie, they, they make a reference to
Superman 3 by, they say, oh, it's like in Superman 3, or something like that, because they kind of do
the same thing that Richard Pryor, Pryor's character does in Superman 3. And it also talks about
the Y2K bug, not in detail, but in the movie, they're actually dealing with, you know, preparing
software for the Y2K switchover. And it gave us also a lot of cultural references, like the red
stapler and so on, and 35 pieces of flair, and so on. So by watching this movie, you'll understand a lot
of those references that get made by other people, you know, that you work with. One on here that I
didn't include is the Matrix Reloaded. If you, I mean, the Matrix, you know, it's all about living
inside of a computer simulation, stuff like that. But in the Matrix Reloaded, they actually use a real
SSH vulnerability in it to hack the power grid, and so on. So that can be interesting to watch,
because it was, it was real, you know, it was like they use SSH in a command line in the movie,
and they use a real vulnerability that existed at the time. Going forward to a more obscure one,
and one that isn't necessarily cybersecurity, but deals with surveillance a lot. And this is called
The Lives of Others. And it's from 2006. It's a German movie. And you, you know, you can get it and,
and listen to the, the dubbed English dialogue, or watch the subtitles. But you know, it goes slow
enough that, that you can read the subtitles fairly easily, and it won't be much of a problem. But
really good movie. Scary, not horror scary. But man, I, I was just kind of like taken aback.
After I watched this, I'm like, wow, the East German Stasi, which is their secret police,
had the ability to do a lot of stuff that, you know, you're just like, wow, I, you know,
is our government doing this to us? And we just don't know it. It shows surveillance, interrogation
techniques, which aren't really intense, but they're just very psychologically manipulative and
sneaky. You know, the, the stuff that they show, you're just like, whoa, that's, that's crazy. I
didn't even realize that that was a thing. State, you know, monitoring of things. And the ending is
really great. So The Lives of Others, it's a really great movie. Then there's a TV series that came after
that in 2011 called Person of Interest. And it deals with mass surveillance, you know, in the wake of
9-11. They basically hook all cameras and TV streams and people's email and everything. All this data
goes into a massive supercomputer that basically is AI and is able to try to detect when the next attack
will be. What it also does is it feeds off clues to its creator about other people who might get
murdered or who are likely to get murdered. And so in the series, they, they try to prevent those
murders. This is a really cool TV show and, you know, shows lots of tech at the time, some of which
is a bit far-fetched and they use some tech speak, techno babble that doesn't really work. But some of
the stuff they show actually was real and, and was, you know, real hacks and real security controls at
the time. So in the show notes, I'm going to include a list of cybersecurity movies and TV shows
that I've included in the cybersecurity movie library. If you have some others that you have
suggestions for, drop them in the comments. Also, you know, you might just, if you have other insights
into these movies that you think is relevant, please make a comment. And if you could go ahead and
record a Hacker Public Radio episode, that would be great. Thanks. End of line.
You have been listening to the Hacker Public Radio podcast, at hackerpublicradio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording a podcast, then visit the HPR site to find out how easy it really is.
Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by anhonesthost.com, the Internet Archive, rsync.net, and the HPR Community Content Delivery Network.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
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Episode: 4568
Title: Book reading The Cuckoo's Egg by Cliff Stoll
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4568/hpr4568.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:14:06 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4568, for 2026-02-04
Today's show is entitled, "Book reading The Cuckoo's Egg by Cliff Stoll"
The host is Henrik Hemrin and the duration is 00:08:52
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "About the book The Cuckoo's Egg, starting by looking back at my experience from that time period."
Welcome to Hacker Public Radio. My name is Henley Kimlin and I'm your host today.
In 1985, I started to work at a telecom equipment manufacturer.
We had a mainframe computer in our combined office and lab room.
We were four sitting in the room and it was this one terminal for all of us and maybe even for someone
more. Downstairs, we at the component technology department had our big climate control lab
laboratories. I used an HP-85 computer having the basic programming language to optimize measurements
of resistors and there were several more of them for other measurements of various electronic components.
Also more advanced computers were used in the labs and as I recall also with other languages
non-basic. I remember I learned briefly a bit about one of those languages but I have forgotten which one.
The secretariat department could send telex messages around the world. We handed a handwritten
manuscript to her and she typed it into the telex system and she had a Xerox computer with
big at least eight inch floppy disks. Not so many years later my manager got the personal computer
running those and some years later those computers also came to us in the department.
But also very early we had a son-unic station and for managers, unix became my daily driver at work.
Before I started to work in school we had some education in basic programming. We were using
the at least in Sweden very successful and good lucks for ABC80 computer. At the end of my school time
my school got the top notch ABC8 tanred with color screen. At home so I could get a chance to learn
somewhat more about computers and basic programming in my own pace. I got a single error said X80
computer which later upgraded to said X81. One summer job when I was a student I was at televerket
the Swedish PETTT. It meant that I visited the numerous of exchange stations
many at the countryside, some with very few subscribers so I could hear the relay start when
some of was making a call. But big stations it was noise from the release all the time.
This was long before the phone number could be seen by us subscribers. It was impossible to
know who was calling. But televerket had such equipment a big wooden box with a print that could
be connected to a subscriber when the traffic needed to be monitored. One reason to monitor could
be that the subscriber had claimed the phone bill was too high, impossible they had been calling so much.
So televerket then monitored for a while and they could show
that there indeed had been many phone calls. But possibly by another person in the family
than the one claiming the bill. And possibly calls were going to a person of an external
lover fair that the partner did not know about until televerket presented their call list.
But the exchange station that were in some cases red plastic pieces indicating
the line was used for data communication and was not to be broken. But the station it was also
possible to connect a special phone to the subscriber line and call as well as listen and interrupt
the ongoing conversation when there was a need for service. Of course whatever was heard was to
be considered unhandled as confidential. As I mentioned after studies were completed I was working
with telecom equipment and in particular for landline telephony. Not at least I worked with components
for the line cards, a card at the telephone exchange that is facing towards the end user.
After this long introduction I better come to the book. I have read the Kukus egg by Cliff Stahl.
Many of you listeners probably have already read this book and even more of you have heard
about the book. Now I have read it. It is a hacker thriller based on a true story that happened
in the mid-1980s going on for a year. It was written by the hunter Cliff Stahl shortly after.
This is the same time frame as I relate to above from my personal life. I think the book can
be interesting for anyone. To me, if I even barely can do any programming or understand the telecom
network in depth, my background gives me another layer of relation to the book. Although I am
younger than the author, I have a bit of understanding. I have heard about both Vax and
Unix and the special dialect of Unix from Berkeley. Cliff Stahl describes Unix commands
which are similar to Linux. He talks about passwords about encryption and a lot more.
Many technical details he describes by using analogie with more common non-tech
nircal life examples. A security hole in GNU MX software, a software still around today,
plays a central role in how the hacker could penetrate. To fix an update, security holes are
very relevant today as well. Many things in computers and technology have changed.
But at the same time, very much of the problems are valid today, although they are somewhat
different. And the way he describes technical details for the non-technical reader are relevant also
today, I believe. At the same time, as a book has many technical details, he also talks about the
daily life at home, the left wing culture here belonged to, at the university, his long hair and
the dress code he belonged to, and the music. He also describes his context to numerous authorities
and frustration he had in those contexts. I am very impressed of his analytical research approach,
his persistence, his skills, and inventiveness, including the inventiveness of his girlfriend and others.
One takeaway for me is that he kept a detailed logbook. It is an important research tool
he wrote down what happened all details. The logbook together with the print outs of exactly
what the hack he did were core references for analyzing and make conclusions,
retract and change conclusions when you information led to that the earlier assumptions were wrong.
And without the logbook book and all print outs, it had been impossible to write this book.
He also wrote a technical paper about it before he wrote the book.
So, for a listener to hack a public radio, this is a book I really recommend,
and for those interested, there are several videos with him,
of a late date on various topics.
Thank you for listening, take care and goodbye.
You have been listening to the Hacker Public Radio podcast, at hackerpublicradio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording a podcast, then visit the HPR site to find out how easy it really is.
Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by anhonesthost.com, the Internet Archive, rsync.net, and the HPR Community Content Delivery Network.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
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Episode: 4569
Title: Kiosk with guest mode on Linux
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4569/hpr4569.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:14:07 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4569, for 2026-02-05
Today's show is entitled, "Kiosk with guest mode on Linux"
The host is Klaatu and the duration is 00:23:57
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "Use GDM and either a ramdisk or systemd to create a guest profile with self-removing user data"
Hey, everybody. It's glad to. There used to be a sort of a really convenient mode or add-on.
I guess to most Linux distributions, I feel. And it was this guest mode. It was a guest user profile.
You could enable this through a package frequently called X guest. And it would add a user to your login screen called guest.
So you could let a friend or colleague use your computer as a guest. And they could, they would get their own profile.
They could do whatever they want to, you know, within within the bounds of what a user is normally allowed to do on the system.
And then when they log out, every all trace of their activity is simply discarded.
It's just removed. And so every time you log into the guest profile, it's a fresh profile. It's brand new as if no one had ever been there before.
It was a really useful thing because you don't really, I mean, a lot of people will just hand their laptop to someone else.
And just, sure, you can use the web browser or whatever. I never liked doing that for lots of different reasons.
But I mean, primarily, because I just don't want people accidentally or maliciously, but I didn't,
I didn't let people who I suspected of malice use my laptop. But accidental, just erasure of my data,
or even just messing up my environment, just moving a panel somewhere that I don't want it,
or adding an icon to a desktop by accident, by dragging it out of a folder or a menu or something.
So it's just kind of, it's safer and easier to give someone their own guest account.
Now, we don't really use X11 so much anymore. I mean, some of us do. I actually do on my slack
machine. I'm still running X11, but a lot of people have switched over to Wayland. And so the X guest package,
which does as its name sort of hints rely on Xorg, that doesn't really work. I mean, you can install the
package. You can try to log in as guest, but it doesn't deliver a desktop as I've recently found out.
So I, I needed a guest account for a project that I was working on. And the advantage of the
guest account was exactly as I mentioned. The total erasure of all user data, indiscriminate,
just don't need it anymore. When someone logs out, we want to lose all of that data. Now,
this particular project was brought to me by a friend in New York, upstate, New York.
And it's for a library. So the library wants to have guest computers that people can use,
surf the internet, search the card catalog, or whatever you call it, the stacks, whatever. And then
when they log out, or they could do other stuff too, they can research online, they can write
stuff in LibreOffice, they could, I don't know, do graphics and gimp or einkscape or whatever. You know,
like whatever is available on the computer, they have access to that. They can save files,
maybe to save it to the internal hard drives so that they can then move it to some cloud account,
or whatever mechanism. I'm not sure if they have physically as attached storage or not. But when
they log out, everything that they've done needs to be erased for privacy purposes, for data
security purposes, for all of the reasons. So my friend who's volunteering at this library, it was
looking for a solution to provide this guest account or this kiosk mode experience on just some
Linux distribution. I had Fedora 43 on hand, so I decided to kind of poke around and see what
I could come up with because I had it in my head that GDM, the Genome Display Manager, that's the
screen that you get when you first log in, or when you're about to log in to a Linux graphical desktop,
that's running the Genome Desktop. You generally see the GDM. It's not always true. They might use
their own display manager. They might use a different one that then activates Genome. But a lot of times
the Genome sort of the default setup for a Genome Linux distribution, a Linux distribution using Genome,
is going to be GDM for the login screen, and then that will pass you over to the Genome desktop
after you enter your credentials. So I had it in my head that GDM was aware of session states.
And I thought I wonder if GDM has some kind of mechanism to trigger shell scripts or applications
or actions of some type based on the session state. Yes, it does. Turns out that it absolutely
does. So the default behavior of GDM is to track I think four or five different states. There's
init. That's the initial state. The initialization state post log in. So that's the moment that
someone has entered their correct, authentic, their correct credentials. Pre-session. So that's the
time before the session actually begins. Like moments before the session begins. And then post
session, which is once the log out command or the log out signal has been sent to the Genome
desktop. Each of these states has a directory located in slash Etsy slash GDM. And it turns out
that when you place a, for instance, a shell script named default with a capital D default in one of
those directories, GDM runs the script when that state is reached. So if you want something to trigger
upon that at the post session stage, then you'd put a shell script called default into slash
Etsy slash GDM slash post session. In fact, there's there may already be a shell script there
called default with some sample commands or maybe just a header comment telling you what the
script does. But it, that's all you need to do is put default into slash Etsy slash GDM slash
post session in this case for, for a log out action to trigger that shell script. The shell script
needs to be executable. I think it needs to be a valid shell script. And that's it. Otherwise,
you have full control. You, you can do whatever you want to in that script. It's pretty cool. So
to trigger actions, for instance, to clean up a user's environment upon log out, I created
slash Etsy slash GDM slash post session slash default. You can add whatever actions you want
to run on log out in this script. And in my case, I wanted to clear everything all all data.
Couple of different ways to do this. I chose the really sort of hefty choice of just removing
dash RF dollar sign home. Now, I didn't do that outright because that would then clear every
user's data upon log out, bad idea. Instead, I mean, that might be what you want. But for me,
I just wanted the guest account to have the home removed. So I did an if statement, if space
square bracket space, quote, dollar sign user, close quote equals quote library guest,
close quote space square bracket, semicolon, then Rm space dash RF space dollars, uh, yeah,
quote dollar sign home, close quote, and then F i to end the if statement and then exit zero to
signal that yes, we are exiting with success. And so that's comparing the the environment variable
dollar sign user, which, which GDM specifically does recognize it uses. Even though I think that
this script is being run as root, I'm pretty sure it respects, it retains the old dollar sign
user value of the session. So I'm comparing dollar sign user to the the string library guest. And
that's a that's the name of the user that I'm going to create as my guest account. It's going to be
library guest. If your guest account is just called guest or my guest or some, you know, a
toxic penguin, whatever, then that's the name, that's the string you would want to use when
comparing dollar sign user to the name. The point is that this if statements, if statement ensures that
the the the home directory dollar sign home is only removed if the active user that has triggered
the log out signal is library guest. If you as an admin user log in as, I don't know, admin or
plateau or gore to whatever your name is. And then you log out that's not going to trigger this because
your dollar sign user variable would not be assigned to library guest in that case. It would be
plateau or admin or gore to whatever your name is. So that protects you from accidentally clearing
out your entire home directory. That's very important. You really need to test that before engaging
in this solution because otherwise you could just clear out every manner of home directory on your
system and that would be quite upsetting if that's not what you wanted. Okay, so the the GDM
solution is pretty simple. I mean, there's no library guest user yet and that is the next thing
that you have to configure here because you do need to think about, and the reason I don't have
a library guest user on my system yet it might my pretend system that I'm talking about yet
is because we have to decide where that library user is going to, where the home directory is
going to actually be located. I mean, it's going to be in slash home slash library guest. I get that.
But what file system and the reason this came to mind is because I was thinking about the, you know,
the erasure of all data on log out and I thought, well, what happens when a user doesn't log out?
There are lots of reasons a user might not log out. The system might be shut down out from under
them. The admin might send a shutdown signal or they might shut down. They might reboot.
There might be a power outage that the box could just lose power and shut off. None of those
involved a log out signal sent to GDM. That means that this erasure that the removal of the home
directory wouldn't be triggered, which would mean that data that you've claimed is going to remain
private and deleted upon the end of the session is now retained in this hard drive. So obviously,
you'd want to encrypt your hard drive to add a little bit of extra protection there. But it's
still didn't quite feel right to retain that data because that's a snapshot of that data, right? I mean,
that could be that that that's not great. So how can we get that data to absolutely go away
upon shutdown, reboot, or even a power outage? Well, I think the easiest way to do that is to just place
the entire home directory or the the guest users home directory in a RAM disk, a temporary file
system, saved to RAM. Now, if you've got a lot of RAM, you know, like, I don't know, eight gigabytes.
There's probably a lot in this context because you don't really need that much space in the home
directory. It's going to be a it's a temporary thing where people are just going to be browsing
the internet probably may be saving a couple of documents. Like literally you could probably make a
two gigabyte home directory and be fine. But, I mean, you have six gigs to run your system on.
But, I mean, obviously, more is better, so maybe 16 gigs, 20 gigs, 24 gigs, whatever. So you
got a lot of gigs of RAM, then you could just use a RAM disk and creating a temporary file system
on all the Linux's I know is pretty simple. You just add a line to your slash FS,
don't know slash Etsy slash FS tab. The line goes a little something like this.
Tmpfstmps and then tab slash home slash library guest. That's what that's the the
mount point we we're creating here. tab tmpfs. That's the file system type. tab rw's comma no
s uid comma no dev comma size equals 2g or 4g or however big you want to make that partition or
that mount point rather and then tab 0 space 0. You can look up all of those options in the
man page of sfst tab. But, essentially, that's making a mount point called slash home slash library
guest right within your RAM as if though it was a hard drive on your system. It's only being ram.
It's only going to last as long as it has power. So anything saved to that drive disappears
upon reboot or shut down or a power outage. I think two gigs honestly is probably plenty of space
for just internet browsing and making a few documents here and there. But you could make it bigger
if you anticipate that your guest users are going to be doing more than than those basic activities.
I have a RAM disk on my computer that I use for my downloads folder and it is I think eight
gigabytes and that's plenty of space for a bunch of you know a reasonable number of large downloads
and it all just goes away when I shut down. Okay, next you need to actually create the library
guest user. You have to do this manually because of no system setting panel that I've seen lately
lets you do advanced tasks like assigning a different home directory to a user. So if you do it manually
you can do that. I do that with user add. Sudo user add space dash dash home dash dur slash home
slash library guest. So we're just pointing the home dur to the the RAM disk that we're creating.
And then space library guest. Cool. Now that user exists you do get a warning here that the home
directory slash home slash library guest already exists or if you don't get a warning about that
I guess I forgot to mention after adding it to fs tab you would want to mount slash home slash
library guest. Then you can do the user add command. As I said you'll get a warning it might tell you
that it already exists. It's not going to copy any files from scale directory into it. It's okay
all of that's going to be created automatically upon login. So it doesn't actually matter. Those
are just warnings that are not errors. You can ignore them. You do need to create a password for the
library guest. I was playing around with automatic logins for library guest. Not sure if I love it
because eventually people are going to log out and then they're going to get back it. So I don't know.
I just I think probably just creating a simple password just kind of makes sense. So Sudo password
or PASS WD space library guest and then give it whatever you know password you want to give it.
And then that's it. That's the guest account. It's on a ram disk. It'll go away if the power is cut
or if the user manages to get into a reboot or a shutdown state and of course because of GDM
it also gets wiped if if there's a log out condition as well. So that's really that that's
a guest account. That's everything you need. Now there is another way around this potentially
if you don't have the space or the power for ram disk and back power mean compute power. Like you
just don't have enough ram for this to work. On some small devices like Raspberry Pi you might just
might not be reasonable to say oh I'm going to sacrifice like half of my ram for this temporary space
that people may or may not use and then may or may not use very often. So maybe that doesn't make
sense. You can do all of this with system D as well or whatever in its system you happen to be using.
I was doing this on a fedora system so I just used system D. In that case you can create your own
customs service. This service is what it could be called like kiosk.service for example. And the
unit file for that would be square bracket unit close square bracket description equals kiosk
clean up square bracket service close square bracket type equals one shot exact start equals slash
USR slash local slash bin slash kiosk dash cleanup dot s h that doesn't exist yet will create
it in a moment. Square bracket install close square bracket wanted by equals power off dot target
reboot dot target and multi dash user dot target. So what this service file does is it gets triggered
every time a power off or a reboot or a startup action or event rather is received or triggered by
system D. So that covers everything but log out log out is still being handled by gdm. But because
this isn't in a ram disk in this example. Instead we're listening to it for a power off from anywhere.
It's a system wide power off. Okay. Well it will trigger our kiosk cleanup script which we haven't written yet.
A reboot same thing and even a startup startup event. And I'm doing the startup event to mitigate
against power outages unintentional power outages. If if the power fails and your computer gets shut down
once again that wasn't a power off signal that wasn't a reboot signal. That's just there's no more
power. It goes away. So in that event in that case you need to catch the fact that we're starting
back up and there may still be data hidden away in a user account that shouldn't be there. Again that's
a little bit of a security hole and makes me not super confident in that particular work around.
I'd much rather I think go with the ram disk. Technically speaking there's not a whole lot
anyone can do as long as the disk if you're using full disk encryption then that data should
still be locked away until a startup sequence begins. At which point the data is then removed.
Is there a millisecond in there where the data still exists that could theoretically be sort of
manipulated or exploited? Probably haven't tested it but definitely the ram disk I think sounds like
the the more secure way to do this. But in this context I think where there has been no guarantee
of absolute just airtight privacy. I think this is more of a more of a solution for like casual
like look you don't I don't want all of your random search histories and your caches and
downloads and save documents on my computer so it's going to be removed anytime I start up.
I think that this works for those use cases. If this is an environment where absolute privacy and
data security is required I don't think I would be using system D for that I'd be using the ram
disk at the very least. So anyway that's the caveat there. The point is the system D power off
target reboot target and multi-user target ensures that a removal script is triggered when someone
shuts down or reboots or starts up the computer. The script that I used for this I saved to user
user local bin and I called it kiosk-cleanup.sh. It's a little bit of a repeat I guess
of the gdmscript but it has to be has to be a little bit more robust so or a little bit more
complete really. So I do an rm-rf of home library guest and then I make a directory called
slash home slash library guest and then I chone dash capital r library guest colon library guest
slash home slash library guest. So I'm recreating I'm removing and then recreating an empty library
guest home. The reason I'm doing that is because there's nothing here there's nothing in this process
to restore what I've removed in this case unlike where the the gdm thing manages the session
and sets up the environment. There's that's not what there's nothing to do that here so I'm recreating
it myself. I don't have to create all the sub-director's gdm does that for me but or I guess the
scale subsystem does that for me but certainly removing and then recreating and then restoring the
permissions is important. So grant the script itself permission to run pseudo-chmod plus x slash
user local bin kiosk-cleanup.sh and now the library guest user data is erased after a log out by
gdm a reboot a shutdown or a startup by system d and again that's only necessary if you just
don't if you don't have the capacity to do it as a ramdesk. If you do a ramdesk you can just
stop after gdm and creating the ramdesk in the user really really nice. As I say there's data
privacy concerns here like if you're doing this for for the general public or even for just
friends of yours it's obviously really important to make it known to people I mean I don't know if
they care but I mean I think it's think it's our obligation as just admins to make it known to people
that the scope of what you're assuring them or what you're guaranteeing them. So if it's on a
ramdesk and gdm as you're doing the erasure after a log out you probably have a pretty good cause
just to say that you know that yes their data is erased upon log out. I don't think the reboot
and shutdown power off really matters or that that'll go away so you don't have to I don't think
mention that but the log out thing assures them that their data will be removed but it's it's
fair warning as well like hey look don't keep your stuff here without putting it on the cloud
or on a thumb drive or something because it is going to be erased. They need to know that
people need to know what they're what they're signing up for when they're signing in to a computer.
I think it's also sort of our responsibility to admit that glitches and exceptions could occur.
I mean especially if you're using the system D work around in that case I think it would be
sort of I think it would be the right thing to say is that you know like while we're doing
our best to ensure that all data is removed you know it's not entirely impossible for the data to be
cashed for you know less than 24 hours and in some instances something like that so that
people know that there's a vague chance that data could be preserved beyond the expectation
and if they're not comfortable with that and that's that's perfectly all right then they know
what not to do on your on this system obviously telling people or reminding people that they're
on a public computer on a public network is probably a good thing as well so without going into all
of the security measures we would need to do to keep people somewhat protected from malicious
actors on all public computers I I think in terms of just getting that data erased that's what
I've come up with a GDM ram disk or system D in a pinch I hope this was useful uh give it a go try
it out see if it's a useful thing for your laptop a guest account I find it really kind of a nice
to have it's not necessary because realistically not that many people ask to use computers these days
again a pinch they have their mobile phones so it doesn't really matter but it's kind of a nice to
have it's kind of cool so um of course for me I also have to switch the keyboard over to from
divorce act to courties so that's a thing as well I haven't really looked into how to make that
automated on my guest account I'm not that concerned about it because again not that many people
ask but it's still a fun project and certainly it's very useful for a public installation so
hopefully this is uh informed you or giving you some ideas if you ever have to come up with something
like that for your library or a museum or or somewhere that you work where you want to provide
public computing services to people thanks for listening talk to you next time
You have been listening to the Hacker Public Radio podcast, at hackerpublicradio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording a podcast, then visit the HPR site to find out how easy it really is.
Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by anhonesthost.com, the Internet Archive, rsync.net, and the HPR Community Content Delivery Network.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
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Episode: 4570
Title: Playing Civilization V, Part 8
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4570/hpr4570.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:14:10 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4570, for 2026-02-06
Today's show is entitled, "Playing Civilization V, Part 8"
The host is Ahuka and the duration is 00:12:15
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "Computer games, strategy games, Civilization V, diplomacy, spies"
Hello, this is Huka, welcoming you to Hacker Public Radio and another exciting episode
in our ongoing series about computer strategy games, and we're chugging along with Civilization
5, and I want to get into some related issues here about how you can interact with other players
and things that don't involve the force of arms. And you can get an interesting new victory
type called the diplomatic victory, which was added in Civilization 5, and we're going to discuss
that and even do an example of it. So diplomacy to start with with other players, you have a relationship,
and it's based on their approach to you. They are neutral, okay, neutral means they're not friendly,
they're not hostile. The trades you make with them will be fair from their point of view.
If they're friendly, they like you, and will accept requests from you more often.
Trades will be slightly in your favor from their point of view. They can be afraid of you.
This only happens if you have a very substantial advantage in military strength. So this is rare.
They will readily accept requests from you, and trades will be in your favor.
They might be guarded. That means they are suspicious and defensive, and will be more likely to be
unfriendly. Trades will be harder to achieve and favor them rather than you.
They can be deceptive, and that means they will pretend to be friendly, but they're plotting against you.
They may bribe other players to declare warn you. They will not accept requests for help, and trades will be hard to achieve.
They could be hostile, and this means they hate you and they're completely open about it.
Trade deals, if you can get them, will be heavily against you.
And finally, there could be a state of war.
So in that case, if their attitude towards you is war, it may not be war yet, but it's coming.
They need the right conditions, so they may pretend to be friendly, neutral, guarded, or hostile,
while they wait for those conditions to mature.
These are not set in stone, and as you can modify how the other player feels to you by your actions,
if you have friends in common, that will tend to improve your relationship.
Similarly, if you have enemies in common, agreeing to their requests will also improve things,
but if you cannot agree, just say so.
The worst negative modifier is when you agree to do something and then do the opposite.
Now saying no is also negative, but it's not as bad as saying yes, and then we're nagging on the deal.
Finally, remember that negatives will erode over time if they're not reinforced.
Now, if you want a very detailed look at the mechanics and details of this,
I put a link in the show notes to the Civ fandom site with a detailed guide to diplomacy.
Now, city states are also very important diplomatic partners.
Now, we'll cover all of the benefits in a different section, but here I want to focus on how they enable
the diplomatic victory. At a certain point, the United Nations will be born out of the world's
Congress, and when this happens, a diplomatic victory is possible. Now, this will occur when any
player reaches the information era, or whenever half the players have reached the atomic era.
So, diplomatic victory requires that you get the votes of a certain number of delegates to the
United Nations. Each player gets delegates based on their population, and there are also some
additional delegates you can earn, such as to building the world wonder for bidden palace,
which gives you two additional delegates. Anyone planning for a diplomatic victory should
consider building this wonder as mandatory. But each city state gets one delegate, and if you are
allied with them, their delegate is yours. The mechanics of city state relationships is that they
love gifts and cash is always the best. So, anyone planning a diplomatic victory would be well
advised to focus on building a large treasury. You will know when a leader vote is coming up
in the United Nations and can make cash drops on any city states that are not already allied with
you before the vote. But watch out that another player doesn't do the same thing after you do,
and snipe away some of your allies. Another thing you can do is place spies in the city states to
regulations, and that's another way to get them to ally with you. And it brings us to the topic
of spies and espionage. Spies are simply awarded to you at points along the way. The first one
comes when any player enters the Renaissance era. After that you receive another spy each time
you advance to another era. So, you can, in general, have as many as five spies. But if you build
the national intelligence agency, you get one more. Now, this is an national wonder and should
be a mandatory build if you're going for a diplomacy victory. And England starts with one
extra spy. So, if you play as England, you could have as many as seven spies. Spies can be used
for offense or defense. If you station one of your spies in one of your own cities, it can operate
as a counter spy and may thwart or even kill an enemy spy. If you are well ahead in technology
that might be a good use since other players will be trying to steal your tech. But if you're
behind, you might want to use your spies to steal tech from other players. You may be successful
in this, but the theft does not go unnoticed. And the other player may use one of his spies to counter
your operation. If your spy is killed, you will get another one in three to five turns, but if
your spy was a high rank spy with promotions, that's a serious loss. So, you may want to move
that spy elsewhere for a while. Now, diplomats, when you assign the spy to the capital of another
player, you can designate them as a diplomat. Now, that will take a few turns, depends on the
game speed, but around six turns on normal speeds, to get them set up. This is called making
introductions, but the point is that if you need an effective diplomat, don't wait until the
last minute. Now, diplomats can be useful in several ways. Early on, they allow you to trade
votes in the world congress, and they will bring you intelligence about intrigues, and you can then
share that with other players. And it can also give you a view of the other player's city screen.
Once you have researched globalization, your diplomats can help with a diplomatic victory
because each one counts as one additional vote in the United Nations for world leader.
Now, you can change a spy into a diplomat, or a diplomat into a spy, just by moving the spy
or a diplomat from its current location to another location, and that triggers the ability to
change their job assignment. This means that when you first get spies and they cannot yet be used
to get additional delegate votes as diplomats, you can assign them to city states where they
can help you get alliances. Then, if you start to research globalization, move them to the
capitals of other players and turn them into diplomats. This, of course, assumes you want to win
a diplomatic victory. If instead, you are going for a science victory, and in our head in science,
it's probably best to station them in your own cities to do counterintelligence work.
If you're a head in science, other players will be trying to steal tech from you.
Now, religious pressure. If you have researched all of the piety social policy tree,
you'll have the option to choose a reformation belief to add to your religion.
One of these, called underground sect, allows your spies to resort religious pressure
against the city they have been sent to. However, this effect is fairly small.
If there is not a follower of your religion in the city, it seems to do nothing.
But in combination, it can flip cities to your religion.
Start by sending an missionary to spread your religion, and then your spy can add to that.
And you should also combine that with a trade route to add additional religious pressure.
And by gradually moving your spies, missionaries, and trade routes from city to city,
you can make your religion dominant in a region.
Now, the diplomatic victory, which is the new one that was added in Civilization 5,
we didn't have diplomatic victory as an option previously.
That can be a fun way to win. I've done it.
Now, if you want to get a leg up, start with a save that gives you advantages,
such as Greece or Venice.
Now, you know, half to do that, my last diplomatic victory was achieved with Ethiopia,
which is generally regarded as a military domination kind of safe.
And you can win any victory type with any save, and it can be fun to play against type.
Now, Greece gets an advantage from relations with city states,
which are key to diplomatic victory because each one gets a vote for the world leader.
And Venice is interesting, because with Venice, in Sioux 5, you cannot build settlers.
So, you know, what can you do? Well, you can use cash that Venice generates to puppet city states.
And you can purchase units in puppet city states as well.
Cash is king in the Venice strategy, and you will want to get as many trade routes as possible.
The first two should send food to Venice to help boost your population.
Since you will only ever have one city as Venice, you'll want to max it out.
All trade routes after that, the first two should focus on cash.
Use your cash to purchase or upgrade military units and employ a defensive strategy.
You want enough military to deter any aggression against you, but you should avoid making any
hostile moves against others if possible. Remember, this is a strategy for a diplomatic victory.
If you want to go to war, don't choose Venice. Choose one of the other domination sives,
like the Zulu's or the Mongols. So, this is a hookah for Hacker Public Radio, signing off,
and as always encouraging you to support Free Software. Bye-bye!
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording podcast, click on our upload link
to find out how easy it is.
Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by an AnHonestHost.com, the Internet Archive,
rsync.net, and our mirror network.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
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Episode: 4572
Title: Uncommon Commands, Episode 3 - strace
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4572/hpr4572.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:14:13 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4572, for 2026-02-10
Today's show is entitled, "Uncommon Commands, Episode 3 - strace"
The host is Deltaray and the duration is 00:17:01
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "An overview of how to run and read the output of the strace command."
Hello everybody and welcome to Hacker Public Radio. This is Delta Ray before I explain anything today
I want you to actually see something if you're at a Linux system right now or can be later
Try this simple command in the shell S trace space up time. That's S T R A C E space U P T I M E
So you run that and just run it once and let the output scroll by
If this is your first time seeing S trace the output probably looks a little like the matrix
You know the code that goes by on the screens there. It's a lot of text. There's some weird function names and numbers and hex codes everywhere
And if your first instinct is wow, I have no idea what I'm looking at
That's completely normal and probably what has put off most people from learning the command
But here's the important thing. You don't need to understand everything to start learning from it as
Uptime runs look near the bottom of the output
You'll likely see references to files like slash at C slash local time and slash proc slash up time
Those should already feel a little familiar slash out at C slash local time tells the program
What time zone the system is in and slash proc slash up time is where the kernel exposes how long the system has been running
So even though the output looks a bit overwhelming you can already see okay
This program is reading some files. I recognize now look for a line that includes something like right
W-R-I-T-E and then parentheses the number one comma and then the string that normally gets print out from the
Uptime command. This is probably it depends on you know how long your system has actually been up
But it might have like a
A laps time like hours min seconds followed by days maybe how many users are logged in and load average
But that right call is where uptime actually prints the text that you actually see on your screen when you run the uptime command
The one that's after the parentheses there is the file descriptor number for standard output
Standard output, you know, it means we're to print the output to the place the program will started from in this case the terminal window
So uptime isn't magically printing text it's explicitly
Asking the kernel please write these bytes to standard out and the kernel does exactly that
This is the key thing I want you to notice right away
S trace isn't magic it's simply showing you the conversation between a program in the operating system
files get opened data gets red text gets written
Once you see that the output starts to feel a little less intimidating and it's core
Estrace just shows system calls
System calls are how user space programs talk to the kernel
User space programs being the programs that you normally run when you run your system and the kernel being the back end brain for the operating system
That actually talks to the hardware
Anytime a program opens a file reads data writes output talks to the network creates a process
It has to ask the kernel to do that work because the kernel is what talks to the hardware
Estrace just lets you listen in
It's very similar to a program like TCP dump or wire shark if you've ever used that to listen to the network
Let me give you a real example of where estrace earned its keep early in my system administration career
I forced myself to get comfortable reading estrace output because I saw other system administrators using it
Not memorizing everything about it, but just learning how to recognize patterns some of the basic system calls and how the output for those system calls was presented
I used it occasionally for myself to find out why something was not working for me
But the real place where it's shined was later when I was working as a Linux system administrator at a mid-sized enterprise company
And we had this commercially developed application that just wouldn't work. It was failing and some weird way
We were trying to figure out where it was light writing files to the logs were vague the documentation wasn't great
And nothing obvious was jumping out, so we were just kind of guessing us to what it was doing
The other system administrators had theory they suspected the program was trying to read from or write to some directory
It didn't have access to
But that was about all it was a theory. We didn't have any way of proving it and the application certainly wasn't volunteering that information
This is where I suggested using estrace. I sat down sshed in to the system and ran estrace on the already running process
Just grabbing its PID its process ID and traced it live within seconds
There it was in black and white the program was trying to write a file to a specific directory and then read it back
And the directory had the wrong permissions on it
So there was no guess work, no assumptions. It just gave us evidence
What was funny was the reaction from the other system administrators the other admins were kind of stunned
They hadn't realized you could attach to a running process like that and just watch what it was doing at the system level
It was like I'd cast some magic spell or hack the system
This was one of those moments. I realized that I could create the CLI magic feed
But it wasn't magic. It was just asking the operating system. Hey, what is this program actually doing?
System calls or how operating systems work?
There is no deeper hidden layer show commands GUI applications
Demons containers everything eventually boils down to system calls like open read right
Stat fork exec fee. There's a whole bunch more out there and there's some newer ones that you might have
seen in the in the output of S trace
But I'm not going to get into all that essentially if you see something like open or open to or open add
It's still probably reading a file or opening a file
So once you internalize that S trace stops being scary and starts being more obvious
Now let's simplify things further try to running this command S trace space dash e space open at
So O P E N A T space
LS
So you basically running the LS command from S trace so that it all attached to the LS command right away
The dash e option tells S trace only show me file open relayed system calls
In other words the open at system call you have to be specific to whatever system call
You're trying to actually filter out this cuts down on the noise quite a bit as it's only gonna show you
The open add functions
So instead of thousands of lines of output you'll see a short list showing which files LS asks the kernel to open
You might see something like open at
AT
Fd CWD
O
Rd only oh
Directory equals three and you know a lot of that stuff. I mean, I you know, I can't really read it
But you can kind of get it's to it's talking about you know read only access maybe and and
A directory or something and CWD might mean current working directory
But that's not what really matters here the equals three at the end is probably the most important part
You don't need to understand everything here just a few pieces so open at is the system call the dot
That's in the middle of the system call is just the path that's being opened so the dot meaning the current
Directory that you're in and the equals three at the end is the file descriptor that's returned by the kernel
If you're not familiar with programming and file descriptors don't worry too much about that
It's basically just a way of referencing the file like the data that it's accessing
So in this case, it's assigning it to the number three
File descriptors are are just usually small integers
You'll see something like zero for standard input one for standard output and two for standard error
So when you see something like three four five those are additional files the program is opened
In this case three being the current directory that you're in
If the program that you're running happened to open up more files those numbers would increase more
But it's important to note that those numbers might need to be referenced later if you're looking at a more
Sophisticated S trace output of a of a bigger program
You might have to keep track of those numbers so that you can see where it actually reads from a file that opens and so on
So those numbers can help you figure those things out
Now let's try something that doesn't exist if you run S trace space dash e
Open at space LS and then it doesn't matter which put here maybe just put in slash does slash not slash exist
And you'll see something like open at followed by you know those those capital letter flags and then the path that you actually tried to
Open or list and you know does not exist and then the important part is at the end the negative one
ENO ENT that's incredibly useful. It's it's the kernel is telling you very plainly
I was asked to open a file and it does not exist so there's no guessing or mystery you can see right there
What the the output error code was from the kernel
If you later read uh if you later trace the read calls you'll see lines like read
Followed by parentheses and then you know the file handle number so maybe it's a three and then
Some extra arguments to that function
Followed by a number at the end. It's probably gonna be something like 4,096
It might be a different power of two but usually it's a power of two
Unless you're getting to the end of a file and then it might be whatever's left over
And so after that it's gonna say equals and then the last number is gonna be like 128 or
Something like that and that's how many bytes were actually read in
On that function call. So that's kind of useful. You can see how many actual bytes of data got read in
Not how many were requested but how many were returned
You don't need to master this right now. Just notice how explicit the kernel is being so that you can kind of get a sense of
Hey, this data is here. I can actually use this later and trying to diagnose a problem
There's another situation you're running into with strace. That's worth talking about
Sometimes you attach strace to a process and it just sits there. No scrolling no errors just one line
Maybe nothing at all and it usually means that it's waiting for something
So you might see something like read
Print the seeds three comma something and then 4,96 and then it's just sitting there and it doesn't return a prompt or anything
That means the program is waiting for input. So the program that it's stracing is waiting for some kind of data to come back
That could be data from a file from a
pipe from a socket from another process
It's not a crash. It's basically just blocking on IO
Waiting and you know at this point you might just yes say control c
But it could be that this will tell you you know that some things not what right with the program
Maybe something's not right with your file system or whatever
Most definitely if you try to hit control c here and it doesn't give you the prompt backed
And you can't cancel the strace process which I've run into before you probably do have some kind of problem with
Your storage device or something and the kernel isn't able to like give you back the data
The same idea applies to socket relayed calls if a process is just sitting in a network called
Offemines of swing for the remote service and a connection or data to arrive over the network
Again, it's not necessarily an error. It's just waiting
If you attach to if you attach strace and see no system calls happening that often means the program is busy doing work entirely in user space
Maybe calculations parsing compression, you know something like that until it needs to talk to the kernel again
There's nothing to show that distinction alone can save you a lot of time because you know, oh, it's actually doing something
Maybe it's stuck in infinite loop. It's it's hard to know but at least it gives you some kind of information
One thing that trips people up strace writes it's output to standard error
Not standard output. So you won't be able to do something like strace space LS pipe
Grap open. You're not going to actually be able to filter out those open requests that way
You can fix that by redirecting standard error to standard output
By using something like strace space LS space two greater than ampersand one which does the
Redirection and combining was standard output and then pipe that into Grap open
Or you can have strace right directly to a file which is what I usually do when I'm using strace and there's like a lot of output
So you use the dash oh option like this strace space dash oh space
The file that you want to log to so you might call like trace.log space LS or whatever command you want to run
So that dash oh option is very useful for when you're doing very large traces that you want to look at later
Maybe in using the less command or something like that
You can also attach strace to a running process. So for instance if you have like a demon or something like that
They want to monitor you can use the dash p option so it can be like strace space dash p space the process ID so make you know like one two three four five
And this lets you see what a program is doing right now as it's running when you're done you can press
Control c and it detaches strace in the process that you're you're monitoring keeps running in the background
Many programs also fork off in our words. They copy themselves and memory and make a new process
In the table and that can become confusing when you try to run strace again something because
The strace for the initial command will end and you won't actually
Continue tracing what you forked off and so in that case you need to use some options either dash f or dash f
In order to start following off the forked processes
So maybe you're running you know strace space dash f space my server or you know some some server
Command that you want to start
If you want to split the output in the separate files
So that you have an output file, but it creates a new file for every forked off process for instance like a web server
Does this kind of thing then you would use the dash f f option along with dash o and
You know the output file that you want and then it'll create a new file with the process ID and it's file name
For every forked off process so this way if you want to do something like monitor a web server
You can do that and you'll have a
Separate trace log for each of the requests that gets made. I've done this several times for for monitoring web servers
Astrace doesn't just help you debug it also changes your mental model instead of thinking this makes no sense
You start thinking what is a program asking the kernel to do?
You know behind each of those buttons in a gooey application and behind every one of those commands that you're
Running our system calls that are getting made to the kernel to do different things and that shift makes
Debugging comma more mechanical and much less emotional, you know, you're going to have a process to doing it
So if strace feels like black magic right now, that's normal
But it isn't magic it's literacy and
Once you have it you'll start seeing problems not as mysteries but as conversations between
Program and the kernel that you can finally listen to
Thanks for listening and as always welcome to hacker public radio
I hope that you take the time to actually record an episode in the future take care so long
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording podcast, click on our upload link
to find out how easy it is.
Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by an AnHonestHost.com, the Internet Archive,
rsync.net, and our mirror network.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
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Episode: 4573
Title: Nuclear Reactor Technology - Ep 6 Thorium Reactors
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4573/hpr4573.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:14:14 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4573, for 2026-02-11
Today's show is entitled, "Nuclear Reactor Technology - Ep 6 Thorium Reactors"
The host is Whiskeyjack and the duration is 00:16:57
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "The use of thorium in nuclear power, what thorium is, what sort of reactors can use it."
This episode is the sixth in an eight-part series of nuclear reactor technology.
In this episode, we will describe the use of thorium and nuclear power, including what thorium
is, how it differs from uranium, and what sort of reactors can use it.
What is thorium?
Thorium is a slightly radioactive metal, which can be used for nuclear fuel, and which
is roughly three times as abundant as uranium.
Really all naturally occurring thorium is a single isotope, TH-232.
Other isotopes such as TH-228, TH-230, and TH-234 exist only in trace amounts, and so
can be ignored for our purposes.
Thorium oxide has long been used in applications such as gas, metals, and high-temperature
ceramics, but has seen little use in nuclear power beyond some experimental reactors.
While thorium differs from uranium, while thorium can be used in nuclear fuel, thorium 232
is fertile rather than fizzile.
That means that pure thorium is not itself directly capable of sustaining a nuclear
reaction.
Instead, it must be turned into a fizzile isotope by bombarding it with neutrons.
In this respect, it is similar to uranium 238, which is the main isotope of uranium, which
can be turned into fizzile and non-fizzile plutonium.
In the case of thorium 232, it can be turned into uranium 233, which is a fizzile isotope
much like uranium 235.
However, unlike uranium 235, uranium 233 is not considered to be useful from making
nuclear weapons.
Sources of thorium Currently, the largest non-reserves of thorium are in India, followed
by Brazil and Australia.
However, since there is currently a very limited market for thorium, there has not been
a lot of exploration done, and it is possible that very large reserves exist elsewhere.
As a result of this, take attempts to list thorium reserves by country with a very large
grain of salt, except for a few very large cases.
India's large reserves of thorium, however, explains their interest in using it as fuel.
China also have an interest in thorium, such that it is often produced as a byproduct of
rare earthbinding and refining.
As a result of this, there are large reserves of thorium already mine there, which could
be used as fuel.
Why there is interest in using thorium as a fuel?
There are several reasons why people are interested in using thorium as a nuclear fuel.
Abundance of thorium Thorium is roughly three times as abundant as uranium in the earth's
crust.
This is based on statistical sampling of rocks, not in terms of finding commercial order
deposits.
However, the world is not currently short of uranium, so the relative abundance of
thorium is not a significant advantage at this time.
Some countries have a lot of it.
Some countries in India in particular have far more thorium than they do uranium.
As a result of this, they see thorium as a strategic and security advantage in giving them
a sovereign independent supply of energy.
Thorium breeder reactors are simpler than uranium breeder reactors.
Thorium 232 to uranium 233, the a neutron bombardment, is analogous to converting uranium 238
to various plutonium isotopes in terms of turning fertile isotopes into fizzile ones.
Listen again to the previous episode on fast neutron reactors if you need to refresh
your on those, but fast neutron breeder reactors are more expensive and difficult to design
and operate than thorium reactors.
Thorium can be used in reactors similar to certain types which have been in large-scale
commercial use for decades, and so are less complex and expensive than, for example, a
liquid sodium-fast neutron reactor.
No new technologies required to use thorium in commercial power reactors.
Supposed lower nuclear weapons potential.
Some people are of the view that there is less potential for creating nuclear weapons if
thorium is used as fuel than is the case for uranium.
However, I am not convinced of this as an argument.
Commercial uranium cycle power reactors are not suitable for creating weapons-grade plutonium.
Plutonium or enriched uranium are required for thorium cycle reactors.
A country which has a large number of thorium cycle reactors will need either uranium
enrichment or plutonium processing facilities while natural uranium reactors require neither.
On this basis, the least problematic fuel would appear to be natural uranium.
What is thorium breeding?
As mentioned previously, thorium by itself cannot be used as a nuclear fuel.
By using plutonium or enriched uranium as driver elements, however, thorium can be converted
to fizzile uranium 233 which can be used to sustain a reaction.
There are different configurations for the fuel elements which I won't go into here as
this would require too much detail.
Essentially, though, a mix of thorium 232 and either plutonium or enriched uranium 235
would be loaded into the reactor.
The reaction would be started off by the plutonium or uranium 235.
Bombardment of the thorium 232 by neutrons would gradually convert it to uranium 233.
As uranium 233 accumulated, it would also efficient and contribute to the power output,
making up for the using up of the plutonium and uranium 235.
By the end of the life of the fuel, all or nearly all of the energy would be coming from the
created uranium 233.
The fuel is then removed from the reactor and reprocess to recover the remaining uranium 233.
This uranium 233 may then be used as a driver fuel for a fresh fuel load.
For reactors that are refueled continuously while online, that is while operating,
fresh fuel is continuously fed in and used fuel extracted rather than being distinct
loading and unloading phases of operation.
Breeding ratio.
The amount of uranium 233 created in this process will depend upon the reactor and fuel design.
This may vary from not much uranium 233 generated all the way up to theoretically at least,
more uranium 233 being extracted from the spent fuel than the amount of driver fuel used to
start the reaction.
That is, the breeding ratio would be greater than one.
However, this has not been demonstrated and most fuel cycles assume that a continual source of
driver fuel will be required, generally from some sort of uranium cycle reactors.
What sorts of reactors can use thorium?
Most of the types of nuclear reactors we have discussed so far in the series can use thorium fuel to some extent.
However, some are more suitable for it than others.
pH WRs, that is heavy water reactors, including can do.
Large-scale commercial pressurized heavy water reactors have been used for decades around the world.
These have run on natural uranium but are also well suited to using thorium fuel due to their
efficient use of neutrons.
India is one of the countries using this type of reactor and they have done a great deal of R&D
on using them with thorium.
A typical thorium fuel for them would consist of 5% reactor-grade plutonium,
plus thorium, about 80% of the energy generated would come from the thorium portion of the fuel.
An alternative to plutonium would be low enriched uranium.
None of the commercial reactors of this type are currently running on thorium,
but this is an area of ongoing research, particularly in India.
HTR, high temperature gas-cooled reactors, as mentioned in a previous episode,
some of the experimental gas-cooled reactors have used thorium fuel.
Examples of these are the AVR and THTR 300 reactors in Germany in the 1960s to the 1980s.
These were pebble bed reactors in which the fuel was in the form of spheres of fuel,
enriched uranium and thorium, plus a graphite moderator, and formed into billiard ball size spheres.
The reactors were cooled by helium gas.
Pebble bed reactor technology is being revived for the small modular reactor market,
but these doer ones don't involve thorium.
Moulton salt reactors. Moulton salt reactors use molten salt as a coolant.
When used with dissolved thorium fuel, the salt would be a fluoride salt in order to be chemically
compatible with thorium. To be used in a thorium fuel cycle, they would normally have a graphite
moderator. From the perspective of thorium, there are two variants of molten salt reactor
that are of interest. One type contains a fuel inside separate fuel pins, like in most other
reactor types. The other dissolves a fuel in the molten salt coolant.
In the latter case, there would be a chemical processing loop that extracts unwanted
fission products that is elements that were created in the reaction that we don't want present,
and uranium 233 from the salt on a continuous basis. Moulton salt reactors were discussed in
another episode as they can use many types of fuel besides thorium. Not all developers of molten
salt reactors are convinced they are well suited to using thorium. With the head of one company
citing the difficult chemistry problems that thorium presents, and the effects this has on the
types of molten salt used as compared to uranium. Lightwater reactors. Lightwater reactors,
both the common pressurized water and boiling water reactor types, could use thorium fuel,
but are not well suited to it. They would not achieve very good breeding ratios in terms of
converting thorium 232 to uranium 233. A major drawback of these reactors is their lower
neutron economy due to the use of a less effective moderator. However, there is some attraction
in terms of using them to get rid of surplus plutonium if that is what is desired.
One of the features of thorium mixed oxide fuel is that unlike uranium-based mixed oxide fuels,
it can burn plutonium without creating more plutonium for uranium 238.
I'm not sure what the attraction of this is, although there are apparently
is at least some minor interest in this from some quarters. Fast neutron reactors, thorium
could be used in place if uranium 238 in fast neutron reactors. However, there is no real reason
to do this when surplus uranium 238 is available, and the latter provides a better breeding ratio
that is, produces more physon material from a given amount of fuel. The challenge is facing
thorium fuel reactors. The main challenge facing the use of thorium is that it does not
offer a lot of practical advantages over uranium. Like fast neutron reactors, using thorium
was seen as a solution to a perceived future shortage of uranium. However, that shortage didn't
materialize instead large new reserves of uranium were found. The cost of uranium is only a small
part of the total cost of electric power from nuclear power plant, so uranium prices could
rise significantly without affecting overall cost much. With enough of a rise in prices,
uranium could be economically extracted from sea water, opening up a very large potential
resource as there are very large amounts of it dissolved in the sea. Uranium fuel is already
tested, qualified, and available in quantity on the commercial market. Thorium is not,
and overcoming that will require a large investment. Thorium is more expensive the process of
defuel due to its chemical nature and the exceptionally high melting point of its oxide.
A practical thorium fuel cycle requires reprocessing of spent fuel, something that is not required
for a once-through fuel cycle with uranium, and is done with uranium in only a few countries today.
This reprocessing is another additional cost. The uranium 233 and leftover thorium in spent fuel
contain highly radioactive isotopes such as uranium 232 and thorium 228, which make reprocessing
difficult and expensive. This is not to say that thorium does not have some potential in the
long run. Rather, it means that the advantages of thorium are offset by problems which come along
with it. Overall, the balance of present in most countries favors using uranium in a once-through
fuel cycle. Thorium in India, an example use case, India is probably the prime example of a
country that has had a long-term interest in thorium-based nuclear power. This is an area they
have been researching and developing for decades. The main reactor types using India are also
well suited to being adopted to thorium fuel. These are pressurized heavy water reactors
originally derived from Canadian designs. Indian scientists and engineers continue to develop
these reactor designs into once which maintain the original principles, but are currently independent
Indian designs. Because of this reactor types of very efficient use of neutrons, it is well suited
to using thorium fuel. Why is India pursuing using thorium? The reason that India are pursuing
using thorium is that they have abundant supplies of thorium, but very limited supplies of uranium.
While Canada uses a similar type of reactor, it has abundant supplies of uranium and so has
had much less incentive to put much effort into thorium fuel. How would a thorium fuel cycle work in
India? The basic fuel cycle would work as follows. Uranium cycle fast-breeder reactors would produce
plutonium from uranium and uranium 233 from a blanket of thorium around the uranium core.
The plutonium in uranium 233 would be incorporated into mixed oxide fuel as plutonium
thorium and uranium 233 thorium fuel. This mocks fuel would be used in pressurized heavy water
reactors. Each fast-breeder reactor could supply fuel for multiple pressurized heavy water reactors.
The spent fuel in additional blanket material from the pressurized heavy water reactors
would be reprocessed to extract the leftover uranium 233. This recovered uranium 233 would then
be fed back into the fuel cycle to make more fuel with top-ups from fast-breeder reactors added
as required. This fuel cycle would allow India to use its thorium reserves with a relatively
small amount of uranium input. Current status India are working on the fast-breeder reactors
which would be used to provide the seed material for thorium fuel in their pressurized heavy water
reactors. India continue to pursue using thorium but they need to build up the rest of the fuel
cycle which enables it before they can switch to thorium on a large scale.
Reportedly they already use some thorium fuel in some of the fuel channels of their heavy water
reactors in order to smooth out the power profile but details of this are hard to come by.
India are expected to undergo rapid economic growth, industrial development,
and population movement into very large urban centers over the course of this century.
Meanwhile coal resources are becoming depleted as well as being a source of serious air pollution.
India hopes to use thorium to provide a secure domestic energy resource which can replace coal
and power their future development. Conclusion thorium is an abundant material that is seen as an
alternative to uranium and nuclear power. Experimental thorium power reactors take back to at least
the 1960s. No new reactor technology is required to use thorium. Existing well proven reactor
designs which have been in use for decades can use thorium as fuel. The common light water
reactor designs that are popular in some countries however are not well suited to using thorium.
Initial interest in thorium was mainly driven by a perception that uranium would be in short
supply in future and slow neutron thorium reactors were cheaper and simpler than fast neutron
uranium reactors. However huge new high-grade supplies uranium were founded in a number of countries
causing uranium prices to fall and reducing interest in finding alternatives. While some
R&D continues on thorium fuel in a number of countries, the mainstream of development continues to
be on uranium-based fuel. Some countries with abundant thorium reserves so maintain a major
interest in thorium with India being the prime example. In the next episode, we will describe
small modular reactors. This concludes the sixth episode of an eight-part series on nuclear
reactor technology.
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording podcast, click on our upload link
to find out how easy it is.
Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by an AnHonestHost.com, the Internet Archive,
rsync.net, and our mirror network.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
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Episode: 4574
Title: UNIX Curio #0 - Introduction
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4574/hpr4574.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:14:14 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4574, for 2026-02-12
Today's show is entitled, "UNIX Curio #0 - Introduction"
The host is Vance and the duration is 00:09:49
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "Overview of the series plus the hierarchy of files"
Hi there, I'm Vance and welcome to Unix Curio No. 0.
This series is dedicated to exploring little known, and occasionally useful, trinkets lurking
in the dusty corners of unix-like operating systems.
I'm calling this entry 0 of the series as it is mainly an introduction to what it's
supposed to be about and why you might want to listen.
So that you don't leave without getting at least one piece of useful information, it
will end with a little curio that you might not find helpful someday.
Back in 2010, I was the editor of the newsletter titled The Open Pit for the Western
Pennsylvania Linux User Group and Pittsburgh.
We distributed it as a 2-page PDF, so had to have enough material to fill each issue.
Because we were having trouble getting contributions, I started writing columns in a series
called Unix Curio to occupy the empty space.
These were inspired in large part by examples that I had seen of people reinventing
ways to do things when utilities for the same purpose had already existed for a long time.
The obvious question is, just what is a Unix Curio?
Let's start with the first word, Unix.
The history of Unix is quite complex.
I've put a link in the show notes to get you started if you want to go down that particular
rabbit hole.
The short version of the story is that many variants emerged, often introducing incompatibilities.
Even within AT&T Bell Laboratories, two major branches came out.
The research Unix lineage, which includes seventh edition, sometimes called version 7,
was often used in universities and government, while system 3, and it's more popular
successor system 5, were clearly intended as commercial products.
Traditionally, system 3 and system 5 are written with Roman numerals while research Unix
versions are written with Arabic numerals.
The University of California's BSD, the Berkeley Software Distribution, was also very influential.
My intention in this series is to talk about things that are relatively common.
Ideally, there would be present on a large majority of systems so that you can actually
use them.
Luckily, with these variants arising from different places, there were people who
recognized the value in compatibility.
So in the mid-1980s, they initiated the development of the POSIX standards.
Publication of these not only caused commercial Unix versions to aim for performance,
it also gave free software implementations of utilities and operating systems, a stable
base to shoot for, rather than having to chase multiple moving targets.
As a result, today's GNU Linux, Free BSD, Net BSD, and Open BSD systems generally behave
as specified in POSIX, even if they haven't officially earned the Unix or POSIX labels.
So I treat all these as being part of the Unix world.
Moving on to the second word, Curio, it just means an objective curiosity
often one considered novel, rare, or bizarre.
There are many well-used utilities in the Unix world, but people forget about others
because they are only useful in specific circumstances.
And when those circumstances arise, these obscure ones don't always get remembered.
One purpose of this series is to point out some of these and describe where they can be
appropriately put to use. With the flexible tools available on Unix-like systems,
and the ability to easily string them together, it shouldn't be surprising that people come
up with new ways to accomplish tasks. I don't want to claim that these Curios are always the best
way to do something, just that it can be helpful to know that they exist and see the way that someone
else solved the problem. Also, if you're using an unfamiliar system,
sometimes programs that you're accustomed to employing might not be installed.
So it's good to know about options that are widely available.
So why am I the person to talk about this subject?
I am not a Unix graveyard with decades of professional computing experience.
If I did grow a beard, it would only be partially gray, and my working life has been spent in the
engineering world, mainly around safety equipment. Sadly there, I have been forced to use windows
almost exclusively. However, in my academic and personal pursuits, I've been involved with using
Unix and Linux for more than 30 years, so I do have a bit of a historical perspective.
For some reason, when I encounter an unusual or obscure tool, I want to learn more about it.
Especially so if I find it to be useful in some way.
After gaining this information, I might as well share it with you.
In addition, I've been involved with Toastmasters International
a public speaking organization for about 15 years, so I have experience in presenting things
worldly. I was inspired to turn this article series into podcasts by another host,
Murph, who delivered a presentation at the 2025 OLF conference, describing how and why to contribute
to Hacker Public Radio. The show notes for Curios 133 will consist of the articles as they
were originally written, though with references added. Because some of the examples in these,
especially the code, can be difficult to understand when they are read out loud,
the podcasts will sometimes present the information in a different way.
The show notes for this Curios 0 and for Curios 4 and later will be written with the podcast format
in mind, so they will more closely match what I say. Now that I've given you the background,
let's end with an actual Curio to kick off the series. Have you ever needed a reminder
about whether the file that you're looking for can be found under the slash user or slash
bar directories? On many unique systems, there is a manual page that will give you an overview
of how the file hierarchy is organized. Try Man Higher that is spelled HIER or in the phonetic
alphabet, Hotel India Echo Romeo, it's an abbreviation for hierarchy. This manual page is not
a standard, but it was present in 7th edition Unix and many descendants direct and indirect,
including every Linux distribution that I have ever used. There are attempts to standardize the file
layout. In the Linux world, the file system hierarchy standard, now hosted by freedeskop.org,
intends to set a path to be followed. It should be noted that system D has its own idea of how
things should be laid out based on the file system hierarchy standard. If the system you're using
has system D, try Man, file, hyphen, hierarchy instead, as it will likely be a more accurate description.
I hope this gives you a good idea of what to expect in future episodes. The first Unix Curio
will be about shell archives, so keep an eye on hacker public radio schedule for it to appear.
If you have a question or a suggestion for a future topic, please comment on this episode on the
HPR website.
You have been listening to the Hacker Public Radio podcast, at hackerpublicradio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording a podcast, then visit the HPR site to find out how easy it really is.
Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by anhonesthost.com, the Internet Archive, rsync.net, and the HPR Community Content Delivery Network.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
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Episode: 4575
Title: Making First Contact
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4575/hpr4575.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:14:15 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4575, for 2026-02-13
Today's show is entitled, "Making First Contact"
The host is Ken Fallon and the duration is 00:29:16
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "Ken finally makes his first contact with Kees "
hi everybody my name is ken fallon and you're listening to another episode of hacker public
radio wow this one has been a long time in the making ladies and gentlemen i am joined here by
elmer and you are i am case and the call sign is papa alpha seven tango risky oscar or m5 twr
yeah in five two in five two so um the reason that this we're actually recording after work
and uh case is a licensed amateur radio operator here in the netherlands and my first contact with
you was where some sort of i had some sort of aerial uh 5 8 whip thing and uh one of the guys
said yeah go down to case he knows all about this and ever since then case has been bugging me to do
uh to become amateur radio operator and it was actually you send me a link that the rsgb which
is the religious society of the great britain during cold war had switched their introductory licensing
to online for the first time yeah yeah which actually brings me to this episode because
they also removed the need to do the when you do the technician class in the uk you're supposed to do
go to a club and you're supposed to do your first contact and you're supposed to do the aerial and
stuff and all the physical stuff of course that wasn't allowed during covert times so i skipped over
that then when i got the intermediate they had put that also online and then when i had done that
the third one also came online so i ended up not having made a contact and getting my full license
and now i've got a dutch license due to the magic i'm haric and now i'm paranoid because i got this
lovely radio which i bought from you or via you and i'm very scared to turn it on because if i get yeah
get around i'll blow it up a little bit of background from my end then yeah 1990 was my first
license in the netherlands d license on the vhf what was it 25 watts or 10 watts or whatever in fm mode
1991 half year later i switched to f-class that was 50 megahertz yeah full license it was 15 megahertz
and up whereby the six meter band was the only possibility to do dx-ing
further than let's say 1500 to 2000 kilometers that lasted until the year 2000 where i took the
advantage of the switching from z class a and b to be to become more less so to say and in one of the very
last exams in the uk i did the cw uh uh yeah the moscow the moscow exam and hence me getting the uh the m5
dw as i believe the one and only foreigner in a range of something like maybe 90 or left or so
and of course i'm uh range super and you're still bugging me to do sort of motorcycle absolutely
elementary cause yeah it would be nice it would be nice because as i said to you it would be nice
to get an irish call sign because they're they give you the ie then a number and a three debtor
if you don't have morse but if you do morse you have to you know it's just a subtle thing it's like
you've got horse i see you've got horse um that's the same with the m5 right yeah
it would be nice and it also bugs me that my license has got cw not included yeah yeah on the little
license card yeah okay now i might not be willing to blow up uh two grand amateur radio but i am
willing to blow these things up and these things here are both filing five or minis uhf vhf analog
amateur radios for i was able to get two of them for the price of 35 euros
to deliver to your house deliver to my house okay somebody somewhere has been exploited but okay fine
um the guys on the it's probably just one chip inside yeah exactly that's that's what it is and
that's right it's darn cheap uh the guys on the hbr um uh channel were talking about this so it was
like a no-brainer and tech minds video i'll put a link in the show notes also a link to pictures of this
in the show notes as well for this episode so what we're going to do is this is the plan we will open
this up oh and we will uh make a contact and we will make my first ever contact with an actual radio
and basically go through what would have gone through had i needed to do it back in the day okay
sound good yeah let's open the box oh look at that so what we're looking at here are two little
radios and by little i mean they're tiny they're like very tiny they're like remember the old
mobile phones yeah i got those specifically so there you go have one room and drill you're gonna
have one yeah i'll have the other here's here's the battery and the battery uh i did unpack these
last night on charge actually it's actually made from aluminium right yeah it feels oh basically it's
heavier okay yeah it feels nice and the battery's got a usb charger on it meaning you don't need any
additional proprietary connector or whatever however you would i i mean i've got bars of chocolate that
are bigger than this yeah it feels nice in them it does feel nice yeah you it's clicks together
it's okay quite well how do you put the box in presumably
it says bb turn them out okay um anything about the antenna on this
it says fm 136 to 174 400 to 520 megahertz
so i'll screw on the little tiny antenna and literally it is the width of my hand
okay how do i turn this off that is a little bit of a question right it's now in dual band mode so we
need to try to get rid of that i haven't i have a manual oh dear you didn't find it out first yeah
we can look at the manual or we can waste everybody's time here while we're talking about
amateur radios so this thing is um has got a little rubber duck antenna at the top
it's got a button that says volume on and off and when i turn that on i see the bowfine logo and it
says four three zero and then disappears menu
and we'll pause the recording here while we figure out how these radios work
so we got them working we don't know how but fine i don't know how you do so um what we're going to do
now is a qso what's what's a qso the qso is just an interaction between two radio licensed radio amateurs
in this case and just exchange some information and we start by asking whether the frequency is
actually free to use so no why well you can interfere others if you don't and that we should try to
avoid them you can just change the frequency take another one which is free and do the conversation
there so what what uh what spectrum are we using what button with all right this is to meet a bit
so one four five five uh five two seven megahertz so that means exactly the same thing so yeah which is
a simple simplex channel and so one four five six hundred and up are for repeaters right and for some
other uses as well but below that up to one four five what is it two hundred or something that's for
simplex traffic so when we talk about meters two meters we're talking about it's shorthand for a range
of frequencies it's about how long the wavelength is that is correct and then you can also say how
frequent the wavelengths come past is also a way of measuring it it all relates to the propagation speed
of light so it's essentially the same thing yeah um and that also depends on the antenna that you have
whether it can pick it up or not or whether it resonates uh better at least on the two on the
on the two frequency bands that are in this little handle uh yeah so super short of ship optimized so you've
got all the spectrum and then amateur radio gets a thin slice of the various different bands so you've got
the very little bands 20 meters 40 meters yeah and we've got a tiny little sliver of all of those and
then within a country those tiny or within a region those tiny slivers are further divided up so that
this this part is where you're going to get more schooled this part is where you're going to get
talky talky stuff yeah here's where our repeaters are recommended not a firm firm very firm depends on the
country but here in the netlands at least it is an advice yeah so let's do that yeah and you're also not
wasting time by being somewhere that somebody's not going to be so actually okay so what's next what
what next would be that we will exchange the callsigns does it matter so say identification i will go cq which
is a shorthand for or can i go cq talking to you and give your callsign you in example if you're just
querying whether somebody will respond to you uh beside that like for now we've got the appointment
here made to do the qso but you're just sending it out in the in the world so to say that radio
signal is there anyone around basically yeah yeah exactly and then you you provide your call sign
and then receiving stations on the other end now okay it's a guy from holland or from england or
whatever country they probably can even see your license class they can in the meantime if they
really quick look you up on qrz.com so they know your name already up front or at least the location
they are where you're probably transmitting from and then you exchange the two callsigns so i know that
you are valid licensed radio amateur and vice versa and then you can have a conversation about almost anything
you like except uh music in the netherlands that's still not allowed although you can talk about it
but you can't play it yeah i do hear qsrs whereby an example just a tiny little bit of music or or tiny
little bit a low volume of music is actually playing in the background i never heard of any problems around
that topic but what what needs to be avoided is like you are like a pilot's radio station yeah
broadcast our station yeah that is not what they like yeah and it's supposed to be for amateur use
and non-commercial exactly exactly so and we should also bear in mind that it's a public channel so
everybody can listen everybody can listen in so uh be aware that there are small kids or whatever could
be listening yeah that is of course with normal fm fm mode radios and nowadays we also use digital modes
whereby at least you can scribble some of it and there are specific propriety uh handles where you
program a specific code just between what uh let's say two or more handles but uh if you don't know that
specific programming goes then you cannot decide yeah i thought that's that's sort of gray area because
you're not supposed to encrypt anything either yeah yeah it happens yeah it happens fair enough okay
so can i suggest you go outside i'll stay here with the recording yes sure then i'll press the b button
i'll call qso rcq yeah then what do i do you start talking i just go is this frequency free first of all
then that is that's the first thing you always need to ask or or just determine whether the
frequencies you use yeah you want to know for sure you want to be certain then you ask if you can see
yeah and then uh then there's five and nine what's this five and nine that everybody keeps talking
about i actually wanted to take a side step and look at your transmitting lookbook what is what is
what is that about and why should why do you need here because we are here in the netherlands we're
here in the netherlands and there's not not it's not mandatory and it's not i don't think it's mandatory
in the uk either but it is mandatory in ireland and i personally think it would be nice to record of
course yes because i'm not i'm not dx-ing and dx-ing is something that you are very much into um which is
dx-ing will be contacting this distance stations i guess the action can be described as like a a distant
dcc entity yeah which can be okay when you start with uh with amateur radio and if the goal of of
doing the hobby is like okay i want to work as many possible countries or entities then any new country is
actually a dx for you yes but for me it is like the the very few remaining are all way past 15 000
kilometers from from where i reside with my with my amateur radio station and yeah you need specific
conditions provided by mother nature number one politics yeah politics as well but with regards to
neighbors you mean no no with regard they might be there the it wouldn't happen oh yeah yeah look at
p5 like like north korea i mean the only way to contact that country is probably via if in the future
like it happened in the past is with the vn mission yeah and then for the vn mission at the time the only
way to to one of the ways to talk back to their home country was via the amateur radio yeah un mission yeah
so they're yeah exactly so yeah unless something funny happens so to say or something totally
unexpected with with regards to north korean uh north korea um yeah that will be one of the countries
you've also that i just can't work you also chase chasing dx is something that you've done you've done
different modes morse codes yeah yeah well all the different yeah there's in the in the united states
there's a award program uh dxc award program and you basically start with um contacting at least 100
countries or 100 entities so to say you get all the digital or the paper confirmations or a paper
confirmation being a qsl card yeah yeah yeah qsl card those cards need to be checked by a field checker from
the dxc desk most countries have got one person assigned within the amateur radio community
to do their field checks and then the list will be sent to the usa to the desk and if they approve
your application then you get a nice award and that you have contacted and confirmed a conversation with
at least 100 countries but that's just the start next you can also do exactly the same
on all frequency bands that you are allowed on but you can also start and they've got the program as
well to do an example in single sideband mode in frequency mode or am mode or cw mode
so yeah that is rather a life a challenge for life yeah i think that's the right wording here
uh you probably be never ever complete uh you can never complete admission and some of us now are
at the stage whereby yeah most of the entities are being confirmed are confirmed and there's just
nothing new anymore no and then you need to take another look at the hobby you're like okay yeah
yeah yeah i'm going to do next there are many side steps like you can get all kinds of certificates
etc etc but the dx hunting so so working that specific entity which cannot on a normal circumstances
not be reached during the day or night or whatever period of time of the day and then you make the qso
after five years of waiting and trying and desperately sending emails like i can be please be on the
frequency in that time at that time of the day we should have at least one percent chance and if then
the qso completes then you're just happy days yeah of course and i've got several with whereby
we had to attempt so many qsrs yeah and one of the countries and a qso is sorry just in case
a qso is just a conversation conversation yeah yeah yeah and so we're going to be having a qso now here
exactly yeah of course that's very short distance well the vhf radio it'll be the longest distance
i've ever done yeah yeah yeah exactly exactly but at least it will be in the car my my main uh
last adventures uh with amateur radio was the 60 meter band 605 uh five megahertz and um the
the band before that one which i wanted to have completed was the one with 60 meter band
which is uh with our tiny gardens in the netherlands quite a mission to get accomplished yeah yeah and
that took me over three years in summer time during the summer months trying out antennas
up to the very moment where all of a sudden it all came together and then it was like in a half year's
time i did excellent excellent excellent good stuff and uh because of you i have this hobby now which
has been very useful um and i know you're interested in dx but for other people listening it's it's like
when somebody says oh you're in it you know you're you're going to a party at something and you go you're
in it and you're talking to somebody who's who's doing you know databases for ibm or you're talking
to somebody who's doing cobalt there's so many different facets of the hobby yeah yeah but the
good thing about it is once you get your uh once you get your full license uh all how to's and all
discussions are based on that level of assumption if you're having a conversation with somebody who's got
a full license you you don't need to start explaining how yeah you you can assume that they know the speed
of light you can assume that they know what uh when you when you go for the exam for the license right
you need to have basic knowledge of electronics in example but also about antenna also about propagation
safety safety safety uh so yeah it's just nice nice common knowledge as well yes it's nothing and only
anything that i've come up on the course that hasn't i haven't found interesting or yeah or in fact
useful later on particularly what we do here and work okay should we do this thing
is it so super okay i'll press pause
okay
papa alpha seven kilo echo november go ahead over
yeah papa alpha seven
thank you
what's your call sign again over
okay okay papa alpha seven
tango whiskey alpha this is papa alpha seven kilo echo november you're coming in loud and clear these
are very nice little hand cells and let's say
back to you
back to you or do you say over
yeah okay papa alpha seven kilo echo november this is papa alpha seven
tango whiskey oscar
yeah yeah
maybe it's one kind of menu setting in the little uh but uh the audio is very good um
very crisp uh nice mid and high pitch so um yeah this is not bad at all i wonder how much how much
how much output power how much rf is actually transmitted by the little radio whether it will be like
a few on the billy watts or maybe even a few watts but uh sounds very good indeed uh papa alpha seven kilo echo november this is papa alpha seven
tango whiskey oscar listening to
tango whiskey alpha is papa alpha seven kilo echo november
um yeah it sounds good here i think uh i think we can call this
done i did have one question should you um
should i be doing this in dutch or uh in english over back to you papa alpha seven
kilo echo november back to you yeah it's papa alpha seven kilo echo november this papa alpha
seven tango whiskey oscar w o returning um in english or dutch it doesn't really matter right
i mean as long as we can identify our call signs and we did which using the international spelling
alphabet alphabet the nato alphabet it's all fine okay though then we call it an end uh papa alpha
seven kilo echo november thanks for the qso and see you back upstairs in a few minutes from papa
alpha seven tango whiskey oscar papa alpha seven tango whiskey oscar closing your station cheers
so we're picking this up again so now i've got my logbook not everybody has to do this but it's also
no harm what you're doing it so i actually know that exactly the same time yeah so uh i'm filling
out the days the start time in utc oh utc so that would be 13 at the moment 13 28 and the frequency
that we were on 145 525 and it was fm frequency modulation power we don't know it was high power so i
assume they've got something like in the book station called was pa 7 it doesn't matter if
called or worked
t w o report was five and nine and received was five and nine
first contact contact
for
i'll fill in the number when i get it
they don't specify the rf power i'll uh i'll fill that i'll find out and put it in the show notes
for this episode look it's not in there the technical specifications with the output power is
lovely i think it's uh usually around five lots
so what happens now what would you what would happen normally if you were at home and doing this
all right then i lock it in my electronic electronic logbook and yet
that that lookbook i can manually upload to the dcc desk in the states yeah and or to clublog in germany yeah
and then the qso will be hopefully uploaded by you as well yeah and then we got the confirmation yeah that
indeed both parties uh both stations entered the same date frequency mode etc etc and then the qso is
being confirmed in a digital from a digital perspective and then count for the netherlands as
your first dcc you just work now your first country your first entity or country and next
uh if one like then one likes then uh we can exchange qso card which is a postcard sized
card uh often decorated uh however you want it to be with your call sign and the flag of the country
or or i have one of yours here which i'll put a photo in the show notes yeah sure and on the back of
that card or on the front depending on the back uh you write the qso data so the date of the day the
time the frequency used the mode used power used maybe some remarks and uh that will be exchanged uh
in uh can be exchanged two ways one is uh direct over the mail yeah or via the snail snail mail system
and the other way is via the qsl bureau which is a collective uh postal system for qsl cards amongst
countries or better to say amongst amateur radio unions within the country so it goes but then it
takes a long time in general like all the year is nothing somebody's going to germany so they'll bring
a bag to germany so you can probably imagine that if you send the qsl card to a distance uh dxcc uh it
can take up to many years before this even sent yeah but it's once it's it's not two euros to send a card
even to europe exactly so if you wait for 11 of them you can send 20 kilos of a box for that price
yeah you can probably also imagine that if you make your first qso like you did now you're very
eager to get the qso card yeah you can probably also imagine that if you were the thousand pa
yeah you're not really interested more in the cards yeah but if you still want to because of some
certificate or or or whatever award program is maybe maybe maybe used by yourself then you can
still request it by sending a card via bureau which will take ages general but the cards will be there
yeah the losses are minimal fortunately the other way is that you log in into club log one of the
electronic systems and you can directly request a qsl card being sent over the post you pay a few
dollars like two or three dollars just for the purchase costs and then you can expect your card
much quicker being at your own okay case we're hitting uh half an hour on that i think that was
uh absolutely excellent thank you for taking the time most welcome i'd like to be not sure i'm gonna
thank you for the fact that uh you got me into this thing in the first place but uh it's been uh it's been
a lot of hard work uh very rewarding and um i messed up my first qso but you know how you did we got there
in the end of course um thanks case and tune in everybody tomorrow for another exciting episode of hacker public radio
You have been listening to the Hacker Public Radio podcast, at hackerpublicradio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
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Episode: 4576
Title: Responce to Lee/Elsbeth eps
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4576/hpr4576.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:14:16 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4576, for 2026-02-16
Today's show is entitled, "Responce to Lee/Elsbeth eps"
The host is operat0r and the duration is 00:39:18
The flag is Explicit, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "Yet Another White Male Opinion"
Hello everyone, I want to do another episode of Hackable Public Radio with your host operator.
So this one's in response to episode four, five, two, two, this,
four, five, three, sevenish, and kind of four, five, five, oneish, where it talks to Elspith about
IT and women in the workplace and kind of neurodivergence, and I want to share, you know, as a white
male, like anybody needs my opinion, that some of those things is she struggled with or
conducive to just being in the corporate environment, and I'm sure everybody knows what I'm saying already,
but I just want to experience or share my experiences with some of the struggles that she had
as a white male. So it's going to be compounded, of course, if you are
of the minority and, you know, it doesn't matter what type of minority or all you're going to experience
these in a worst case, worst or case. So the only thing I can complain about is that I'm neurodivergent
and I struggle with that, but kind of the whole thing about, you know, people taking credit
is one that kind of sparked me, that's always going to happen across anything, and, you know,
I, when I did have a brief stint of being a manager of five or six people, I kind of read the
manager books and they said, you know, the general guidance is try to not take any credit for anything
and try to give the credit to your employees if they do the work, obviously. So, you know,
you take all the blame as the manager and your employees are the ones that are supposed to get the
credit and you, you know, stand on their shoulders or whatever. That's the general idea of the
quote unquote, good manager is to shield him from the bad and raise them up with the good, but
that's not what happens in corporate culture when people are trying to get jobs and whatever.
I didn't start out this way and probably the last job I had a director and I was talking
with him and he's like, yeah, Robert, you're so, you know, so negative or pessimistic or whatever
the term he used was, and I said, man, I haven't, I haven't always been this way, the industry made
me this way, working in defensive security at large organizations in corporate America has made
me this, it has made me defensive and, you know, not trust people and just generally having to,
you know, mask at scale and try to not, my famous, infamous term is, you know, your baby's ugly,
my baby's ugly and there's elephant in the corner of the room over here. I don't have time
or patience to establish relationships, any of that stuff, I just want to do my job and that conflicts
with, you know, how people normal people neurodifficult people work and that's what I struggle with,
but the whole credit thing, I think everybody can experience string set in some level.
I can't remember any time that it's specifically made me uncomfortable, but then again,
I'm the imposter syndrome is pretty heavy within the IT space and a lot of people have it,
but don't realize that they do have it. So the recipe for that scenario is you have imposter syndrome,
you do a thing or you make a thing or you build a thing or you help something and someone else takes
credit for it and you don't really notice that you should have stood up and take credit for it or
whatever the case may be. So that might have been some of the things that I experienced,
whereas like, well, you know, that wasn't really the expert here, but I'll just fall on the,
you know, on the guidance of whatever's messaging, my direct report or, you know, peer or whatever,
and let them take the credit, let them take the heat, I don't, you know, I call it mental gymnastics
to deal with people. Let them have the kudos, you know, if you're after kudos and acknowledgement
and taking credit and feel goods and working in industry or working in at least IT and
information security, you're in for the wrong reasons. There might be a snowflake job out there for you,
but that's not what I've experienced within these four to 500 companies at least. Maybe small
businesses and startups, but that is not what I've experienced. I get my kudos from local events,
helping people online, community doing workshops and presentations and helping people online.
That's where I get my fill, helping neighbors, things like that.
While the other part, I'll talk about is, you know, the work life, like COVID work life balance.
And I think it's kind of, everybody has their own view, but I think what happened is, you know,
people got stuck inside with each other and spouses, whoever, and one of them realized,
man, this person has messed up and they realized they are neurodivergent or have some other kind of
thing that they need to sort out. And so, you know, we're in that space where people,
more people have got diagnosed, people have figured out that, you know, the only reason they were
working out their job is because that's their job and they wake up and they go to work and
then they come home and they didn't have time to really think about how shitty their jobs were.
And I feel like a lot of people during COVID, you know, just stopped and looked around and thought,
you know what, my job sucks. And I need to, you know, find a new job that doesn't treat me
horribly. And I'll say, you know, the industry's jumping up and down, especially in an
infrastructure agency security, you've got people jumping up and down and say, oh, we can't, you know,
we can't, we can't, we can't retain time, we can't blah, blah, well, boohoo on you, you made
this industry this way. You're a product of treating people like trash and throwing them away
and, you know, when I walk into an organization, I fully expect them to disappear and evaporate
the next day like in that stock market movie where there's like telephone cables hanging from
the ceiling. That's what I expect. I'm pessimistically in that headspace, a lot of the times where I
just, I expect at any point in time, these stockerizer stations are just going to can tons of people
and I'm going to be in that that where we organization worked at, they let out 12 percent
and then they did a mandatory return to work and lost another, you know, three percent or whatever
and then they did another round of layoffs. So like, Thao's post-COVID, the trickle down, you know,
effect of that and it's just, I think people realized that they're, like, my, I've heard stories,
people, you know, here locally they worked in the job and they didn't like the job or whatever
and they started to pick up a hobby of making, be honeybee, honey, would be send next thing,
you know, they're selling honey and they get these big contracts for, you know, large organizations
to sell their honey to wherever that's they went from doing whatever it is they do to doing
something they actually enjoy doing or at least for that period of time enjoy doing. So I think
that people, help people realize how crappy they were being treated and hopefully people have
moved on to better things and I think retail is suffered a little bit, fast food chains,
everybody's looking for work but that's some of what it, you know, whatever.
Another thing of kind of a, we, you know, going the HR route for things. I, I don't even know
what the guidance would be but in my experience, HR companies are designed for, you know,
basically to protect the company. So if you go run to HR to something you better be prepared
to lawyer up and sue them essentially or don't say anything at all unfortunately that's how
corporate America works today and, you know, unless you have like specific proof of something
or your ironclad or even then it doesn't matter, you know, the lead will get buried and things
like that. I just kind of, the pessimistic angle I've got. So like, you know, kind of saying that,
I couldn't move up in an organization because of, you know, HR issues or whatever, that's,
that's just the nature of the piece. You know, if you, if somebody goes to HR about something,
they're going to be put on the radar as a risk to the organization because you are,
you're a risk of organization and they're going to treat you like that. I had an employee that was
sleeping and I warned him because he had a long commute. I honestly didn't give a shit the
few slept, but he would sleep in meetings with my direct reports and he would, you know,
kind of take these long commutes and I worried about him going home late or coming in early
and falling asleep at the wheel and killing himself or someone else more importantly and that was
what was important to me is, you know, I don't want you falling asleep in the car and killing someone.
I really don't have to give a shit if you fall asleep. Don't really care about the optics
of you falling asleep in front of my boss, but I'd have to care about those things because people
care about stupid shit like that and in, in my experience, if you want to move up an organization
that the fast track that I've seen people do is that they leave and go to a different organization
and then they come back. That is the fast track, the method that I've seen people jump back
at forth, especially in my security consulting space, you know, you leave an organization,
you work there for five years, six months and then you come back and you bounce back and forth
between it too and every time you get a job, you get a race. In my experience, to try to actually
get a race and fight for someone for a race is much more difficult than actually just getting a job
somewhere else for six months and then calling your coworker and saying, hey, I heard things are
upside down over there at insert companies used to work for. I have come back to several companies.
I've been fired more times than I'd like to admit. I've been laid off a lot of times and I'm
almost feel like I'm immune to it, but obviously, you know, I lose sleep over stuff like
that because I have a family and I support people and I try to pretend like none of it matters
and I can just get a job in IT or something but at the end of the day, I've been through
kind of every iteration of that type of thing and it kind of sort of immune to it and it's
kind of whatever, but for people that again have worked the same place for 15 years, 10 years,
whatever, they don't have that skill set and they don't, they're not as, you know, adapt that,
developing those skills to bounce back and looking for a job as a full-time job and it's hard
and it's difficult and, you know, AI can help with some of that stuff, you know, with language and
communication. But yes, you know, that's kind of my thought on moving up in an organization and
I just, all I hear is people complaining that they're not getting erased, they're not getting
erased and aren't getting erased and like what, what easier way is there to get erased and to
go somewhere else and whatever. And my experience has been, like, I want to work somewhere where
the people aren't terrible and this is everybody's experience that I love that I want to work
with people that I can tolerate that aren't toxic and that's really all people are asking for.
It's like, minimum, most people just want to work somewhere where they're, it's not a horrible
environment in toxic and that's pretty much the standard. We've learned to kind of accept at least
an IT and in fact like, and the people I talk to have that same kind of aspect, but if you're trying
to go get her and you're trying to, you know, excel yourself and move and quickly you're going to
have to work really hard and find the right people within an organization or you just swap
back and forth, jump around, do contract where take different jobs and kind of develop those skills
to be nimble in a market to move around and have different skill sets. I've been lucky where I've
gotten a lot of my jobs through, you know, knowing about who you know and also kind of mass
media using IT and my skills in IT to notify large amounts of people or apply for large amounts
of jobs or do things kind of at scale that most people wouldn't be able to do easily. That's kind
of how I've identified some of the stuff. Some of my opportunities that I've got but most of them are
kind of who I know. And I don't want to try to pretend on, you know, where she, you know, where she
was at the time or what her background is or what her interest was in education and furthering her
development or career path or whatever. But, you know, if you work the same place for a long time
and there's not any other history, there's not any other skillsets being built. It's probably
could be just a matter of, you know, that, again, that imposter syndrome where, you know,
get an AI prompt that tells you and walks you through each one of your things. I did one that
took about four hours and it expanded my resume out exponentially to ask me questions. Oh, yeah,
I have done this. Oh, I have done this. I, you know what? I have done this. I've done this. I did this. I did that.
And next thing you know, your resume is massive and those ATS systems can scan them and get
all the GCPits they need to get out to, hopefully push you up in the line a little bit. But I don't
have any professional training. I got a networking specialist diploma in school and my technical
skillset sharing my information online. I think has helped, you know, having my own website,
sharing, you know, through social media or sharing my experiences doing meetups and going to
conferences and just putting myself out there has, I think helped people understand who I am,
what I work on, what my skillset is very quickly. And that's kind of helped me get, you know,
get me connected to the right people. So that's, that might be some of the, you know, if you're an
introvert, like a lot of IT and if you're interested to hear people, I think I started out
being an introvert. And then as I got older, I realized that it's not really that difficult for me.
So I don't even know what I would classify myself. I have an end-gram type, whatever,
that conflicts with, with actually how I feel like I am. But yeah, I'm the Myers-Briggs ENFJ
in a tri-type in-gram 729. And this helps with prompting too. So you can get a prompt that says,
you know, don't use indexes, blah, blah, blah, blah. I have that on my AI notes. I'm kind of
tains any right now. But you can do the Myers-Briggs personality test and then figure out what your
tri-type is and put that in your prompt. And it will be more like you than the token, whatever.
And there's also some notes around diversity within LLMs without, you know, so they don't
send you the same answer. If you ask an LLM a joke, they'll tell you the same joke, like 15 times
in a row, no matter how you tell it to be creative. There's options. There's ways to get some
diversity in those response using specific prompting to kind of make it kind of force it to be
to go off those, to go off those grinded paths that they've been shortest distance paths that
they've been, whatever, to be more random creative if that's for like a better term.
So that kind of kind of help, you know, or hurt you. So I kind of broke out of my shell realizing that,
you know, what makes me feel good is sharing my knowledge with the community and if one person gets
or understands it or it helps them then I feel like that was all worth it. You know, because
out of the stuff I do feels very niche and then, you know, anything I try to do at the normal scale
feels like it's being washed out by all the other social media garbage or whatever. So I find myself
doing stuff. Hopefully that nobody else has done because again, the impuffer syndrome kind of rolls in
and says, well, you know what? I can't do a thing on that. That's already somebody else is an expert on
that. Well, somebody else is an expert on that. Well, they might be, but they're not sharing their content.
So I did a video on how to like swap out the locks on a pins on a door and somebody laughed at me
or make fun of how the way I did it and I was like, well, where's your video? Where's your documentation?
Where this is how I did it if you've got something better or you've got some other source of
truth or better way to do it. Let me know. And I would have done it that way, but this is based on
the research I did and it works. So like it may be hacky and that's the whole point. Is it works?
I did kind of going back on off tangent. I did management for, I think about six months
before I realized that it wasn't the right fit for me. It was probably the right fit for me, but I wasn't
ready. And I also was kind of an intoxic environment financial industry. It can be pretty toxic,
but that's a muckity muck, as they say. And my problem was I tried to solve people problems with
technology and that was one of the infamous quotes that my direct report was that you know,
trying to solve, I tried to solve people problems with the technology. And then he said,
all problems are people problems. And that kind of made a lot of sense to me at the time. And
you know, this gentleman at the time we love hate. You know, he respected me. I respected him.
He was he was a master at his craft and how's a master at my craft. But we were on like two
different planets. And you know, we kind of understood each other and we connected in a way that,
you know, at the time, didn't really understand. And then I realized later that he's, you know,
neurodivergent himself, which goes back to people getting late diagnosed, you know, in their 30s,
40s even, um, people doing presentations and having a blackout, realizing that they're
highly functioning autistic. Like this stuff goes on diagnosed, the testing is whatever, the stigma is
still bad. I have, you know, friends and family that have, you know, children that they're trying to,
you know, whatever. It's like we need to communicate and help each other out. Because
all these people have to people, more than have people listening to this podcast or probably
neurodivergent in some way. And if you don't, if you're not, you probably aren't just,
I don't realize it because it's a numbers game. There's, there's a, it's a lot of it. And, you know,
these, these people, again, you know, and the, and the podcast talked about, you know, having
having diversity, you know, whatever. And then that's not the case. I know I talked to someone
a group and I think it was a Nashville conference. And she was part of an organization that would
help leadership teach leadership about neurodiversity and understand how to work with people
that, you know, thinking a different way and how to deal with that, right? And that's not something
anybody gives us shit about, at a corporation. But, um, at some point, hopefully, uh, people in
an organization who realized that their staff is, their IT staff and security staff, and their
programmers are mostly neurodivergent. Um, they're probably hopefully going to get some kind of training.
And the stigma will be whatever and people will understand that, you know, people with neurodiversity
have to, you have to work with them a little bit more and meet them where they are and
do accommodations and all that good stuff. But, you know, that's not where we're at today, right?
And I'll share my one story. Um, I was at a big financial institution, you know, big heavy audit.
I don't think my head up. It's like 16 degrees outside today. And, you know, it's all hands on deck
where we're, we're audit compliance people out of the word work. I'm a highly, you know, specialized
skill, you know, uh, I have a very particular status skills. That's, that's the guy I was, um, they brought
me in consulting if they wanted something broken. And this was, you know, early, you know, 2015,
something like that, where there wasn't a whole lot out there. We kind of wrote the book on that stuff.
And, you know, at the organization I was working with that, I mean, as you can all upset,
you know, they didn't understand what I was doing or they didn't understand my approach or whatever,
and they're like, well, I'm like, I wrote the book on my job. Like, nobody told me, you know,
to your point, there was no path. There was no traditional path for my security back then.
And if it was, it was, I had already long blown past it. But, you know, I had my own processes,
my own documented flows that I went through. And he's like, what is this? This is, this isn't
make any sense to me. I'm a manager and you're, you know, how do you, you know, you're doing
your job wrong? It was like, how do you, how can you possibly tell me that I'm doing my job wrong?
When there's no one to tell me how to do my job. And, of course, now there is a framework
and things like that out there. But back then, there was, you know, even 2015 era, there was not really
anything that was concrete enough and whatever they could, they could give you that. And I, I followed
whatever we had back then, and I adapted it to my own technical processes, but it was all high-level
stuff, right? So this big financial institution, we had, you know, we had to be compliant
for something at some certain date. So every single, you know, consulting organization was there,
all hands on deck, you know, I had to like pull in a chair from a different part of the level
of the building just because we had like three people to one cube, three of our guys to one cube.
And that, actually, the next month that I came there, I brought my own hub, not a switch,
a hub, and then I brought my own folding chair that I put inside of my luggage,
so that wouldn't have to worry about having to grab a chair and make sure that Sally got it back
at the end of the engagement or whatever. So I brought my own chair and I brought my own hub because
it wasn't anything there. And we're going back and forth, we're going through processes, and kind of
like a, you know, we got these people that will do like, you know, kind of bounty hunting and they'll
there's a debt to be paid. They'll go out to these sort of mom and pop bounty places,
which have no security controls. They have no, they have people, people, PII, but they don't know
how to handle it. They don't know anything others supposed to do. So our job was to
kind of audit these off-soft audit these companies and help guide them through some kind of security
policy. So, you know, at first it was, whatever, and we were doing stuff in Excel, and then I started
building it out to know anything about SharePoint, build out a whole flow and SharePoint to send
people to the authoritative sources. I sent templates to our clients, kind of the bounty hunters,
and had them, you know, basically signed them, which I was told later that you can't do that. You
can't write their security policies. You can't help them, you know, develop it. I was like,
well, hey, then, then you're asking someone to do an impossible task. It's like asking an aunt
to, you know, create an understand metaphysics. It's not something they can do, and or had the time
pastes to do. So I would help them build out frameworks, and I would go over it with them,
and I would say, do you have this, do you have that, and they would say, no, yes, whatever,
and they would sign the document. Well, come to find out. That was, you know, I wasn't allowed to do that,
no, blah, blah, blah. So we went back to this old method of doing everything kind of in Excel,
and basically the whole process that are client, which is the manager or project manager on the
engagement, I basically replaced his job function with SharePoint. So that way, we wouldn't have
the weight on him, because we would, he would, he was flaky and being a person and having opinions,
and whatever, and when you're going through an audit process, it's like zero ones, zero ones,
zero ones, zero ones, zero ones, zero ones, zero ones, zero ones, zero ones, zero ones, zero ones,
if less greater than go, like that's not how my brain works as an engineer. So when my process
is a people, people are not fucking processes. My process was SharePoint, and sometimes people
are part of those processes where they have to, you know, approve something, so I had to build
into the process, and then, you know, we went, and he said, oh, I don't do that. We went back
to doing what we were doing, you know, two weeks or three weeks prior, and, you know, I didn't
realize at that time, but there was no space to have meetings, so we would have meetings in the
lunch room, and, you know, people would get upset on my team because I wasn't paying attention,
blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, because, you know, there's an ATM over here.
That's, you know, connected to the internet, and there's somebody walking over here, and,
oh, there's a point of sale machine. How does that work? You know, look, it's one of those
digital things. I went over the hidden menu, it's like, there were so many distractions in a lunch room
to try to have a meeting in the lunch room and a break room, not even a break room. It was a, it
It was a cafeteria that they were having me have meetings in and they would jump up and down
and say, oh, yeah, you know, I wasn't paying attention during the meeting.
Well, of course, I'm going to teach during the meeting.
I'm neurodiverse and there's all this other crap going on and this environment is not
conducive to have private conversations about information security in a, you know,
Fortune 500 bank institution for a great sake, but yet I was the one to feel like I was
the odd one out and I wasn't doing what I was supposed to be doing.
So that's kind of a, you know, a story might, you know, poor white, white male story that
that kind of has kept me over the years at another company where these used to work
at where, um, I if it didn't find out to a later, but some of the leaders have had been kind
of more or less forcefully slash whatever removed and because of something that I found out
later that I did. So I had found out that I could essentially plug in my phone into any physical
workstation and log in without any credentials and I made a coworker make a video of me doing
this. So I'll walk up to a computer and somebody's laptop actually was another coworker's laptop,
walk up, you know, it controlled the click button pop shell and then, you know, sent that off
for the races and, you know, here I am not that was not part of engagement or anything. I just
realized that there was something weird with the authentication process or the log on process
and thought I'd take it a second step and see what I could discover. And I'm been on to me that
that video was used with leverage to let one of the ski key stakeholders or the people that
I joined the organization for. I interviewed for several people. My director for among others was
was in there and they were that was what I learned much later after they had already left
that that was kind of used and they were both kind of champions in that organization because they were,
you know, breaking down walls and breaking down barriers and burning bridges and, you know,
whatever. That that famous quote by Ashwa Wattu, whatever, the expansion.
It's like, she says, I learned all the bridges in front of me and behind me. I don't get the
fact. That's kind of sort of how they were at it. They were very precise and now they were dealing
with the organization but they were taking things seriously and trying to make changes and people
started realizing that these security people are getting on my last nerve. They're interfering with
the business and we're going to apply pressure and get them to essentially leave or get laid off
or whatever. So there were lots of shenanigans at that organization that led to that type of stuff.
But kind of those things, you know, that what you do impacts people in a real way and kind of
understanding that and thinking before I act and being for a little bit of her modest,
I learned pretty early on but sometimes you can't help yourself because you get excited about
you know, technology or showing somebody something or understanding how a piece of technology works
and just saying, hey, look, this thing is like, you know, putting plain text passwords all over to
our logs. By the way, and then people get offset when it's supposed to be into and encrypted all the
way to the vendor and you find out that in actuality, you know, the credit card number to be
sent to three, not one, but three different places in plain text and sitting on a log file somewhere
on some other server. But that's just, you know, understanding technology and being modest about
your approach to that and how you want to communicate it and being a manager made me kind of
realized that, you know, dealing with this from a security people and then throwing grenades and
is kind of a real thing and respecting leadership and management as long as they respect you,
you try to shield, try that they try to shield you from stuff. But at the same time, you have to kind of
try to use them and consult them before you go do anything, especially being nerd out there so you
don't understand, I don't understand, you know, the analogy is kind of, I'm an alien in the
human suit. I don't really understand how people's brains work, I'm very logical and if I can't
assign something logic or define what the problem is, people tend to get very, get very frustrated
with people if they don't, can't explain to me what problem they're trying to solve because of
bullshit, you know, politics and red tape, I can't help them, you know, I'll communicate that in
such a way that um, to peers or leadership, say, look, I want to help, I want to do work, I want to
solve problems, but you have to cut through the bullshit and help me help you and if you're trying
to get me to be the one to figure this out, you're asking the wrong person, you need to find somebody
that can help you with this because I don't, I don't do people, people can fees me and they're
illogical and a lot of times they don't mean, now with the exception of people that care about their
jobs, understand technology and can do the title that is in their email signature, I don't usually
have a problem with it's to people that don't know what they're doing, they don't know anything about
what the title of their title and their email is and their toxic and they don't want to do work
and they're, quote unquote, busy because they're ignorant or uh, people are like a better term
lazy and don't want help with automation or whatever, that's kind of where I get myself in trouble.
And I'll say, you know, when it comes to that what I experienced in, you know, the 2000s
early 2000s, yeah, I was bad, I'm sure some of the things I said or did with my peers and in
groups with other guys, women around on social media or not social media, but like just in person or
whatever, whenever it's a girl around, we're just stupid and we don't know how to handle our emotions
or whatever and we say or do stupid things. I can't excuse any of the things that I said or did,
but we don't know how to deal with our feelings and then we kind of say things because, you know,
we think with our, we lease sometimes. So that's a result of that going to conferences and
and things like that back in the day, yeah, it was bad. There weren't a lot of
and hardly any females there and then the ones that were there, I'm sure ahead.
Not a great time and over time that has improved, but I feel like now it's it's one
extreme or the other. It's divided. It's people are still like dudes are still just
dickheads, like absolute, like dude, you can't say shit. Like, like,
and you know, it hasn't really happened to me recently and then like 4 to 500,
but the smaller the organization, the smaller the said, the smaller the group, the more isolated
the situation, the more people are unprofessional, you know, those things come into your head and you
say them out loud. And that's, you know, reshaping that takes time. It wasn't that long ago,
we were, you know, confident women over the head, grabbing into the cave. I'm not saying any of
it's okay, but like, you know, it takes time. So for me, it's, you know, I was nervous before,
but now I'm even more nervous. So it's hard to like, you know, find people that are genuine,
women that are genuine and that space that haven't been, you know, already pushed off and
whatever. So when I meet someone that's generally excited about it for me, security,
that's very hard to talk to them because I don't, it's, it's, I have to be extra masky. I put
on my mask for professionalism and then I put on my mask for to not be sexist essentially,
or not say anything that's offensive and, you know, that's hard to do. As a person that's always
the jokes to, you know, everything like that and anything that's anything, a minority
ends up getting in trouble or ends up getting sort of made fun of. So, you know, being the
funny guy doesn't always work very well in this environment and I've said and done things that
are offensive to other nationalities and things like that. And, you know, you know, for better
worse, comedians have, you know, gotten better about that stuff and, you know, I'm free to make
fun of myself. I'll say that I'm particular things and my wife will say, you can't say that,
like, well, you know, one basically that I struggle. I'm neurodiverse. I can make fun of,
I feel like I have some capacity to make fun of people like that, because whatever, um, but then,
you know, it's, it's, it's, it's a struggle around people that care and, you know, you try to
approach women in tech or women in information security and it's so, there's so much
history there and so much trauma, I guess, that it's the whole thing is just, you can't
let your guard down at all. Um, and that's unfortunate and it's because, you know, kind of a product
of our brand environment and how I was raised, um, you know, like, you know, my, my, uh, you know,
direct relatives, like my grandfather was like super racist and it's like that bothered me as
even a young kid. I recognize stuff like that, but, you know, as you get older and you realize
that you can't make the jokes he used to make, because they're actually efficient and people
can gaked in the wrong way, but sometimes I'll say, sub to my wife, this is like,
sister's, it's actually true and it's, you know, love inches. I'm like, well,
yes and no, but it's something that's true and it's funny. Like, I'll give the example of,
I didn't know anything. I live in the language order and we have a big huge
door to tech and I knew all the smart people went to tour to tech and like, whatever and I was
down there doing some work or doing a presentation or something and, um, I was, when I was walking,
I was talking to somebody else and yeah, I was walking around the area and I saw like, like,
you know, I was near tour to tech or whatever and I saw a bunch of Asian people and I was like, oh,
it must be like Asian people a day or something and like, I didn't know, like, I genuinely thought
that like, it was like something because it was so many Asian people, I thought genuinely it was like
some kind of like Asian appreciation month or something and someone her overheard me and was like,
very offended and I was like, I wasn't, I was saying it to kind of bring up that like,
I didn't know that it was that, you know, whatever, I don't know what it is now but like,
I wasn't saying it to be mean and I didn't even know I was being racist. Like, I just
genuinely was like, I'm confused. I didn't know why so many Asian people were there and that was kind
of the thing that like, you know, that didn't realize before until it was like two they
and like, you know, sometimes being around other friends of family, you know,
I'll try to be the funny guy and that blows up in your face sometimes, you know, like,
being offensive aside sometimes you'll say something that triggers someone.
Plus over example, like, we were at a boat party a long time ago, one of those party boats
and we were with some of my wife's friends and we were all kind of having fun and I
didn't know particularly know this person very well but I was going to like push them in the
water and I triggered him because he had some trauma with something and it blew up in my face because
I thought I was going to be the funny person and push this guy into the water and it like triggered
and it was a big whole production and that's kind of the unfortunate thing about being
or a writer and kind of being the funny person and laughing at yourself and making jokes about
yourself, you still end up offending offending other people even though you're making one of
yourself and kind of using that as a mask to, you know, take, take the heat off your weirdness
and then be funny. So that's, you know, blowing up on my face a fair amount of times and I've
gotten better at like recognizing and thinking before the words come out of my mouth and just kind
of keep my mouth shut and try to be PC about stuff is sometimes starting because the more
comfortable I get around someone, the more things I say that, you know, aren't particularly funny
to people because that's just how I deal with stuff and that's how I've always done it
and that's kind of blown up on my face professionally and, you know, personally.
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Episode: 4577
Title: HPR Beer Garden 10 - Scotch Ale/Wee Heavy
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4577/hpr4577.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:14:18 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4577, for 2026-02-17
Today's show is entitled, "HPR Beer Garden 10 - Scotch Ale/Wee Heavy"
The host is Kevie and the duration is 00:37:45
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "Dave and Kevie talk about the Wee Heavy ale style."
Hello and welcome to the Hacker Public Radio Beer Garden, yet another phenomenally exciting
episode of what both the Beer Garden and also Hacker Public Radio, who we should thank for
allowing us to produce this series up as not a series yet, shush on the Hacker Public Radio
platform, the much obliged for that. My name is Dave and I'm joined as almost consistently
in the past by Kevy, hello Kevy, how are you? Hello, hello you've caught me in a good mood,
this is probably my favorite style of being able to be able to go into you, so you're
I'm good at it, like a Cheshire Catcher's name. Yes, I can vouch for this, I can vouch for this
definitely. So what we're going to be doing on this episode of The Beer Garden is we're going to
be reviewing the Scotch AL style. Now I have been told this is not Scotch AL's, this is Scotch AL,
this is something it's a style in and of itself. But before I hand over to Kevy to explain exactly
what a Scotch AL actually is, I do have a question, he's probably going to answer anyway, but I'm
going to get in there first. Is a Scotch AL a wee heavy or is it is a wee heavy a Scotch AL?
Yes, you're right on both counts. A Scotch AL is a wee heavy. Now, as you perfectly point it out,
there are Scotch AL's do not get that confused. Yes, a Scotch AL is a Scotch AL, but
not all Scotch AL's are Scotch AL's, right? It's now it's actually quite odd because people in
Scotland are very, very protective of that word Scotch. We are not, we would never use it to
describe ourselves. Scotch when you say it like that is nearly almost always reserved for whiskey.
Right, you know, so if you say Scotch up here, okay, most people wouldn't use the term, but they
would immediately associate with whiskey. They certainly wouldn't, they associate with something
being Scottish, that's different again. Although it does tend to get used and if you want to
annoy a Scottish person, call them Scotch, they probably will actually go to them off.
Or if more so, going to a part a part, but a nurse for a Scotch is whiskey. Yes, well, that's the
only type that are. You will be told that there is no other type of whiskey. In Scotland,
anyway. Yes, but I've been in mind, I'm no longer a whiskey drinker, so it doesn't affect
you. Yes, which is sad actually, in and of itself, do we need a minute silence?
Not quite, not quite. Okay. Oh, interestingly enough, you mentioned in whiskey. I mean,
I don't know whether there is a relevance between whiskey and the style we are reviewing today.
Well, actually, no, there's not. No, that isn't. Scotch sale as you wouldn't more likely get a
cold in Scotland than the wee heavy. And it's just that the only reason it's called a wee heavy. No,
this could be a series. That's could be Saudi. This could be a whole two-hour long episode,
which me that I was with complain about, but I think the the wives and my boss tomorrow might
if it was. The term heavy is very often referred to as a beer that is was just on the heavier side,
and it would be classed as when beers were essentially taxed for the first time in the 19th
century. They were taxed on their weight, their density, and also their alcohol amount. And
anything that was above a 70-show, no, the the shilling system was 60-shilling, which was light,
or an England would be called mild, it's same beer, light and mild and 60-shilling at all the same.
Then there was actually, it was usually called a pinder normal, which is 70, which would be more
akin to our kind of bitter, but they're totally different flavor profiles. But just to give you an
idea, heavier than our larger, but not a heavy yield. And then if you got a pint of heavy, that would
normally be the 80-shilling. So this is when you do get a bit literally quite a bit thicker. So
likes of 80-shilling to me is perfect, it's nice and it's got a nice thick body to it, but it's not a
strong ale, a heavy. The wee heavy was the next level up, which would be given in a small glass,
not a pint of it, and it would be usually from about 7% upwards. If you see 80-shilling generally in
pubs here, well, actually, in pubs, it could be in bottles, whatever, normally it's been four and five,
and that would be a pinder heavy, but a wee heavy would very often would always be served small.
As far as a history goes, if you actually look to the history of the first wee heavy, then you'll
find that it seems to suggest that it was from the 18th century, it's when it was first coined.
However, it was much further back than that. A wee heavy is always strong and multi,
and it would be very much more forward, it would generally have toasted caramel notes as well,
and would quite often have a dark, fruity character, and this is just purely down to geography.
So the climate in Scotland is weight, and you can vouch for that, you've been there many
a time, and the further north you go, it gets weighter, it's just part of the geography, so up here,
it rains, well, we never have a dry month, let's be honest, a bit like me in general, don't have a
dry month. So, and then north of Scotland, it's always weight, so hops and things don't grow,
so traditionally, people would actually make beer, generally for themselves, not so much for
commercial purposes, from what they had, and barley grows very well in a weight, so you get
multi barley, and that's what gives you your multi taste. The other thing that they would use instead
of hops would be Heather, which grows anywhere in the north of Scotland, so that would stop it
from being overly sweet, can give it a floral note, but only in lighter beers. If you get Heather,
if you put Heather into a dark ale, it's more or less ignored, it's just a wee bit like,
you know, when you put a tiny bit of sugar into a race of beef, where you've used like a lot of
toned tomatoes, or maybe some alcohol or something, just to kind of provide balance, it doesn't
make it sweet, it just provides balance, so that's all the hair that was for. When Scottish ale
became more popular than the lowlands, so when I mean by that it's essentially the central belt,
of Scotland. That started getting traction in the 18th century, and the term Scotchale was
coined, because it was a marketing gimmick more or less. It was to export this outside.
So it wasn't actually until the 19th century that it was properly exported, and that was always
it coincided with the industrial revolution, because they just couldn't produce that amount.
So you would have this small, very often traditionally taken in the evening after dinner,
and it would be served as a winter warmer. So this does a continuous theme quite nicely of winter
warmer beers. As I said, the wee heavy was considerably stronger than I heavy. It would literally go
up if you had a pint of traditional pint of 60 or a pint of light would normally mean between
two and three percent. A pint of what they called normal or ordinary would be between three and four,
and then pint of 80 or heavy would be between four and five, maybe up to five point five,
that would be a very strong heavy though. And then anything stronger than that would be the wee heavy,
which as I said, would be traditionally done as a late drink after dinner, somebody coming in
from the cold and it would be to warm up. So drank maybe off on a long side of whiskey as well
traditionally. Now, obviously the big problem is with people home brewing a lot of this stuff,
is that until a big brewer comes along and actually starts to produce it in quantity,
they will be different depending on what's grown locally. And the first brewer that I could find
to actually brew this commercially, where William Younger, so Younger's tart and special was
available until very recently, although no longer produced by the Younger's brewery, which is
long since close, and also Robert McCueen. One of the interesting factors that I just found out
actually, William Younger's brother was the founder of Brutanales, who produced one of my favorite
beers, the old joke. Yeah. So I found that actually, I thought something I didn't know. So when
I was doing this, I found this very interesting. So with the arrival of the recent craft brewing,
what I'm going to call it, a boom is it a boom yet or just an interest. But certainly,
one of the places which has developed a taste for the Scotchel or we heavy is the other side of the
pond. Now, the other place that did was Belgium, as we found out in the Christmas episode,
the Belgians liked it as well. But we're going to leave the Belgians for just now, because I need
something to say in the next episode. With the advent of it in America, the biggest difference you're
find between uscottchel or we heavy from Scotland. So if it's from Scotland, generally it will always
be what I've just described. It'll be multi, slightly toasted caramel with a fruity back end.
And it'll always be dark fruit. You'd never get citrus or orange or anything like that.
It'll always be like a dark dried fruit back end. However, with America taking it, they've done
almost the stereotypical Scottish thing. They have made it. And to be honest, as a huge fan of Scotchel
or we heavy, I generally don't like the American style we heavy, because they have made it a bit
of stereotypical as you could get for Scotland. Yes, they still have multi-ness. They still have
some fruityness, but they add a lot of smoke. They have this kind of peat smoke, fake peat smoke into
the thing, which is totally alien for a beer here. They're the odd one that does, but it's a newer
beer. None of the traditional ones seem to have had that. And the other thing they do is they make
them nearly all cask conditioned, which means they have a very strong taste of whisky with them as
well, which again, I'm just not a fan. I don't particularly like my beer's taste like whisky,
personally. So there we go. So there is the history that I have got from the We Heavy. And unfortunately,
there was a time when We Heavy was available in every bar, in every local place. To be honest,
no, you will struggle. Unless you're going to craft a deal, please, you will struggle to get a We Heavy.
You should still get a heavy, kind of heavy, but our We Heavy is something that has really lost popularity
in recent times, sadly. Right. However, I'm going to add the WeCaviat.dot, don't be too disheartened
to be continued. Okay. Well, thank you for that. I have questions.
Genuine questions. Now, you've kind of answered one of them about the definition of an 80
shielding or a heavy. I expected the 80 shielding to be quite strong. And you said it was something
around 4, 5% maybe. Yeah. You share around that. Yeah. Right. So when I was looking for a suitable
Scotchale for this review, I discovered Bellhaven. Now, the Bellhaven 80 shielding is only 3.9%
which I would put down. Well, that's like we're in the session IP. I know you don't like that,
but we're in the session IPA region of beer strings. So to call that a heavy, it didn't
didn't sound right to me, because obviously I didn't know what the genuine definition is,
but I understand that now. So I'm happy. It's interesting you mentioned about
car's condition, particularly across the, across the puddle, but the beer that I've got this
evening is car's conditions conditioned and it's made in Scotland. Oh, no. So I'm not saying
you never get it. I'm saying traditionally. Traditionally. Right. Okay. That's interesting.
And now I have a little challenge. So I chat not to not acquire a challenge to what you said or
to something we said previously. Now, you said that we have a,
can be, I think you said, 7.8% give or take, and you're, did I notice between 7 and 9? I think
I said 7 and 9, not commonly. In fact, you said, you've actually helped my point here,
but you've also said they're really multi. Are we not sort of
encroaching into barley wine territory here? Yeah, very similar actually, but
there's not, not so much aging in it. Right. Yeah. Okay. That, okay. That makes sense. That makes sense.
So yes, yes, we are. There's a lot of similarities from a barley wine and a wee heavy,
certainly. And probably one of the reasons I love both styles, because they're not the same.
Yes. Yeah. No. Certainly get it. All right. No. Thank you.
Right. Well, I presume you would like me to try my first? No. But I see that because it's a
teeth, yes, you can do that. I'm good to make you, well, I mean, blessing, I have already made
heavy weight this evening, and I know he's, uh, he's quite keen to get on with this. I have really
struggled to try and find a Scotchale. Now, that's because I don't know what the Scotchales are.
I kept you mentioned earlier on, there was a number of beers that I probably could have chosen.
How do I realize they came under the heading of Scotchale?
Well, one of the ones that can be recommended to me, which is, well, we kept you actually mentioned
earlier on. I couldn't find anywhere. The large supermarket, you could get it online,
but you could not get it in this to horse. And I wasn't going to spend 40 quid to buy two
bottles of this stuff if that makes sense, because they're minimum. And this makes sense. No,
because they're minimum delivery charges. You have to spend 40 quid otherwise you get stiffed
three more charges. So, oh, she did your time to went into, uh, into Tesco and discovered this
Scotch beer. And I said, I said the picture to Kevin said, just, just this qualify, and he just
responded with thumbs up. So, that is why I've chosen it. And what I've got here is an inus gun,
which is brewed in, oh, Edinburgh. Uh, it's the original single malt cask beer. It doesn't seem
to have a name of its own. And maybe the original is the name, because I know they do other styles
and other strengths. But it says on the bottle a uniquely single malt whiskey cask matured
to be deliciously different and seriously smooth. Well, I remember when it came out,
it was originally called Innocent Gunn. I think it was called original Scotch eel. Right. So,
so that is the reason why I said stay away. Yes, I'll allow that. But that's really interesting,
because we were talking about McCune's champion earlier on, and they've stopped putting Scotch ale
on their label as well. Yes. So, it says, a romance of vanilla, malt, toffee, and the touch of oak.
Oh, with a perfect understated bitterness. Well, I'll be the judge of that. The color of it,
because the unusually, it comes in a clear bottle. And the color, in fact, it does come across quite
well on the camera, actually. It's a beautiful golden, almost honey-like color. So, let's crack this open
and see how it lands on the nose. Oh, hello. Oh, my goodness me, that is, that is very
hoppy. Oh, that's not the thing. Oh, that. That's all I've got at the moment, bear with.
Let's go away for the missed to disperse. So, all I'm guessing is that the hoppy hoppy
larga, it's really, really old. No, I'm hoping they haven't changed the recipe too much and
I last had that, because used to, whenever I get it, the first thing you notice was this faint
tooth whiskey. I'm not getting it from the bottle. So, which probably means you won't get it at all,
if you're not getting it from the bottle. If I'm getting nothing from the bottle now.
Okay, let's decence this.
Oh, that's a bit lively. She can hear it's a little bit on the, on the fizzy side.
Yep, certainly sounds like we all right.
I'm getting next to nothing off of this.
I've got a COVID test over there. I'll give that a go in a minute.
Well, it's when you, it's when you dig a drink of it and you realize it's no,
no teeth, something can break. Definitely sounded wrong.
Let's see, under normal circumstances, I want to check the label again to make sure it wasn't
brewed by some Peter's, but obviously, in this case, that isn't it.
In fact, while I'm waiting for this to settle, this is probably a good time to set the record
when we did the Christmas sale. I had the, some Peter's, was it the winter rail or the Christmas
sale I got? Oh, it's one of the two. I made this big deal of some Peter's,
having previously disappointed me. Well, as it happened, literally about two weeks after we recorded
that episode, a friend of ours gifted us a some Peter's mix box, 12 different beers,
most of them could chunk of them were up there. And the, the beer that I
rude the most was the plum Porter saying that when I tried it, it was quite disappointing. There was
no plum there. It was, it was relatively flavourless. But this did one that I had. It blew me away.
It was, it was, the plum was, was so in your face. And I, I really enjoyed it. I think I scored it.
I saw the 375 or 4 on untouched, which is, is, is good. Yeah, just been looking back at the
notes. It was the St. Peter's Christmas eel. It was the Christmas ale. Right, okay. Yeah.
Right. I'm still not getting much from the glass. Let's give this a, give this a try.
Oh, there's a lot going on in there. Oh, that is nice.
Okay. So it is quite sweet. So the, the, the multis is unquestionably in there. I, I, I'd mentioned it in the
color, but I'm actually getting tones of honey from this as well. Did I say that in the,
yes, yeah, you did mention honey here of vanilla, malt, toffee, and oak.
Oh, and I actually know it might be, it might be toffee I'm getting. No, I was going to say
actually, no, sorry. It was the old girl's thinking you're going to get a sweetness of that,
or, because well, so it's probably the combination of toffee, and it will actually that will give you.
Yeah. I'm, that, that, that, that is, is very, very sweet. It's, it's, it had that's really nice.
That is incredibly nice. And the bitterness that they, they spoke about, what do they say?
Understated bitterness, when you first take, take the beer in and you're holding onto it for
a second or two, you get the bitterness immediately. But once it's gone, the after taste remains
that's where the sweetness comes in. The bitterness is gone. The sweetness kicks in. You get that
toffee. I'm not really getting the vanilla, the vanilla. But there again, that could be
included in the, the general sweetness of the ale. But this is 6.6% ABV. And I would say it tastes like it.
It's not overly strong. I think the sweetness does a lot to dumb down the bitterness,
but the, the, the, the two, the two opposite ends of the spectrum. The bitterness and the
sweetness are actually working really well together. I'm going to enjoy this for the next few
minutes, Kevin, while you tell us what your beer choice is. I've actually got two beside me.
And I was trying to think, do I go for my traditional favourite one? Or do I go for a special one
that I actually got? And I think I'm going to go for the special one. That would have been my choice.
Yeah. Well, this is trick weird, the trick weird house brewery. And this is the 2000 beer.
So 9% in volume doesn't look overly dark, actually, through the glass. It's a brown bottle,
but I can see through it, which tells me this isn't going to be hugely dark. I have had a
couple of the trick weird house ones before. And they were very, very, very good. So I am looking
forward to this. So a strong, ill, brewed at trick weird house, people share Scotland. So that's
the border. So if you're thinking about the south of Scotland and freezing galleries on the
west, it's almost going to hang south of the border. The borders themselves are over 33 north of the
border between Scotland and England. So there we go. Oh, we better spray that. Oh, yes.
Oh, deep dark moths on with a trickle note, mildly boozey, which I would expect at 9%.
Oh, that smells, actually, that smells a lot darker, and I think this is going to pour. So let's get this
into glass. Oh, it did pour darker, that looks, oh, much darker, that looks in the bottle.
Hmm. So lovely lovely. You can see that it's actually dark brown, it looks a bit black. Yeah,
yes, not caramel. But it's, yeah, it's dark brown. Hmm. So let's even get this almost no head on this.
I poured it quite aggressively there. And there's a thin thin, it's like pouring a cook,
just thin, form that disappear instantly.
Right, so no head to speak of at all. There you go. That, okay. Yeah.
So from the glass, yeah, trickle, toasted moths, not as boozey from the glass. I must admit,
but let's give this a try.
Oh, yes, that is special. Yes, you've got those toasted moths. They're quite toasted, actually.
That's very toasted. toasted moths. There's a trickle going in there that adds bitterness to
the stop, it's been overly sweet. There's an alcoholic sweetness almost like a boozey toffee.
And there's something in the back end I'm struggling with.
Actually, I don't really know what that is. There's like a barley flavor on the back end. It's not
fruity as I was expecting it to be. It's like barley.
Oty. That's interesting because you call that out of the aroma. Mm-hmm.
But it's on the back end. It's a mildly spiced. It's like this Oty barley. And then
mildly peppery. It's really nice. That's different. That is really different.
I'll tell you what it kind of reminds me of. If, I mean, I know you should obviously
got the whisky connection. That would be a beer form of a black rum.
That's what it reminds me of. Would you get that sweet and bitter, nice old combined? And it's like a burnt
bitterness. Yes. Mm-hmm. Well, that's, yes, that is what I would highly recommend.
Yes, not what I would class a traditional wee heavy, but not a million miles from a
either. As actually, that's a special addition from truckware house. I would say it's very,
very good. It's actually not as nice if you get the chance. They're not overly expensive. If you go
to the tourist shops, you can pay a fortune for the truckware house sales. But you can get them
on most beer website to have sales score to sales. But three pound fifty. They're not overly
expensive. I think I paid three seventy five for that one. I would actually say the trickqueer house
regular ale is maybe slightly tastier, but I mean, I'm competing like in between a nine
at a ten and a ten at a ten kind of idea. Not a heck of a lot more. So yes, so definitely this is
one I would recommend. But I know I want a truck at nine percent. And especially because you
won't be able to get it involved, you know, don't chug it and waste it. Oh no. No.
Wonderful. So did you say nine out of ten? I haven't actually reviewed it yet. No, I was
meaning. Oh, sorry. If I was to compare them, it's like nine and one would get nine and a half
they'll get ten kind of idea. You know, it's very. Oh, gotcha. Okay. Yeah, I think personally the
trickqueer house ale pips it for me. I don't know why. I think it's maybe just more traditional
we heavy. This one's different, but it's very good at the same time. Excellent. Okay. Do you want
to score yours now? Yes. Well, to be honest, I think you said nine out of ten and I'm pro. I'll probably
give it actually nine and a half out of ten. That's very, very, very good. Very good. Wow. That is
that is very good indeed. Well, be given that I have an extra no chance of actually getting that
without ordering it online. I will add that to my next beer order. You bought it locally,
I appreciate. No, no. I got it from realaelstore.co.uk. Worth worth a try and also they, the one thing
at Algnusia, but them is I've given them a shout out because they don't charge a fortune for shipping
up here. So that's one of us going to be a winner, isn't it? Yeah. So if you don't charge me
a fortune, they're going to charge anybody a fortune. Sorry, remind me of the name, and can you spell
it for much benefit and also the one, the website or the thing? No, the, the, the beer truck
queer T R A Q E I R. I think the next time I do an order and actually I think I'm, I'm currently on a
not moratorium. What's the word I'm trying to think of? I basically, I don't think I'm allowed
to order anymore beer at the moment because I'm just going to blame me anyway. Well, yes, but even
not for a while that gets a bit. I get a bit self-conscious about it. Oh, just plain kevy.
I'm just looking here on the website. Sorry, I, I, I, I did splash out a bit more on that. That's
over the yellow and the addition brew for the 2000. That one was actually five net if five
above all. The other is your clear house is three 75 above all and they've got to show a queer
jacket bite, which I also had and was phenomenally good. It's 395 above all. So not overly expensive.
No bad prices. But if you were to go to a tourist shop in Scotland, then you probably be easily
paying about six, seven pound of all. Where you can get it. It's not that common. You have to go
somewhere like the house of brew or somewhere like that to actually get someone like this. Yes, very
nice. Well, like I say, I will look out for it and whether I'm allowed to buy beer again. I will add
that to my, to my order. Beautiful. Yeah, so for mine then, I'm still very much enjoying it. It's almost
gone, which is probably a good testament to a decent ale. Starting to get a little bit of sweetness
off on the nose. But still nothing that garnered the same kind of reaction as you have with yours,
which a little bit surprised about. I'm enjoying this immensely. I do have another,
another bottle. Um, but I only bought the two. But now that I know I can get them from the test
go with them, not expensive. Uh, I may go for some more. And during your tasting, Luke came in
and tried this and gave it a very vehement, nodding of the head and thumbs up. Really good. Really good.
So I have to incorporate that into my, um, my repeat. You need to get him one for an actual episode
not a chance. Not a chance. He's, he's going to be joining us for, we've had a change in
circumstances. We are now going to the Sheffield Indian beer feast in March, where it's previously
we weren't able to. So we've now put the tickets for that so we're going to be going. He's coming along
as well. So he's happy to enjoy the beers and he will, he'll probably pace me quite well.
But he will not sit in my front of my phone and tell anybody about him. And this is from a man who is doing
media, film production as part of his college course, which also requires doing things like
voiceovers, which he absolutely hates. That's a shame. Anyway, it is. I'd love to get him
on the, on, on, on, well, I need my shows to be fair. Anyway, yeah, back to the point. So I'm
torn at the moment. So whether I'm going to give this, uh, at eight and a half or a nine,
I'm just good. I'm going to give this a nine. So upgrade that to a four and a half on on
tap. So yeah, nine out of ten for this because I've never had the style before and whether this could
be constituted as part of the, the, the formal style of a Scotch ale or a wee heavy is uncertain.
However, just from the experience of the ale itself, the fact that it has that beautiful sweetness
that offsets the, the bitterness that you first get when you first try it. It takes a lot of boxes
for me for, for an ale. So I, I feel I have to have to score it higher. And the fact that I know
I'm going to go out and buy some more of it as one of my allowed to is, it's got to go in
its favor. So yes, I'm going to score this a nine out of ten. Cheers. Very good, very good. Right,
before we actually wrap up this episode, actually I do wish to say thank you to everybody who's
been giving us really nice feedback. The problem is there've been doing it and passing messages
and things. So I don't need these are writing things down. So we have it a lot of nice feedback
from this. But one thing I actually do need to do up, we, but a house cleaning before we actually
get the feedback stage. And this is testament. Now last time we were on wee spoke or yours are
used spoke of Michael Jackson beer writers. Yeah. And I said that his articles still pop up and they
do. And this is testament to actually how influential he was and I just looked him up before
coming on here. I did not realize he actually died in 2007. Oh well, not particularly all day
either. Only a 65 when he died. But part of articles and things are still constantly coming up
and beer journal succeeded. So that's what he's actually thought he was still with us. So I said
he was still with us. But I thought he was, but no, it turns out he's not. And given that was 20
years ago just about, then he roughly did die with Roger Prords. My other fear lap of author.
Yes, yes. Oh, interesting. I just do wish to put that out, actually. Yes.
Did you spot the fact we did have some feedback on HPR? So this is Carl DeTag who made a comment
on our Belgian Christmas ails episode Belgian Christmas ails that was released in the middle of
January. Yes, traditional time Christmas be a yes. And they said in the state several breweries
have Christmas ails. My favorite is old Fezweeg or old Fezweeg ails. Not very spiced,
multi has a chewy quality thanks for your show. Well, chewy ails. Hello. I'm having a huge fan of chewy
ails. You have a convertible. Yeah, absolutely. So I will have a look and see if that is available
on this side of the puddle. I would be very surprised if it was to be honest, but I'm happy to be
but thank you Carl DeTag for leaving your comments anyway. It's good to know you're listening
and enjoying the show. Yes, please do comment. Please do message as well. You can get a hold of us
on untapped. You can get a hold of us on mastered on telegram if you're so wish. And if you
actually wish to record an episode, please feel free to because like I said, this is a community podcast.
This isn't not our podcast. So we're going to be out as very much community based. Yes. Yeah.
One but I hope you keep in yes as well. I was recommended by Ken Faln on the last HPR community
news to unknowns what the next beer would be. And the sky for me actually we're going from Scotchale
we have a two Belgian Scotchales. And that's the reason I did not want to mention anything about
Belgian stuff in this show. But I will say if you find the history of beer interesting,
I found this mega interesting. So tune in for that. Looking forward to it.
Say tomorrow that's plain lies because we can for it for start. We actually aren't allowed to release
what close on two weeks apart. I don't want to get together. Sorry. I still have one yet to release.
So it's really to go right. Yes. That is right. Okay then. So if that is us, join us to model
for another exciting episode of Hacker. I'll break you.
You have been listening to the Hacker Public Radio podcast, at hackerpublicradio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording a podcast, then visit the HPR site to find out how easy it really is.
Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by anhonesthost.com, the Internet Archive, rsync.net, and the HPR Community Content Delivery Network.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
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Episode: 4578
Title: Alex's journey into Amateur Radio
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4578/hpr4578.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:14:22 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4578, for 2026-02-18
Today's show is entitled, "Alex's journey into Amateur Radio"
The host is thelovebug and the duration is 00:13:34
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "Dave talks to his son, Alex, about his experiences as a newly-licensed amateur radio operator"
Hello and welcome to another exciting episode of Hacker Public Radio. My name is Dave and you may
recall some time ago and I'm just actually just going to find out live. This is a live bit of research.
How long ago this was? It was back in 2021. I did an episode number 3473 talking about my journey
into amateur radio. What the reason that I've come back again is because someone else in this house
hold has just started theirs and that is my youngest son, Alex. Hello Alex. Hello. So,
Alex, you have recently passed your amateur radio license and I think what
listeners would be really interested to know is why you decided to go for your amateur license
in the first place. Yes, so I know you had an interest in it for a while and when I went to
maltbee for the first time for our radio club, I enjoyed it and I enjoyed learning about it.
So, I thought it would be an interesting thing to try and take part of. Okay, that's really interesting.
When you were coming along to the radio club with me, I'll be perfectly honest with you on
a main ever of actually said this to you before. I didn't actually seem as though you seemed
that bothered about it. Obviously, that was wrong. So, we know now that you do have an interest
because you've gone and got your sample license past your exam. What are incentives were you
given to actually get your license properly? Well, I did want to try and I thought it would be
interesting to communicate to other people and I was excited to try and learn and see what I could
do. That's nice. I like that because that's as a sense of personal progression. This is
you wanting to learn new things. And I will say that as you've been going through the process,
your desire to learn and your desire to question the things that you had been learning
has been really quite notable. Were you polite to tell? Well, there was a
the bet that we had in multiplayer. If I was the first to pass my license over the other junior
member, I would win was it 20, 10 pounds. That I think was 20 pounds. Yeah. And I did get that.
So, I did have 20 pounds and I also got already along with it. You did. Yeah, absolutely.
You also got a slight bribe for me because I did say I would pay for the license. They
fed the examination for you. So, we've tried to make the journey as painless as possible for you.
So, hopefully that hurts worked. But I think just keeping on that line for a second, when it
came to the training, how easy did you find it? So, the official foundation training book.
I didn't understand very easily because it was quite complicated. But there was the ham train
one which I found much easier to understand. So, I mostly use that one to study.
I've heard a lot of people say exactly the same thing. The ham train book, by the way, ham train
is the training arm of Essex Ham, which is the organization in the UK that is put on free.
Or one of the number of organizations that put some free training for at different levels.
But yeah, you're absolutely right. The ham train foundation book clip is designed more
at a more easy to understand element, where is the RSGB foundation license handbook or manual
which one it is? Is very technical, very matter of fact. And it's almost more of a curriculum guide,
syllabus guide than it is a training manual. So, what about the exam itself? You just spend a lot
of time going through the books and learning and watching the videos from Essex Ham. But when
it came to the examination, was it as difficult or complex as you had imagined that it was going to be?
No, I expected it to be much more difficult. But some of the questions I understood, some of
them I had to go back over. But in the end, I did get an understand most of it. So, I think that was
nice. No, that is good. What course on a GG shoes? I chose M70UO. Why? Well, we were looking over a few
ethics ham, the call sign checker. And I thought it looked nice because it was one of the
few that we found out was available. And it kind of looks like a face. Yes, it does. No, you're absolutely right.
It's a good course, I naturally. And it scans quite well in Elphabet as well, which is good.
So, now that you've got your course sign, you are licensed at the foundation level, which means you
are perfectly within your rights to pick up a microphone and make noise. How does that make you feel?
And it sounds a bit like sitting on a psychiatrist couch. But how does it make you feel that you
have this ability to do it? And I think I'm rather than, oh, it makes me feel excited. And what about
if you were to then pick up the microphone and press the button and speak into it, how would that
make you feel? Well, I'd probably be nervous at first, but once you get the hang of it, you're
sort of, it's easier. And also, I feel like it's more, it's an interesting hobby and I think it's
really nice to learn and get into. Okay, well, we'll come back to that because I do have a specific
question about that. Now, interestingly enough, you would have already made a number of contacts,
supervised contacts, on the air before you had your own license. There was one that we did,
you see my handheld radio when we did the field day outside the clubhouse. Do you remember that one?
Yes. You did how you had one contact on the HF radio at club when I think it was, was it
Liam was was going through it with you? Yes, it was Liam. Yeah. And then what I would consider
an immense privilege for you is you managed to get a contact whilst down at the radio center at
Bletchley Park in December. Yes, I do still have a postcard on my wall from there. Do you
remember which country you were at? You reached Sweden? Almost. Finland? No. No way. Switzerland.
Yes. Yes. As each of those experiences, I mean, specifically those in order because those
of the three you did before you took your exam, starting with the handheld going to HF with Liam
and then speaking to somebody on the rather nice radio installation at the National Radio
Center, how did you find those experiences? Well, the one handheld, I think that was my first ever
chance when it wasn't there. It was definitely a very scary experience. I didn't really know what to say,
but I got the hang of it after a while. For the HF one, which was Liam helped me that one,
I think it was definitely an interesting experience because also I got someone from my thing
Finland or somewhere like that because it was a while away. And for the one I bletchley park,
come actually really proud of that one because it's from, you get from a while away. And also it's an
official, the official radio center. So, financed a very good achievement, transmitting from there.
Well, being able to actually use the National Radio Center call sign, GB,
free RRS. I was going to say to GB2, RRS, but that's the news bulletin. GB3 of RRS is
internationally renowned and recognised as the National Radio Center. So, for you to use that,
is quite a privilege position to be in. Did you find that each of those three experiences got
easier with each one? I think the one at GB3 RRS was one of the scariest because it's from a
big place, but the one from the handheld to the HF, it definitely did get easier. Yeah.
So, I think, in a way, yeah. There was one more. Was that? On the way back from Bletchley Park.
Ah, when I was talking in convoy. When we were in convoy and I was speaking on the on the radio
and I said, right, I've had enough now, you can do it and I shove the microphone in your face.
And you just took to it completely naturally. As if it was something you'd done for
prages. Yes, I do remember that now. We were talking for a while and then you thought that I could
should have a try. Yeah. Well, as I'm sure supervised by somebody who has a license,
then really anybody, absolutely anybody can use the amateur radio bands. Yeah, and I think that's
a nice experience because that's only a recent rule, isn't it? It's a recent change to the rule.
Up until recently, I think you had to be either in this immediate or a full license holder to be
able to do it. So, I think it was about 18 months, two years ago, whether it changed the rules
that actually allowed foundation license, I hold us like myself, to be able to supervise
other users using their call sign. So, technically, either of your brothers who have no interest
in pursuing a call sign, if they wanted to and they want to speak to somebody on the radio,
they could use my call sign with me there. Yeah. So, how many new contacts have you made since you
became licensed in December? Since I became licensed, I believe, I did speak to you on the
last I was walking locally, other than that, I don't think I've made many contacts. That's the
answer I had. It was just me. As a matter of fact, there were two instances. The first one was actually
on the day you got your call sign, where you went out for a walk, and you tried, you had the
hand held and you tried to court. I remember the second time now. And yeah, and the one after that
is when you came and joined us on a walk. So, what's next for you? In terms of your amateur
radio journey, you know I am now studying for my intermediate. So, that's the next step on.
Do you have any inclination to move onto the next level, or are you going to stay where you are
for now, have a look around and see what things are like, just get used to it?
Well, I've not really had much experience in amateur radio yet, so I'll probably stay foundation
for a while. I think I definitely need to try and make a few more contact with people, go to
other places, and try and get contact there. So, now that you've been through the experience
of learning more about it and having a go and going through the training and going through the
examination, what was the best piece of advice you could go back and give yourself when you first
looked into this? And I suppose I actually suppose my extension, what was the best piece of advice
you could give to somebody else thinking about getting into amateur radio? Well, study hard. I think
studying is important to try and get your head into the mindset of amateur radio and for your exam.
Excellent. All right, well, I hope this has given you a bit of a taste of of what it's like
for somebody who has just passed their amateur radio exam, who's just starting to learn their
experiences. And of course, if you do have any questions you want to ask, then please feel free
to leave a comment on the show notes of this episode. Or of course, if you want to, if you want to
to make a bit more of a long comment, or you want to describe your own experiences of having
to have been gone through the same thing, then please do feel free to record an episode yourself.
So, Alex, thank you so much for speaking to me. I know this has taken about a week to
actually get around to doing. But I've been with you on this journey, and I even found this
conversation in lightning, so I'm hoping other people will as well. So, thank you.
Yes, it was a very nice experience. Thank you. So, join us again tomorrow for another exciting
episode of Hacker Public Radio.
You have been listening to the Hacker Public Radio podcast, at hackerpublicradio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording a podcast, then visit the HPR site to find out how easy it really is.
Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by anhonesthost.com, the Internet Archive, rsync.net, and the HPR Community Content Delivery Network.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
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Episode: 4579
Title: Happy by shower
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4579/hpr4579.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:14:23 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4579, for 2026-02-19
Today's show is entitled, "Happy by shower"
The host is Antoine and the duration is 00:07:45
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "On what makes me joyfull when I’m destroyed (spoiler: an anchor, hope)"
You're listening to Happy Bysher, where I show on HPR.
Hello dear beloveds here with you at HPR and Twan.
The message of this episode is the following.
Life comes in waves, circumstances are volatile.
For the majority of them, we have no control of what happens.
Things happen in climate events, and happen in health.
Our, our health, or another one's health,
financially, emotionally.
Many, many, many depend on choices that others make,
or outside events that we as humans cannot trace,
or interfere on cause and effect.
And lah, that's an interjection.
We can't even tell the weather precisely yet.
Our emotions, they're subject to the same phenomenon,
as far as they are tired to that events,
our feelings of sadness, of relief.
We'll come and go, also as waves, unpredictable,
and patrous in precise.
It ruins the health of anyone.
Do you listen to your heartbeat?
It can be 80 or 110 BPM.
From one second to another,
by the choices of her thinking, without you moving a musco.
Like a music you're hearing, it can change your heartbeat
even though you do nothing, but also,
if you think you can change everything.
Of your body chemicals, of your heartbeat,
of her feelings that, in lasting instance,
are our choices, our choice of feeling.
A basketball player, for instance,
can be a better player, and then there's a research innate.
Only training in his mind,
imagination and comparison to one that is not practice at all.
Your mind, and by it we mean,
now the choices of her thinking, your mind
have influence in your muscular abilities,
and in your body chemicals.
These regulate basically the entirety of your sensations,
that are different from the feelings,
and contribute your health or lack of it.
So when one believes, have a belief,
he has a stable point in which to be firm.
Even though the circumstances are waves,
he's not floating on them.
He's anchored.
That's why if firm, if true, and this fate,
this subject that this person is more stable and happier
than an ordinary person that has no hope at all,
but lives by what the world has to offer today.
In summary, the instability is not beneficial,
especially if it's not only tights that are infrequent
and the rise but are more precise, more stable,
but if there are waves, it's more unstable yet.
Well, we are taken to the thinking of instability
for the pursuit of something we believe,
or are made to believe, is worth it.
And maybe not,
then when someone presents something we,
quote-unquote, need, that may not be the case.
We can think, then, we choose what we live for.
How I choose to few,
how I choose to behave,
because or in spite of what happens around and around and around.
No matter the point of the universe when person has reached
physically or perceptually, his transcendence,
his conquests of the best of his life, anything,
that does not define him for eternity,
because it's not in the best.
It's happening right now.
Has not ended, yeah?
No point of experience of me.
I have days of very low mood and uncertainty,
the feeling of serving for absolutely nothing.
Even in good days that may feel true,
the feeling that thinking may feel true to me,
but does not define me,
as it defines when I am in the ground on this thinking.
I have been sad things like this,
from people who have value or value it,
value it then, more than family of blood.
These are days that it's not healthy.
I don't have the appropriate care of my body.
I don't shower.
Until recently, those were days of much suffering,
but I perceived that in the next day of each of these days,
the next day,
in having kept and keeping trust,
keeping trust in the hope.
I have,
I can have a night of rest.
I can wake up and take a shower
and after all,
start a new,
almost a new,
haven't lived the bad experience the day prior.
As an experienced dead,
at that moment,
I only wanted to go away as soon as possible,
like,
take me out of these,
I want to go out,
I want to sleep and forget,
I want to,
anything.
Wow,
but after going through the entirety of it,
and it's full duration,
no short cuts,
I would not,
I would not replace this feeling
and learning experience by anything else.
Someone has said that English is when makes us do something.
In comfort,
we only go comfortable.
The purpose or the action
comes from the need to change.
I will repeat this phrase.
The purpose or the action comes from the need to change.
Every little experience,
and not only the great and the normal,
but little ones,
or seemingly little,
contribute,
contribute to mode someone,
the rest trajectory.
You have been listening to the Hacker Public Radio podcast, at hackerpublicradio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording a podcast, then visit the HPR site to find out how easy it really is.
Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by anhonesthost.com, the Internet Archive, rsync.net, and the HPR Community Content Delivery Network.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
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Episode: 4580
Title: The First Doctor, Part 4
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4580/hpr4580.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:14:24 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4580, for 2026-02-20
Today's show is entitled, "The First Doctor, Part 4"
The host is Ahuka and the duration is 00:15:00
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "A continuing look at the first Doctor Who."
Hello, this is a hookah welcoming you to Hacker Public Radio and into the
exciting episode in our series on Science Fiction and we're going to go back to the early
doctor who some of the classic stories and back to the very first doctor and so we're
going to pick up where we left off with some of our previous episodes here and the
first story we're going to talk about is one called Galaxy 4.
This is a science fiction story that is focused on the fairly common idea of not judging
a book by its cover. The Tardis lands on a deserted dying planet. They see a funny looking
robot that Vicki calls a chumbly. Then another one appears and they investigate but are
rescued by three beautiful women who tell them they were in great danger and they take the three
travelers back to their ship where they meet the leader Maga another beautiful woman but
somehow these women are odd and a bit cold. They tell of how they met another ship from an
evil race the real and that in a space battle the ships damaged each other and landed on
this planet. Then later the Tardis travelers meet the real who initially refused to reveal their
appearance because it would frighten the humans. As it turns out they were very alien and appearance
but not at all evil it was the beautiful women who were the evil ones in this story.
Then there is a very interesting there's nothing like this anywhere else in the
canon of Doctor Who. It's a little one episode story. Why one episode? Partly they had a
Tadahila gap and so it takes place on the planet Campbell. Agents from Earth realize the
Daleks are hearing up to no good. It turns out this mission to the unknown is a prequel
to the Daleks master plan which comes just a little bit later and is notable as the only
Doctor Who story in which none of the regular cast appears. That's because this was an extra
episode given to the Doctor Who team late in the day and the regular cast were already given vacation
time off so consider this episode zero of the Daleks master plan and not has a standalone story.
Now the original story has been lost like so many episodes of early Doctor Who but a very nice
version was done by the University of Central Lancashire and you can view it on YouTube. I've
put a link in the show notes. It's introduced by Edward DeSusa who played Mark Cory in the original
and it's worth a good look. They did a good job with the story and you know that's it's nice
that some of these missing stories from the first two doctors you know there are big gaps in
William Hartnull and later Patrick Trouton from when the BBC was just saying oh no one will ever
want to see this again we can just wipe the tapes or throw them out or whatever and it's really nice
that in some of these cases that they you know someone has done a different version to bring
the story to life. Some of the Trouton stories were done as stage place and then the stage play
was filmed and those are very interesting. Then we get the myth makers now this is another one of
the historical stories and we've talked about how in the early days there was a tendency to alternate
science fiction and history and they did a lot more historical stories than modern Doctor Who does
but in this case instead of verified history it's historical legends that play here in the form
of the siege of Troy by the Greeks. So you have all of the Homeric cast here Achilles,
Prime, Hector, Odysseus. The Doctor is taken for a god by Achilles although Odysseus has his doubts.
Vicky is captured by the Trojans and taken to Troy, calls herself Cressida and is taken for a goddess.
Stephen goes to Troy to try and free her but is seen as a Greek so Vicky is now suspect.
She falls in love with a son of Prime named Trojless and you think something might happen here
particularly if you're familiar with a play of Shakespeare called Trojless and Cressida.
Now this story only has faint echoes of the play preserving that Cressida is Greek and Trojless's
in this case it is Cressida staying with Troyless. So instead of going back to the Titus Vicky is
now out one more companion gone. Now this also marks the departure of Verity Lambert as the producer.
She had been the producer of Doctor Who from the very beginning but went on to have a very successful
career as a producer both with the BBC and with independent channels in England.
And she was replaced by a fellow named John Wiles. Wiles tried to implement changes such as making
the show a bit darker but ran into opposition from both heart and all and BBC management
and resigned after producing four stories the myth makers threw to the arc and the popularity of
other SF shows on television made a move to more SF and less history desirable.
As for Heartinel's opposition it is notable that he had become quite identified with the role of the
Doctor and was very proprietary with it. This would come to pose problems later as his health declined.
Now the Daleks Master plan this is the one that we said mission to the unknown could be thought of
as episode zero or the prequel to this story. This story arc takes 12 episodes or 13 if you
add mission to the unknown as indeed you should. The reason for such a long story arc is that
Sir Hugh Weldon the director general the BBC at that time wanted a monster-length
Daleks story because his mother was a big Daleks fan and this story does have a lot going for it.
The length means you can do a little more character development. Now the story starts off with
Stephen recovering from a sword thrust during the fall of Troy and being attended by
Katarina a Trojan maiden who is now in the TARDIS. Now I think at one point there was a thought that she
might become a new companion but that turns out is not what happened. Now they arrive on the planet
Campbell the same one that we saw in mission to the unknown and meet with space special security agent
Brett Vaien played by Nicholas Courtney who in a few years would become the beloved to Brigadier
Luthbridge Stewart. Vaien tries to force the doctor to take him to Earth so he can warn the planet
but the doctor recognizes the Daleks and wants to find out more about their plans and this brings
us to one of the most evil villains in Doctor Who, Mavic Chen. You see the docs have assembled
a group of villainous aliens to join together in conquering the Earth and Mavic Chen is part of the
group but he is also the idolized guardian of the solar system so he's a traitor. Now Katarina the Trojan
maiden sacrifices herself to save the others from a convict they meet on a prison planet.
Another wonderful character is Sarah Kingdom played by Peggy Marsh who is head of space special
security who has been told by Mavic Chen that Vaien and the others are traitors and so she kills Vaien
who is in fact her brother but they manage to convince her that Chen is the real traitor and she joins
them. In the middle of all of this Christmas happened and this resulted in the most absurd
episode ever of Doctor Who, it's called the Feast of Stephen, capped by the doctor breaking the fourth wall.
The episode is now among the missing but you can find reconstructions on YouTube if you want to see
the absurdity of it and there is a reappearance of the meddling monk. This is a sprawling story I mean
12 episodes good lord but overall worth a look Mavic Chen played by Kevin Stony is delightfully evil
and Stony would return to play another villain in the Troutin story the invasion
and it is interesting to see Nicholas Courtney before he got the role he would always be identified with
Doctor Who would not do anything this large again until the flux in 2021 and frankly this story makes
more sense and that brings us now to another historical called the massacre of St. Boatholmese Eve
you'll often see this as simply the massacre which works because the herrily is no other story with a similar
title and after that massive science fiction story you know another historical story that was the way
they did it. Now this involves the true story of Protestants in France being massacred by the Catholics
and the main feature worth calling out here is that William Hartnell plays two roles in this story
he is the doctor of course but also the habit of M. Was a leader among the Catholics looking to
rid France of the Protestants. Now the idea of playing two parts became even more nicely done by
Patrick Troutin later in the story called the enemy of the world in any case this leads to confusion
by Stephen who thinks the habit is actually the doctor. Now in the story a servant girl named Anna Chaplet
is rescued and this opens up the interesting possibility that she is the ancestor of Dodo
short for Dorothea Chaplet a companion who appears at the end. She witnesses a car crash and
barges into the tire that's thinking she can call the police that's Dodo we're talking about.
Now while the novelty of Hartnell playing two parts may stand out on first look the story is really
a showcase for Peter Purvis in his role of Stephen Taylor. Now because Hartnell is not on screen very
much, Purvis really has to carry the plot and he does so admirably. Hartnell was on vacation when
the second episode was filled and so didn't appear at all and his health problems were beginning
to cause problems which contributed to this situation. He was having a lot of trouble with remembering
his lines which is a real problem for an actor. He was not that old by current standards as he was
58 when this story was produced. I'm now 74 so 58 seems more like late youth to me but you know
for Hartnell it was nearing the end of the line. And then the last one will discuss on this episode is the arc.
The tireless materializes on a spaceship in the far future so after this historical back to science fiction
it is carrying the future of the human race to a new planet refuses to
because the earth is falling into the sun. But it also has an odd race called the
monoids who are on board and they have one eye so that's what monoid stands for. They're an alien race
who came to earth when their own planet was dying and now they serve the humans.
Unfortunately the TARDIS crew carries germs for which humans and monoids on the arc have no
immunity and sickness breaks out. One faction wants to kill the doctor in his companions but instead
the doctor finds a cure for the disease and they leave on the TARDIS. Then the TARDIS materializes
back on the arc but they discovered that hundreds of years have passed. The monoids have
rebelled and taken over and now the humans serve them. As the old saying has it be kind of those you
meet on the way up for you will meet them again on the way down. So that's enough for this particular
look at the first doctor where moving towards completing all of the first doctor's stories.
But this is enough for now so this is a hookah for Hacker Public Radio signing off and is always
encouraging you to support free software. Bye bye!
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording podcast, click on our upload link
to find out how easy it is.
Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by an AnHonestHost.com, the Internet Archive,
rsync.net, and our mirror network.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
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Episode: 4581
Title: Sharp Intake of Breath City (A.K.A.) How I learnt to stop worrying about the fork bomb
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4581/hpr4581.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:14:24 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4581, for 2026-02-23
Today's show is entitled, "Sharp Intake of Breath City (A.K.A.) How I learnt to stop worrying about the fork bomb"
The host is not_toby and the duration is 00:36:31
The flag is Explicit, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "My journey into the magickal world of beastie bits on disks and daemons all the way down.."
How do I hack a public radio well I never thought I'd do this but here I am recording
finally it's been a long long road to get to this point I've actually trying to do this
I started listening to hack a public radio back in like 2011 probably no yes yes
2011 which is when I and I thought I don't want it to do is I've
remember back in the day people used to make these these podcasts about their sort of journey
into free software and hack a dumb if you like becoming a hacker you know in the in the
OG sense of the term you know multiple MIT model railway club hacking so I'm not a model railway
enthusiast but I I do like thinking with computers and have done since since yes about 2011
is when I first cut my teeth on on Linux yeah I historically very much nerd most of my life but
more of a humanities nerd as a child I was very interested in kind of philosophy and literature
and sort of art house cinema and art the arts really the arts and the humanities were much more
my speed I sort of loathed or was poorly let's say I you know I didn't get you know I grew
I'm I'm to give some context I'm 41 now so I grew I missed the era of like BBC micro
and it sounds as though the generation prior to mine were sort of I don't know about this like
computers were exciting it sounded like computer sounded very exciting in the ACs you know
interesting and weird and quirky and it sounded like people who came of age around that time
had a different experience to to my generations which I see at school for me was essentially just
learning Microsoft utilities it was word power point XL right and I fucking sorry then I had to put
the explicit tag on this bugger but I do like to talk like say that sometimes yes it was fucking
awful and I and it turned me off computers completely but having said that I was also not a very
technically minded individual at least I didn't think I was maybe I was in other domains maybe I
had to find that out later this might be a really long episode by the way um maybe we would have split
it up in some parts I don't know it's wonderful what you guys do I haven't actually listened
to a public radio and sometime but I do I do mean to change that and get back into it um anyway
we'll get there we'll get there um yeah so very much not not didn't think of myself as a computer
person at all um didn't like math and science and I thought that was computers but I've kind of
kind of kind of since come to realise that computers are much more are actually potentially
much more about philosophy and linguistics and you know systems right systems and language um you
know obviously the math stuff is there and science stuff is there at the low level if you know
good which is actually what I'm really interested in I do struggle I struggle with the nitty gritty
of compsai but but try to push myself through that and again we'll get to that but um so yeah
2011 I uh I was um also very um got into skateboarding and BMX riding my teens and 20s which
have a lot I feel like those communities and if anyone knows about Chappard Rodney mother and he's
like one of the famous most famous skateboarders of all time and also kind of a genius and also
very interesting open source and he he actually makes these these kind of interesting
comparisons between open source communities and skateboarding communities or I like to think of
I like to think of like skateboarding BMX like roller-blading or you know parkour like these are what I
call I don't even think of them as sports I like or they're sports they're free sports and
free them right like they they encourage um playfulness and they encourage a kind of physical
start of hacking like hacking the environment which is like you know so there's a lot of
overlap I think in our communities um and it's also about pushing the standard forward so like
progression there's a there's a there's a constant turn of progression that happens in those activities
let's not call them sports I don't like the terms sports I think of them more as like performance arts
or um yoga really it's like a spiritual thing for me those activities um but they aren't
tremendously hard on the body and so what happened for me was I sort of destroyed my uh one of my
knees gradually and so the over time and so it's the right hold age of of 27 I was diagnosed
with the arthritis of someone twice my age and under when a um um a pretty significant procedure
where they they took the meniscus from a dava and implanted it into my knee because I destroyed my
meniscus and then they took some stem cells and and injected them into the you know some anyway it was
it was a it was a it was a big thing and I and I basically had to sort of sack off
that stuff which is really kind of consumed my time and energy prior to that and I was um
I sort of accidentally became interested in computers uh via one trying to revive the passions
out of the kit as I say for sort of arts photography filmmaking let's share I had to sort of
for one reason or rather I won't get into you know it's trying not to make this too much of a
low story but basically I sort of lost touch with that that side of myself and uh so I was trying
to get into photography and now when I was a kid photography was I just used a film camera because
it was just kind of prior to you know the advent of um you know just I mean I'm sure this
camera's around but they weren't really you know anyway I didn't use them so coming back to
trying to come back to photography and around sort of I know in 2010 obviously digital cameras
were all the rage now and film cameras were kind of rendered obsolete so I just get a film camera
actually but I mainly focused on digital and I suddenly all right I never until that point of
my life this is how much of a kind of Luddite techno-phobe sort of person I was I really did
consider myself quite anti-technology I've sort of done a strange um round robin and I've sort of
ended up back in the same place which again we'll get to hopefully find it interesting um if not
obviously you know there's plenty of other things to listen to but um no so god of computer for the
first time you know I'd use my parents computers and stuff you know and that was all again
at school like you know just hated to be honest I hated computers they were annoying
and I have to say I lay that blame squarely at the feet of of of I'm just gonna go for it
counting Microsoft I'm sorry if you're American I know how Americans feel about that but
our scripts and Australians do love the word and sometimes call each other that word is a
tower of endurance so I'm hopefully no one's fallen off their shaft counting Microsoft I can't you
know like honestly they just they run everything I do I still have to deal with you know Microsoft
software what I'm looking at teams right now um oh god it's just spec wasn't it um I mean
and all this business of them becoming all over the world anyway let's not progress um really turned
me off computers when those did really did just hated it all everything always seemed to break
they just seemed like a nightmare to deal with nothing worked like I wanted to see I just didn't
did I just hated computers as a result but as I say getting it back in front of trying against
just photography back in photography in my late 20s or mids late 20s when I knew that my days of
jumping down stairs on bikes and skateboards were kind of numbered um I got a computer got a
sample it was a sample RF 11 like 15 inch I had like an Nvidia you know I did I'm a nerd so I brought
all the magazines you know you know the internet was around but now I was such a lullite like I brought
magazine I was a magazine but I used to fucking be obsessed I used to have like pulse magazines for
all the things I was interested anyway so I brought computer magazines you know did all this research
got the laptop I thought you know my budget blah blah blah blah blah got this laptop and got it and thought
fucking hell you know like I want to understand how to take care of this thing I was you know I was
how much money is working as a um what a fan man delivering fruit and veg around South
Hampton and um you know so I was you know you know how much money it has 600 pounds of
all this went a lot of money for a yeah anyway so I've bought this laptop so often and I was like
I need to learn to take care of this because the computer every time we use you know I just
could use always ended up coming shit essentially we'd get in you computer the family was
and then it would just gradually over you know just deteriorate and weird things would happen and
you'd look at it and you'd be like what what's going what is this like back in the bad old days you know
we're talking like when does I start using like when I you know from like when do the first we've
probably got our first computer like was the end of the late nineties I remember my dad sort of
clunky all laptops and so I don't know what Windows but after I'm this T-that 95,000 then three to like
this X-peen it was just horrible I hated it um so it goes to the computer it was seven
Windows 7 era this was and uh coming up towards Windows 8 um but I remember yeah just deep diving
computer magazines and then of course you know um what's the word I'm looking for a god when
something is fate or um inevitably inevitably you know I discovered Linux I just like what is this
you know I can put it put it you see see if you would ask me what an operating system was at
that time my life or price that I would have just looked at you blackly I like I wouldn't have
had a conception of what an operating system was which I think is kind of interesting like as
you know being now what 15 years deep into being a computer like I think it's really important especially
like this whole year the Linux desktop and trying to advocate for people to eat for your name
and so stuff like it's important to like sometimes step back and realize that like normal people
don't like they don't they don't walk at you know I mean like I was one of these people that's
I'm care and I don't you know like it's not you know you know like it's not
didn't you you asked the man on the street like what's not for a system most people just
looking at you blackly I don't know you know and I didn't and then suddenly I was in this I
want it you know as I say I sort of stumbled into it I just became fascinated I thought wow
I don't understand how the fucking things work and they are like so much you know God there's
we live in the computing you know we live in the age of technology computers so I at that time my life
having the energetic space and time to focus on something other than destroying my leg
through on high impacts absurdity I
yeah I was like wow I just want to fall down this rabbit hole and fall down the rabbit hole
I did the the photography never came to much I did take some rather nice photos actually
camera but then I ended up sold it all I just just fell down there I had this operation and
I was basically bedroom for our six months after it we wasn't successful but it let me fall down
the rabbit hole quite deeply and I know immediately from as soon as I kind of got into computers
I was straight away like that Linux thing I don't know as I say probably just kind of
because it's kind of a countercultural sort of slightly hippy-ish type deal do you know what I mean like
GPS I was like wow I remember watching that that amazing documentary revolutionary
sort of like yes man these are my people this is definitely the direction I want to you know
I want to explore with with computers and offering systems in general just
immediately found but as soon as I sort of realized that oh there was this thing called
an operative system like how like I just wanted to understand first principles
around computers and so I am I remember I was watching like I think it's CS50 a highly recommended
to anyone that's like looking to get you know that that foundational level
understanding of you know just like binary that blew my mind just understanding that everything was
zero and one I was like what excuse me how on earth is that I think it was my bling it was such an
exciting time it was such an exciting time and it was I mean I needed it because it was pretty devastating
to lose to be so physically incapacitating how having you know spent so many years being
such a physically capable person so it was really like you know computers learning about computers
and and by extension of that really open source because I think if open source wasn't there I
think if the if they're kind of slightly weird counter cultural oddness of you know the Linux ecosystem
which is coming let us sort of you know sad it's a bit like skateboarding me and then picks
now like you know Microsoft being the biggest donation to these days the latest foundation and
kind of trying to subsume the whole thing it's like really like which is kind of wire ended up being
more of a BST person but again we'll get to that primarily what I'm trying to say is that I'm kind of
a despicable hipster at heart and if it's popular I don't want anything to zero that
and if it's slightly weird and niche and off the wall then I'm there you know drew a
length so I'm very much a BST guy I really want to do I want to experiment some more with
the template because that's I think computer software as artists I think extremely interesting
anyway I'm jumping ahead probably needs to well I might commit this because I would feel like I've
been talking for 40 long maybe I'll send this one off and hopefully pick up at some point or maybe I'll
just keep going which really um you get a bit further I'll go a bit further let's go a bit further so
yeah at 2011 2012 just fell down the rabbit oh and I went in hard you know I went from zero to
hundred pretty like within that first year I'd like done full gen two installs and you know actually
then X was like I've got really into gen two I was just listening some talk about it I just fell
down but I had all this time you know I wasn't wasn't able to work for the op and so I just fell
down the rabbit hole of 120 to 120 computers and really operating systems and yeah and yeah let's
let's hit the BST is actually because it was I went to an age to go to a lug in portsmith put
the plug the portsmith Linux user group and um I always remember I was one of my you know I
still need to all this stuff but I remember this and and you get very different like very
eclectic selection of people would turn up to those kind of things and but I remember there was the
guy that most of the person is just guy who turned up and he just he what he said I had no idea what
he's talking about like compilers and like the security of compilers and and he and he was I just
remember finding this chap that I didn't hear he was never seen him again but he was very impressive
you know he seemed like the smartest guy in the room and um I said I did not understand the word
what he was talking about but I wanted to know I mean I think in a way software you know this
the structure and interpretation of computer programming book which is like the Bible and it's known
as the wizard book and there there is something about something analogous or something um there
again it's like magic right it's like if you've ever if anyone has ever delved into esoterica
and uh looked into the occult and uh the practice of magic uh with a K it's like again a lot of
weird sort of um metaphorical overlap and it's sort of uh I don't know it's strange um anyway this guy
seemed like a sort of you know very advanced wizard and uh and he and he I remember sort of my
main game going oh look you know if you're interested in the stuff that he was talking about which
I don't know what he's talking about but please you know help me I'll be understanding you like
you need to look into open bsd and I was like okay and so it's sort of stuck in my head and I did
and that's kind of yeah I've sort of ended up being being very much more um interested in bsd family
both brain systems but that's kind of a whole rabbit hole um I think let's let's try and you know
I guess I guess you know half an hour is not too bad for podcos episode is it it feels very indulgent
talking about myself like this to be honestly I feel quite self conscious about the whole thing but um
no mind um whisper again next yeah so just got really into it got really into it
eventually my leg started to uh you know I just used to spend hours um
really compiling the system and gently and it was funny like it's easy to think and there was that
kind of trope of like you know just wasting time um yeah shaving and but I think it's it's three
for me I learned through tinkering I'm not I'm not a very good academic learner I sort of learned
by trial and error and I learned by playing and tinkering that's I think the best way for me to learn
you think uh and so I just did a shit ton of that already uh over the course about 10 or
half years and then my leg kind of got better you know I was on benefits during this period um like
welfare in America but um you know that was coming to an end because you know there's no reason
I mean not to go to a draw I definitely didn't want to go back to white van manning at this point
and so I decided to uh to enroll on a on a comp side degree to a comp side degree and um
and being a contrary motherfucker and of course as soon as I started trying to learn academically
around the stuff the whole thing just kind of I don't know but there was a lot of
things going on my life to be honest with you which is not really um which is a pretty
of topic for for this uh maybe one day or again into that stuff because I have listened to a few
HPR episodes where people talk about you know mental health and I think it's really important
and that sort of stuff uh so hopefully I'll maybe I'll do more of these this is really fun man this
is really fun but yeah I've had I've had struggles in that domain and between that and then
getting married, having a char, getting divorced, having to start a career and all this like
sort of getting a career and in the world you know I know I'm that's my job I'm a professional
software engineer which I hate out time I'd like to I like computer programmers my favorite way
of describing what I do I think you know just think to an episode of BSD now actually the other
day and the the chat was talking was saying like how he loves programming but he hates software engineering
and I totally understood what he meant um so yeah it's sort of my my passion went dormant
between as I say the degree the it actually re the degree kind of killed things for me a little bit
and there was a lot of other things going on my life which I won't get into but then it briefly
real woke woke up um when my ex wife got pregnant with her daughter and suddenly it was like
oh you need to get a job because I was just a sort of penina student at the time um living on
the student loans and all that jazz living in a in a warehouse um the room was a little bit
lonely windows uh so I said oh shit I need to get a job so I start is at a I got I got a like
temping job well I was essentially working as the under study to the under study the under study
to the to the intern who was this sort of eight I was like in my early 30s and I was working with
this 18 year old lovely beautiful boy called Bradley who he was he was so a lot such a lot of
such a lovely department actually it was very very like being in the IT crowd you know it was very
IT crowd ask if it's basement department and I just rocked up there expecting only to stay for
a couple of weeks and just to do you know help this this intern you know they just need it anyway
long in the short if it was it's like because I had accumulated all this knowledge programming and
systems and whatnot over the years even though it had been slightly um mangled by the by the
how in you know fucking fit my weird mind into the academic world sort of but not really
I you know but then I got there it's just a part of it was so funny because
like they're just were doing everything completely manually so I got there and like the first day
they were like okay he was like you're like what we need to do so dealing with like basically
I won't say the name of the big advertising conglomerate essentially like with million
different subsidiaries and all these users and we were down at the basement of this
place and give you a clue golden square and and you know when a user would leave
or change that they were basically what I'm trying to get to is they in order to back up machines
what they what this got chat Bradley would do was literally just like drag and drop in windows
he was teaching me he's like this is what he was what I took about teaching grammar to suck eggs
right at this point this is this is around what year we hear like about this is actually
yeah the year my daughter was born say 2018 should know that right um yeah so you know I've been
deep in the matrix by this point for for if you know you know I accumulate some skills right
I could write scripts and I was like what the fuck you don't you didn't know any power shelves
windows have gone in the bin in my first year I was like fuck that shit never going
about there again you know I I dabbled bit with I had a MacBook at one point and I quite like you
know it's like oh this is not this is a Unix great but also no fuck off Apple with all your proprietary
garbage um anyway and up in this department and I just start writing PowerShell scripts and
shell scripts and Python scripts for the because they were also it's advertising agency lots of creative
so lots of MacBooks you know so we had like a Mac department and a windows department and
but basically everything was being done manually there was one guy who'd written like an
onboarding PowerShell script that was like so insanely like it was you know and I become very
idealistic with was you know do one thing do it well you know you know I'd really take
and the Unix philosophy on board and this new starter script is guy who'd written and PowerShell
he was like a very much a windows guy you know and it was just like it was just a shoot I may
he laughed and I basically just started automating left writing center and they kept me on
age and it was such a great dream because I was supposed to be doing support right I was supposed
to I was I was on the support team like that so I was supposed to just be like a help desk guy
but I didn't I didn't do a single bit of help desk work all I did was sit in the corner just doing
whatever I wanted really which basically was like writing scripts but then I also started like making
my like making little get-up projects of this you know little help of functions and you know just
I think it was lovely I just got to like sit in the corner and they just left me alone because I
just every now and again I throw something useful over the wall and maybe like oh this is great you
you know saved a lot of loads of time and that was like back up back up scripts and automating the
how is it sort of the intuning of the Mac I can't remember loads of stuff I did there I really became
extremely productive and extremely interested again in programming and systems and because actually
what I was doing had a tangible effect in the world and was helping people and it felt fucking awesome
to do that actually but really really great and and then one thing left to another and I've
created all these you know silly little get-up projects with all my you know probably not great code
but it was you know it was working and then I managed basically just long as sort of it was I ended up
very quickly progressing from you know sort of you know in turn to the intern on the help desk
to you know doing DevOps you staff and then chain moving companies which yeah because they didn't
pay very well at this particular company so you know obviously my skills were worth much more so
sort of you know anyway nothing sort of was I ended up being um you know I'm now seeing
itself run generative very big very big company which is not really yeah anyway that whole process
of I ended up as start up got a quiet way of a company and it's been that's been a real challenge
and that and that whole process which took place over many years um fears at least um sort of
cause caused me to withdraw again and be like oh god you know and I sort of but then the reason I'm
kind of doing this absolutely actually we're nearly getting up to half an hour is I've kind of
come full circle and I had another big off on my leg because I have essentially severe arthritis in my
leg as a result and and often it's been what nearly yeah 15 years this year actually since that
I described at the beginning of episode and I've just recently had another even more insane up where
they broke my femur um because my leg was going wonky from all the arthritis they broke my femur
and realign my leg and have kind of bolstered it all back together again with like a set of sort
of 70s huge fucking nail-esque screws going all the way through with femur so and that's the other
thing I had kind of also got back into physical things as my knee got better over the last 10 years
got back in skateboarding back into BMX mountain biking, fixed gear riding bikes you know I love bikes
absolutely and Steve Jobs actually said the bicycle the computer is the bicycle of the mind so I
think it's no no constant that I'm you know and you know anyway I need to wrap this up because
we're approaching I don't know if I've set this half an hour limit pretty arbitrary but any who yeah
um oh god well was right um yes recently had this this major up and uh so obviously put the
cybersh on all my physical activities again and so what do I do of course fell back down the
rabbit hole of um programming and uh and this time fell back in love with BSD's I got really into BSD
as I mentioned earlier to the point that I actually ended up going to your BSD con I think back in
2000 and before I started my degree back in 2000 maybe it was the year I started my degree of 2014 potentially
might have been 2013 I'm not sure it was in uh oh god where was it it was it mulled sir it was the
one that was mulled sir I'm not sure what you know that was but it was it was very cool but yeah coming
into the industry and working industry obviously like it's you know unless you happen to be able
to work with BSD systems you know sort of mainly being on back on Linux and Mac OS and stuff for
the last few years for my sins but no you're having this time off and having the opportunity to
start playing again because I couldn't be out running my bike playing on that I just um yeah falling
back in love with it all actually ended up acquiring a bunch of old MacBooks through very strange circumstances
that I won't get into now um and then I must like you know what I don't want to put Linux on these
old MacBooks because um it just seems inappropriate given the lineage of Mac OS which I do actually
even though it's probably I do find Mac OS phenomenally interesting because it's such a hotge
potch of different systems and ideas and I'm really I just find I think I think the story of Apple
is also fascinating I wouldn't consider myself an Apple fanboy by any stretch of the imagination
I do you know but there is there is a sort of spirit in the history of Apple that is that is
I don't know it's sad it's sad actually because I was very when I first got interested told
I was taking a walk the walk the little bit of the technology I was very um I really you know the
hardware is beautiful and again it's this intersection of art and technology I think the Apple really
does epitomize and it's tremendously sad that that basically the defining influence on Mac on the
company was was a sort of you know very I hate to use the term but I think he probably was
exceptionally narcissistic kind of person Steve Jobs seems like sort of like the the bad Apple
dare I say and then he look at what's who's just like oh god what a beautiful human what amazing
stonishing lovely kind gentle soul if he if it is you know I mean like if if he could have driven
if it you know I mean like oh god how how things could be imagine imagine a universe in which we
have an Apple that was open what that would look like it would be so good you know it would be so good
and it's lovely to see companies like framework and that one out of one out of Germany's wonderful
mountain M&T reform oh god I've loved he's living the universe where they they you know I mean
but I think sadly anyway I don't know um where was I fuck me mean well back at the point
um that was from Linux Outlaws back in the day I used to listen to all the podcast back in the day
that's why it's uh it's it's very um it's really good to be doing this I really hope that I actually do
are you know um kick this over the line um I think I will but yeah anyway it should be wrapped up
awful awful awful awful uh no I don't know quite that yet what else do I want to say um yeah
I mean well back at the point no I don't know I don't know um
um boundary dwelling um boundary dwelling hmm no I think I'm running dry I think I'm running dry
I need to do some work I'm mainly doing this to procrastinate about some work if I don't really
want to do but I must because it does pay the bills um yeah speaking of which I have
recently for the first time actually started to contribute back and I guess that's the plan of what
this is about to because I want to start contributing back I've been given so much by the
source communities whether it's podcasts or and the software itself you know and I'm at a point
now where like you know I've been doing this for a while I'm not a move anymore um I'm certainly not
a very sophisticated programmer I'm you know I'm not I'm really not a very computer
computery person you know but I love it and I've learned a lot over the years and I really do want
to contribute back and so over this last few months when I've been I've had next time on my hands
I have started to um I've got back into learning about the lower level staff and and back into
trying to understand our project systems better which I did have the understanding at one point
and it's sort of actually quite a lot. Not as sure of that is like you know finally after many
many years sort of submitted some patches I got these that's that's where we were yes match the
MacBooks got these old MacBooks oh look at the BSD on these you know I never when I was into BSD
before I was always quite into the into Open BSD more than I was just because I really like
that they're the correctness side of things I loved how are idealistic they are I love how
how they just they don't pander to anyone they just do exactly what they want to do and if you
like it great if you don't yeah whatever I really like that mentality I think that's that's how we
don't that chap um the HHH with his new a Marchy thing I think I think he's really right about that
I think like you know you should just make stuff that you want don't you know this this
fucking Rick Ruben says this about art right don't make art for other people you make it for yourself
other people like it great do you know what I mean you gotta do it for yourself um so I love that
about your own BSD but this time around I've actually been more focused on free BSD just because
I'm not sure why I'm they're the BSD community scares me I'm completely honest with you
that's there's just seem so much smarter than I could ever possibly be and I just feel like
I don't know where I can really like contribute there because just just so far beyond my level of
understanding of operating systems and low-level programming where's free BSD seems like a lot more friendly
that seems a lot more friendly maybe I'm wrong I didn't know I didn't know I've been just
to hear people's thoughts but it just it just seems a bit more friendly welcoming that obviously
trying to pan the more you know to you know be more of a generalized OS compared to open BSD is
like you know for the developers for us by us right you know free B but I think I remember free B
but no free BSD's been great I've really enjoyed it and I've I've submitted a couple of very
minor patches to the to the kernel to to fix the function keys on on the old MacBooks
and also to add SMC support for my for the one out I've got so I've got a 17 inch
last 17 inch oh that's beautiful bit of hardware just adore a wish a wish I could somehow
shoot on a modern motherboard into it such a great form factor not enough anyway I'm whaffling I'm
whaffling I'll sign off there I can't see I can't stop I can't wait I don't know what
more I'll talk about hopefully I do more updates and talk about strange things I'd like to do
anyway hopefully someone enjoy this and got something from it and if not this and do another
updates or I don't go outside and get some vitamin D I don't know or just tinker because that's what
we like to do here hack it probably really a fun it really hard to end things but there we go
I keep calm carry on bye
You have been listening to the Hacker Public Radio podcast, at hackerpublicradio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording a podcast, then visit the HPR site to find out how easy it really is.
Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by anhonesthost.com, the Internet Archive, rsync.net, and the HPR Community Content Delivery Network.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
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Episode: 4583
Title: Nuclear Reactor Technology - Ep 7 Small Modular Reactors
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4583/hpr4583.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:14:29 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4583, for 2026-02-25
Today's show is entitled, "Nuclear Reactor Technology - Ep 7 Small Modular Reactors"
The host is Whiskeyjack and the duration is 00:13:42
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "This episode covers Small Modular Reactors, or SMRs."
This episode is the 7th and 8th part series on nuclear reactor technology.
In this episode, we will describe a topic which has been in the news in recent years,
which is small modular reactors or SMRs for short.
What is an SMR?
Basic definition.
A small modular reactor is a nuclear reactor that is designed to be largely built
in a factory and subject to as little on-site assembly as possible.
The main goal is to lower costs by reducing construction times and allowing a more
rapid start of return on investment.
Size-based definition.
Some people put a numerical size limit on SMRs, saying there must be no larger than 300
megawatts to qualify as an SMR.
However, this limit is not universally accepted and not all SMR designs fall within this
arbitrary limit.
I will ignore this numerical limit and just consider anything to be an SMR if it meets
the criteria of being largely built in a factory with minimal on-site assembly.
The actual goal of the SMR idea.
The actual goal of the SMR idea is to build reactors rapidly and efficiently on more
less than a assembly line basis, rather than can crafting each one.
One engineer in the nuclear industry has compared building reactors to building ships.
Traditional shipbuilding techniques involve assembling each ship from the keel up on the slipways
from individual components.
Newer shipbuilding techniques assemble ships as separate blocks inside factory-like
buildings and then join completed blocks together in a final assembly stage.
This requires careful planning and tight-quality control, but results in building ships
much more rapidly and economically.
This engineer said that SMRs are attempting to build this doorway of doing things to the
nuclear reactor industry as well.
SMR categories, small versus micro.
One very important distinction that needs to be made but seldom is happens to be the
difference between size ranges.
These different size ranges are often meant to meet different use cases which in turn
has further influence on their designs.
Small SMRs SMRs in the several hundred megawatt range are meant for normal grid-scale
utility usage.
These designs are often based on well-proven design, scale down and simplified and use
normal commercial fuel.
These small SMRs typically come from companies with long experience in the nuclear
industry.
Small SMRs and small grids.
In addition to normal utility use, these small SMRs are particularly attractive to small grids
where absorbing a large power plant into the grid is difficult.
Adding a large amount of capacity all at once that may be a significant fraction of their
entire total is difficult from an operational and economic standpoint.
Some of these utilities may have built nuclear power plants decades ago when reactors
were much smaller and are finding that newer ones are much larger.
The attraction of SMRs to them is the smaller size.
Checker wet SMRs from micro loads.
Designs in the tens of megawatts are often meant for special use cases, although some vendors
do promote them as alternatives to normal full-scale utility plants.
These use cases can include such things as powering communities in remote areas which are
far from normal utility grids.
These places are usually powered by diesel generators which are very expensive to operate due
to the cost of shipping and fuel.
As well as the higher cost of diesel compared to normal utility power, these communities
often have no normal roads connecting them to the outside world and after bringing the
diesel once per year by ship, winter ice roads or in the worst case by air.
This is exorbitantly expensive but numerous attempts to replace diesel by other means haven't
held now rarely been successful.
Yet another use case is a related one of providing electric power to mines in remote areas.
These face the same problems as remote communities.
Micro SMRs for large industry.
In some cases however, the intent is to provide a process heat for large industrial applications
such as a production of chemicals.
In these cases, the micro SMRs would be replacing natural gas or coal.
The SMRs in these cases are often designed to produce heat at higher temperatures than
typical utility reactors.
As can result in very different designs such as high temperature gas-cooled reactors.
SMRs to power data centers.
Some parts of the AI industry are talking about using SMRs to power their data centers.
However, I suspect that this will be forgotten once the AI bubble pops which could happen
in the near future, possibly even before this podcast airs.
As such, I will ignore this use case.
Let's just nonsense about micro small modular reactors, you say.
Unfortunately, the terminology used today originates from period when ideas were not well-defined.
Furthermore, ideas that were around before the SMI term earthquake have been rebranded
as SMRs for marketing reasons.
The result today is that some very different things are being called SMRs and different
people are using different terms to just try to distinguish between them.
Some people are using the term micro SMRs, while others are calling them MMRs or micro
modular reactors.
I will simply call the very small ones micro SMRs for simplicity.
Small reactors as modular reactors that are not SMRs.
Not every small commercial power reactor is an SMR.
The larger SMRs are more or less in the same size range as reactors built in the 1960s.
However, these were not designed with the sort of modular construction techniques that
are one of the defining features of an SMR.
India was still completing 200 megawatt reactors in the early 2010s before switching to larger
sizes.
These were well within the SMR size range but not considered to be SMRs.
Conversely, one builder of large tube type heavy water reactors which inherently have modular
features has taken experience from building reactors in Asia and applied it to their
newest 1000 megawatt design.
This incorporates modular design and rapid assembly techniques in order to build a reactor
more quickly, but as these are large reactors, they are also not SMRs even if they are
modular.
Standard versus proprietary fuel.
SMRs which are based on scaled down conventional designs normally used standard commercial
fuel.
This is typically uranium oxide fuel enriched between 3 and 5%.
Some SMRs, particularly the micro SMR ones, use a proprietary fuel, often with higher
enrichment levels.
These proprietary fuels are often enriched to just below 20% uranium to 35.
If you recall from a previous episode in this series, uranium which is enriched to 20%
or higher is considered to be military material and cannot be used in civilian applications
aside from a few research reactors.
As a result of this, there are currently no commercial suppliers for this great a fuel
outside of small amounts that are made in Russia and very limited experimental amounts
that are made in the US from diluted surplus weapons stockpiles.
While some of the SMR vendors claim to have fuel suppliers lined up, this fuel is not
in production from reliable sources and so buyers face additional risks in using these reactors.
There is no such risk when it comes to SMRs which you standard commercial fuel.
Wear SMRs are currently being built.
There are many different proposals for SMR designs, but I will just focus on ones that
are actually built under construction or have signed utility customers and will almost
certainly be built.
HDR-PM in China.
This is an SMR that often gets mentioned as it is seen as the first to actually go into
operation.
This reactor was mentioned in a previous episode in this series.
It is a high temperature gas cooled, pebble bed reactor.
The basic design is descended from reactors built in Germany starting in the 1960s.
A Chinese research group bought the design information from Germany and continued to work
on it further.
The fuel is contained together with graphite moderator in billiard ball size spheres which
are in bins.
The fuel is uranium enriched to 8.5% to coolant is helium gas.
Two reactors jointly feed a single 210 megawatts steam turbine generator.
The reactor went into operation delivering power to the grid at the end of 2021.
Repurposed ship reactors in Russia.
Several different models of reactors originally designed for powering ships have been used
to provide power for remote Arctic communities in Russia.
These are pressurized water reactors using uranium enriched to under 20%.
They have been mounted on barges and on land.
They are used to replace diesel or small coal plants.
Some people like to cite these as the first SMRs.
However, as repurposed marine reactors, it is questionable whether these are true SMRs,
but that is a matter of semantics.
They are, however, a good example of how micro SMRs can be used to provide power to remote
towns and mines.
300 megawatt BWR in Canada.
Canada is building a power plant just use of Toronto that has 4 300 megawatt boiling water
SMRs for a total of 1,200 megawatts.
These are scaled down and simplified conventional reactor designs using standard commercial
fuel.
The production started at late 2024 and the first reactor is expected to go into commercial
operation in 2029.
Recent news suggests that the province of Ontario may go back to building larger reactors
after this plant is built.
But several smaller provinces are interested in this SMR, due to its small size, soothing
their small electricity grids.
470 megawatt PWR in the UK.
The UK has announced plans to build a series of 470 megawatt, pressurized water reactors
from a UK company.
These are scaled down and simplified conventional reactor designs using standard commercial
fuel.
The reactors are designed to be transported to this site in modules and assembled there,
but with most of the work being done in the factory.
At 470 megawatt, these are notably larger than the 300 megawatt cutoff used by some people,
but as the ultimate goal is modularity, if they can meet that intent, I think they can
recently be called SMRs.
Construction has not yet started, but as plans are well advanced, they are probably worth
mentioning.
25 megawatt PWR in Argentina.
This is often cited in sub-articles as one of the first commercial SMRs, but is actually
a scaled down prototype for an SMR that is intended to be four times the size.
This is a scaled down pressurized water reactor.
Construction has been on again off again due to financial and economic problems in Argentina,
so it's hard to say when or if this will ever be completed.
I thought it was worth describing here though, because it is mentioned in a number of news
articles on SMRs.
Various experimental SMRs.
There are numerous experimental SMRs on the drawing board or under test.
Some may be built as prototypes.
This, however, will probably never be built or, if built, go beyond the prototype stage.
Modular large reactors, newer large reactors are starting to incorporate modularity into
their designs as well.
These are composed of large modules weighing from 100 to 1000 tons.
The amount of concrete and steel required in construction has also been drastically reduced.
There can be large economies of scale in electric power generation.
As larger reactors incorporate modular construction, and as SMRs get larger, the advantages
of SMRs in grid scale utility applications may fade away except for smaller grids.
Conclusion, SMRs are a new trend in nuclear reactor design.
However, there are really two different things which fill two different needs.
One style is intended to adopt designs which allow for more rapid construction with
more of the work being done in the factory and less on the construction site with the overall
goal of reducing costs.
The other style is to provide very small reactors to power remote communities and minds
or to provide process heat to large industries.
The first SMRs are in operation or under construction.
The most promising grid scale designs that present are simply scaled down and simplified
conventional designs that use standard commercial fuel.
larger reactors will incorporate modular construction techniques, blurring the lines
between them and SMRs.
In the next episode, we will talk about future reactor technologies, particularly what
are referred to as generation 4 reactors.
This concludes the seventh episode of an eight-part series on nuclear reactor technology.
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording podcast, click on our upload link
to find out how easy it is.
Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by an AnHonestHost.com, the Internet Archive,
rsync.net, and our mirror network.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
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Episode: 4584
Title: Recording a show, and crappy audio
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4584/hpr4584.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:14:30 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4584, for 2026-02-26
Today's show is entitled, "Recording a show, and crappy audio"
The host is Archer72 and the duration is 00:07:24
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "Archer72 demonstrates 3 forms of microphones, some better than others."
hello this is archer 72 for hacker public radio in this episode it is kind of a
tongue-in-cheek episode it was made mentioned by someone that I might have
crappy audio on the earpiece that I was using for the new years of
you show so I wanted to test that theory against my standard microphone and a
couple of earpieces to see how they sound when I refer to my standard
microphone it is the zoom H1 essential and is attached to a arm that is
bolted to the table of my next to my bed and is connected by a USB to the
computer the zoom H1 essential is listed as a compact 32-bit audio
recorder no leveling is required thanks to a 32-bit float converter
technology stereo recording and playback and it is in wave BMF or IXML
format maximum recording quality is 32-bit or 90 and 96 kilohertz as a
built-in XY stereo microphone maximum sound pressure level is 120
decibels max is barrier free for people with visual impairments thanks to
acoustic instructions via the built-in speaker or headphone output has an
OLED display built-in speaker recording medium is micro SDHC cards up to 32
gigabytes or micro SDXC cards up to its one-terabyte operates as a USB
microphone on Mac PC iOS or an Android power supply is two AAA batteries
or a zoom AD 17 power adapter or USB-C port a stereo mic line input with a
3.5 millimeter jack stereo line headphone output is also a 3.5 millimeter
jack and the way is 92 grams the two earbuds that I am going to test use
open air technology which directs the speaker pointed at your ear canal
instead of your traditional earbud which goes into your ear canal
and now recording on the Tozo O2 earbud and for purposes of testing
we'll be good to use the microphone article on Wikipedia
a microphone colloquial I'm gonna mess this up colloquially called a mic is a
transducer that converts sound into electrical signal microphones are used in
telecommunications sound recording broadcasting and consumer electronics including
telephones hearing aids and mobile devices several types of microphones are used
today which employ different methods to convert the air pressure variations of
a sound wave to an electrical signal the most common are the dynamic microphone
which uses a coil of wire suspended in a magnetic field the condenser microphone
which uses the vibrating diagram as a capacitor plate and the contacts microphone
which uses a crystal of PZO PZO electric material microphones typically need to be
connected to a preample fire before the signal can be recorded or reproduced
the second of the two ear buds that I am testing are the sound core 29 and I want to
do my test sample as continuing in Wikipedia as a under-history to speak to larger
groups of people need a rose to increase the volume of the human voice there
earliest devices used to achieve this were acoustic megapombs some of the first
examples from fifth century BC Greece or theater masks with farm shaped mouth openings
that acoustically amplified the voice of actors and amplipators between 1964 and
sorry I got that wrong on between 1664 and 1685 the English forever
this is English physicist Robert Hook was a first experiment with a medium other than
air with the invention of an early telephone made of stretch wire with a cup attached to the
gen today this is known as the tin cantilephone in 1856 the Italian inventor and Tonyo
Mucci developed a dynamic microphone based on a generation of electric current by moving
a coil of wire to various depths of an omega field this method of modulation was also a lasting
method for the analogy of the telephone speaking of this device mucci row in 1857 it consists of a
vibrating diaphragm and electrified magnet with a spiral wire that wraps around it the vibrating
diaphragm alter is the current of the magnet these alterations of current transmitted to the other
end of the wire create an agos vibrations of of the receiving diaphragm and reproduce the word
now i'm back on the zoom mic and the last source of audio recording that i'm not going to
demonstrate here is the exit audio recorder which i've mentioned before in previous episodes
which is not on after all anymore i don't not sure how i've got taken out of the after our store
what there are two ways to get it and one is straight from good help which would be an a key
APK side load pile or the other is obtaining and i'll leave the instructions in the show notes
not all these sources were the best of quality but at least they lowered the barriers to entry
and leave you to be able to record to do a show of your own
this has been archer 72 feel free to leave comments on this show or any other
bye
You have been listening to the Hacker Public Radio podcast, at hackerpublicradio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording a podcast, then visit the HPR site to find out how easy it really is.
Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by anhonesthost.com, the Internet Archive, rsync.net, and the HPR Community Content Delivery Network.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
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Episode: 4585
Title: mpv util scripts
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4585/hpr4585.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:14:30 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4585, for 2026-02-27
Today's show is entitled, "mpv util scripts"
The host is candycanearter and the duration is 00:11:55
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "a collection of hand-written scripts for mpv and explaining how the mpv api works"
There are some programs that act as a cornerstone, a little next to meody, like Vim or Emacs,
deserve some publicity and high levels of extendability. One of these options is really better,
but today we're talking about a different program that I think deserves more attention for its
flexibility. That program isn't baby-y, simply described as a media player in its documentation.
Despite the name, it has tons of support for everything from DVDs to HLS streams to even YouTube
support and has been fantastic for my daily use cases. I wanted it to show off some scripts
I had written in order to display how I took advantage of the flexibility and to potentially
provide a starting point for others who MPV the poor scripts in three different languages,
being Lua, JavaScript, and C. Regardless of which language you're using,
the underlying framework is similar. The cornerstone of scripting an MPV is properties.
Nearly every feature of MPV is exposed through some property or another,
and it can be things that first termed a video, setting, or even state flags.
There's also a dedicated property and for you to find a global, that can be written to
by any script, and it's liberally not touched by the player. The generalization of many different
pieces of info to his property to them makes scripting much easier as all data can be forced through
to think where and point. Property is probably able to be affirmed. This is done through the
of variable property function, which calls the given function whenever the property is updated through
any source. This can be used for anything from when the player goes into a certain state
from when the mouse is moved thanks to the flexible property system. Register event runs the given
function on a global event. This is for state changes that like a fouling started or stopped
or thinking operations, and it's generally a more live away to detect such global state
tuned over using a property. Added hook is an experimental feature, but it is required for
certain cases. Unlike other hooks, it is blocking, which can be important for preventing
waste conditions. Register script message, expose that a user-thread function under
the given name and can be activated from the command line or through a key bind. Added time
out an ad periodic timer are the most basic hooks, calling the function once or repeatedly
for a given number of time. The other command that are important are get and set property
native, which read and write two properties. Command, which runs the command within the MPV
console syntax, LST method, which displays a message to the user on the top left.
These nine functions make up the majority of the interaction with the MPV core.
So we have the button blocks. Let's see what we can do with them.
A and a square profit that Lua doesn't do much on the phone, but it sets up properties for
other scripts to use. In particular, it watches for when the path and play time remaining,
property of or being written to, parses the data out of it, and then writes the data to
user data properties that can be used by other scripts. Getting into this script selects
to do stuff A and a square aspect ratio at Lua. MPV by default has the geometry property,
which may written to you to change the window size. However, did geometry either set to the
value, whenever any fellow said it, which can be annoying if you would previously resize the window.
Wet the script is doing its useful. First, it watches a geometry variable and make sure it
is of a specified aspect ratio. This allows you to do things that like specify the geometry as
the percent of the screen without having to be calculated by use manually. It also resets a geometry
value to the current window size, whenever new fellow voted, in order to prevent random recitals.
First, the target aspect ratio is stored in local variables. This technically should be described
off system, but for a personal script, I didn't want to go through the treble of implementing it.
The reset gem function is simply gets the current dimensions of the window, and writes it to
the geometry. The dimension hop function does a heavy lifting of calculating the aspect ratio
in writing a new geometry 5 if needed. Then the function are just registered to the corresponding
properties and events to make it work. Next, the audiovisual. By default, MPV only displays a black screen
when playing audio files of no associated video track, which is lame. Fortunately, MPV also supports
assigning an arbitrary FFM pedic photographs, so we can rectify that. Due to FFM pedic limitations
of every input having to be filled, this program actually requires a default cover file with
the name covered up PNG to be put either in your home directory or in the MPV config directory.
The one that I drill and made will be in the show notes. The script is split in the two different
functions. That being one that handled adding the missing cover is needed, and one that actually
assigns the filter graph. First, a look-up table of images to the main is put in the top of the
function. This is the useful for network streams that do not provide a cover image, such as this
podcast for some reason. Because the command to add the image stream returns a false value if the image
can't be found, we can use a suit check whether the given image exists and provide a fault
that option is not. You also try to add the FFM from the domain, but this will most likely fail.
Since there is no way to parse HTML, we simply try to access FFM.itio into domain root.
Finally, it just adds the cover image if all other methods have failed. Inject needed,
it's a function that actually does most of the work. First, it scans your all the tracks in the
track list, and if there is a video track, then it simply returns without doing anything.
If there is no image track present, then it calls resolve within cover with the domain paths
that we have assigned in a props.lua. Finally, it writes the filter graph.
Now, this isn't a filter tutorial, but in essence, what is this doing is scaling the image up
to 250 thick by 250 thick if it's smaller, using nearest neighbor, and then scaling it to a width of
720. This width is big enough that the element on the screen do not look too blurry.
We'll also be following us that doesn't overload the RAM. Then it calls it's a built-in audio
visual either, and overlay it with the image. This uses ad hook since the function needs to be run
after the tracks have been parsed, but before the videos are playing, then the F event will crash
if it's missing a source. A and F are playing with that lua, it's just um,
either function I defined it in order to help with playlists ordering. The full clear is simply
clear is a playlists and resets MPV to an idle site is, and playlists next to last simply moves
at the next element in the playlists to the end of it. A, R, C, Fill, dot lua,
or relative cash fill. This makes the winning for cash state a little bit more dynamic.
By default, when the network screen runs out of cash, MPV will simply wait for one second
of the cash to be filled before playing again. In most cases, this is fine, when playing a
flow stream, it's a constant starting and stopping and can be distracting. This script changes
how much cash the cash waits for before playing again, based on the current cash speed,
the bit rate, and the speed. The audio and video bit rate are thumbed and multiplied by the current
playback speed, and then multiplied by 3 in order to give some extra room for the cash. That's
then divided by the current download speed, and they clamped to 20 seconds maximum, and are
supervented from rating forever. Then, erase the cash cause of the weight property and deflate
an OSB message. Also note that it writes to a file local options instead of the default cash
cause weight. This means that it's reset after the file is loaded. Jump to E-Cash is another
either hub or function that sets a playback to 5 seconds before the cash is done. This is very useful
for things like live streams. Last and thirdly not least, is a ton of art at the wall,
which writes to the title bar. By default, MPV uses the title property in order to set what
the title bar displays, which uses property expansion. For update expansion, define special characters
that expand to whatever the property of fallen. By default, property expansion contains some
logical operations that like checking if a property is set to a third value, but with scripting,
we can go further and make it even more dynamic. When the function is first started on startup,
it writes the current value of the title property to a special user data variable. This is
thought that the user can still set a title bar for things like the idle state. Everything related
to updating the title dynamically is handled by a function title update. First, the media title property
is checked, and if it's not that, that no file is currently loaded. So, we set the title to the
previously saved default title and return. Next, the current playlist position is retrieved,
and if it's not negative one, the subtracted it from the current playlist count to get the number
of files remaining in the playlist. Negative one is a special case, meaning no playlist is loaded.
Next, the play time remaining at property if retrieved, and if it's not set,
we assume that we're currently loading the file. So, we just display the currently loading title,
and one left a number of files remaining in the playlist if it was set. And earlier return.
Everything produced by on is for contracting the title bar, for a file that's currently being played.
The progress number is the most dynamic part of the script. By default, it displays the current
position in the file from 0 to 100%. However, after it's less than 100 seconds left of playback,
then it instead displays the number of seconds until the file is over. It also uses the
prepping doubts that up in a underscore props. Apparently, it's also displayed the number of seconds
behind real time a livestream at being played, since those were by constantly updating the end
time of the file. Finally, if the player is popular cash, then it displays the percentage of cash
until it'll start playing again. If the the MOOC's are the network property is set, then it also
displays the cash speed or download speed of the file. Finally, if the domain path, which we set
in a underscore props, is set, we also display the host name of the file being played. Finally,
we set title to the concatenation of all of the different variables, and we're done.
Thankfully, Louis isn't as strict as, say, JavaScript, or a fee yet about 5-inch signatures. So,
we can assign a title update function to a myriad of different properties and events,
as well as a periodic timer, just in case. Title update only shows the template of the title,
not how fast the values in the title are being updated. Keep that in mind if you want to extend
this one. Hopefully, this episode aspires you to try out MPB and try your hand out the
wascripting. Even if you're not an expert in coding, Louis is one of the easiest languages to get into.
And crafting your own customized media player is a surprisingly easy goal to achieve for even
for a first timer. You just have to be patient. Happy MPB-Aing and have some good.
You have been listening to the Hacker Public Radio podcast, at hackerpublicradio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording a podcast, then visit the HPR site to find out how easy it really is.
Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by anhonesthost.com, the Internet Archive, rsync.net, and the HPR Community Content Delivery Network.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
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Episode: 4587
Title: UNIX Curio #1 - Shell Archives
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4587/hpr4587.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:14:33 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4587, for 2026-03-03
Today's show is entitled, "UNIX Curio #1 - Shell Archives"
The host is Vance and the duration is 00:12:08
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "Putting an archive into a self-extracting shell script"
Hi there, I'm Vance and welcome to Unix Curio No. 1.
This is the first entry in a series dedicated to exploring little known and occasionally
useful, trinkets lurking in the dusty corners of Unix Lake operating systems.
In case you want some background on this series, entry No. 0 gives a little information
on what you're supposed to be about.
You can check it out at Hacker Public Radio Episode 4-5-7-4.
To make the easier to find, all of these episodes will have the tag Unix Curio.
You could also pull up my host page for a listing.
Today's episode was inspired by an article I read on the Linux Journal website back
in 2009.
It described a custom-built bash shell script that would contain a tar archive.
When run, the script would extract the contents of the archive onto the user's system.
This to that article and other relevant references appear in the show notes for this episode.
When I encountered this article, I felt a wave of nostalgia and my thoughts immediately went
back to how I used it and email used to work in the olden days of the 1980s and early
1990s.
Back before 1993, there was not yet a mind-standard to govern how to attach files to messages,
so you had to put everything into the body of your message.
It was pretty easy to send a single text file as the message body, though it would be a
good idea to inform the recipient and advance that it was coming so that they knew what
to do with it.
But what if you wanted to send a bunch of files to someone and keep them all together?
Maybe they're all part of a single project.
Of course, tar existed, but the file format could differ between systems, so the recipient
might not be able to unpack the archive.
You could send each file in a separate email message, but then you had the risk of one or
more messages not being delivered, and even if they all made it, they wouldn't be bundled
together in one place.
Another common approach I remember seeing at the time was to put all the files into one
message with delimiting lines, often saying cut here, to designate where one file ends
and another one begins.
But this required the recipient to untangle things manually.
A task which could be tedious if you have several files.
The solution developed back then was a shell archive created by the char program.
That spelled SHAR or in the phonetic alphabet, Sierra Hotel Alfa Romeo.
This program wraps all your files in a neat shell script that the recipient can just run
and have the files magically pop out.
All they would need to have is the born shell and the said utility, both of which are
standard on any unix-like system.
The way it works is to run the SHAR command followed by the names of the files you want
to send.
If some were all of the files are to be contained in a sub-directory, you need to name the
directory first, then the files.
So the generated script will create the necessary directory before extracting the files to
be put inside it.
Typically the output of the SHAR command would be piped into a program for sending email
or posting use net articles, though it could be redirected into a file.
See the show notes for some usage examples.
For a recipient of your message, can then pipe the message body into the born shell with
the hyphen S as in Sierra option to save the files on their system with the original names
intact and the directory structure if any.
Different implementations of SHAR have varying capabilities.
For example, the BSD and Mac OS editions can only really manage plain text ASCII files.
Email back then and even today treats handling 8-bit data as an extension to the core
mail transfer protocol.
So trying to send binary files takes some additional work.
The BSD and Mac OS versions also require, as described earlier, that you name a directory
before naming any files inside it.
One typical way is to let the find command do the work for you.
It produces a list in the right order.
The GNU implementation is more flexible and can take just a directory name automatically
including everything underneath.
It can also handle binary files by using UU and code.
UU and code is a method that was developed around 1980 for encoding 8-bit data as ASCII text.
It takes arbitrary 8-bit binary data in chunks of three bytes and turns it into a form
consisting only of printable ASCII characters representing each chunk with four characters.
When the current base 64, mind-standard was developed and became widely supported, it effectively
made UU and code obsolete.
The GNU-shar rather nicely auto-detects whether the input file is text or binary and
acts accordingly and it can even compress files if asked.
In addition, instead of using UU and code for binary data, it can base 64 and code the data
as an alternative.
However, unpacking UU encoded or compressed files from such an archive requires the recipient
to have the corresponding utility to decode and or uncompressed the files.
While these are easily available on systems from the last 20 years or so, on older ones
that wasn't guaranteed, so the documentation has lots of warnings about using UU and code
or compression.
I should point out that my previous mention of BSD refers to the historical BSD 4.4 version
from the University of California.
Both free BSD and net BSD now have a library called Lib Archive that is used for reading
from and writing to various archive formats.
One of these formats is Sharr and the TAR command can be told to create a Sharr archive
on these systems.
This newer method is able to UU encode binary files and it can also have the resulting
shell script attempt to send the owner permissions and flags on the extracted files.
Lib Archive and TAR on these systems are not able to read Sharr files, but that's not
really necessary because they are designed to be interpreted by a shell anyway.
Open BSD does not seem to use this same library and instead it relies on the historical
BSD implementation of Sharr.
Looking at commercially unique systems, the version on Hewlett Packard's HP UX can also
UU encode binary files.
In addition, as a special bonus, it adds code to the script that will compile and use
a simple UU decode tool written in C so the recipient doesn't need to already have one,
but they would need to have a C compiler.
It will even handle device files and put the corresponding mate node commands into the script,
probably making it the most full-featured implementation of all.
IBM's AIX doesn't appear to come with Sharr.
Neither do Son OS and Solaris, both from Sun Microsystems, which seems quite odd since
original development of the program is credited to James Gosling.
If that name doesn't sound familiar to you, he had a long career at Sun during which he
did a few different things such as creating the Java programming language, no big deal
there.
Now that we are well into the 21st century, the standardization of archive file formats and
methods for handling email file attachments means that Sharr doesn't really have that much
of a practical use any longer.
However, the author of the Linux Journal article apparently had such a need and created his
own solution, probably unaware that Sharr already existed.
Next time you're considering rolling your own script for a particular purpose, consider
searching or asking around to see if someone else has tackled the same problem.
Even if it's not a perfect match to your needs, they might have learned lessons that
you can apply to your own approach.
I mentioned archive file formats being standardized.
A future Unix Curio will cover that subject, but it won't be coming until a few more
entries down the line.
There are a couple of other topics to deal with first.
So for now, let's say goodbye to Sharr.
Thanks for listening and keep an eye out for the next year in Xcurio, which will be about
F-Grip here on Hacker Public Radio.
If you have a question or a suggestion for a future topic, please comment on this episode
on the HPR website.
You have been listening to the Hacker Public Radio podcast, at hackerpublicradio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording a podcast, then visit the HPR site to find out how easy it really is.
Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by anhonesthost.com, the Internet Archive, rsync.net, and the HPR Community Content Delivery Network.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
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Episode: 4588
Title: HPR Beer Garden 11 - Belgian Scotch Ale
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4588/hpr4588.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:14:34 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4588, for 2026-03-04
Today's show is entitled, "HPR Beer Garden 11 - Belgian Scotch Ale"
The host is Kevie and the duration is 00:32:35
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "Dave and Kevie talk about Belgian Scotch Ales."
Hello and welcome to yet another exciting episode of Hacker Public Radio and this is the
big garden, the our regular beer style review that we have been doing for quite a few weeks
now, this is episode number 11. My name is Dave, I am joined as almost always by Kevy. Hello
how are you? Hello, I am very well, I am very well indeed because this is another one of my favorite
styles of beer, so looking forward to this. When do I go? This is when you put me through session
apes, you're still down to feed me back. Okay, accepted. On this episode we're going to be as Kevy
has already suggested, reviewing one of his favorite beer styles. Now, last episode we reviewed
Scotchales, or we heavy, we're doing a slight variant on that, and this is Belgian Scotch
Ails. Now, I haven't got a clue what the differences between the two are from the fact that one
is brooding Scotland, one is brooding Belgium, but Kevy, I think you're going to try and tell us
a bit more about him. Yes, so I finished the last bit of waffle we did a bit
we heavies with to be continued, and this is the to be continued, because once I got into discovering
new Belgian Ails, I was noticing that I'm going, well, where's this from in Scotland? Oh,
it's from Belgium, but this thing looked like it literally was produced by a shortbreadton maker.
You know, I mean, everything was tarten, the sills, things were killed, things were bagbipes,
to the point where I'm going, the way I'm going, as far as I'm aware, Belgian aren't that
Scottish, as far as I'm aware, I can't say I've actually ever been myself, I do hope to go soon,
but I was thinking there's something odd here, so I started actually looking up, and it was
amazing how it fits in so nicely with a combination of the Christmas Ails episode, the Belgian
Christmas Ails episode that we did, and also the wee heavy episode that we did previously.
So towards the end of the 19th century, the Belgian beer distributor started selling this thing called
Belgian Christmas Ails, which, as we found out, was actually done by both Youngers and Maccurians.
It was the same beer just sold as a different label, and what was happening was the Belgians
actually started to get a taste for it, and they started to mimic this Christmas Ails style,
and a few did it early on, kind of 1903 time without a great deal of success, but then the demand
actually started to come quite high, so they decided to start producing, so by the start of the
20th century, they were producing incredibly small quantities, the Belgian Scotch Ails, which is what
that we are grew out of. The big real boost for the Belgian Scotch Ails actually believe it or
not came from the first world war. British soldiers were invited with bitter from England,
which was fine for those south of the border, who were used to drinking bitter. However,
the problem was the morale of the Scottish soldiers was actually getting quite low, and they
discovered, they soon discovered, that the Belgians were producing this Scotch Ails that tasted
very similar to what they had at home, and of course the British army started ordering it for
the Scottish soldiers so that morale would actually keep boosted, and of course it had all the
characteristics, it was multi, it was fruity, it was strong and warming, it was quite boozy, even more
so actually than the Scottish own version, which tended to be between, as I said last time between
7 and 9, very often this was from 7 upwards of 13, 14 percent, although the 30, 14 was more
extreme, so it was very similar, I know something they were familiar with. However, the problem was,
it was still not the main type of beer produced, so it was still produced in relatively low quantities,
so what happened was during the First World War, they started im-porting more and more from Scotland.
Again, it's funny, you wouldn't get away with these days changing the label or calling it something
totally different, but it also focused on ramping up production, and because of just the way things
went with the war etc, it wasn't actually until the 1930s that they were properly producing
vast amounts of the Scottish scale, but it's amazing to think that it was actually homesick,
Scottish soldiers that were one of the big early drives to get the Scottish ale more readily available
onto the Belgian market, and of course the Belgians had already discovered, they enjoyed the Christmas
seal, they actually weren't selling it as Christmas seal, it was very much Scottish ale, and it's
funny to see a lot of these labels, as I said, you would think they were from the very heart of the
Highlands produced and we bought the somewhere, and literally been paraded out with bagpipes and
tilted men, you know, it was so over the top Scottish, and these are still been produced to this day,
and it was that bigger industry, some of them were brewed in Scotland and never to be sold in Scotland,
they were exclusively for the Belgian market, so they were brewed, they were then im-ported,
and these were not rebranded ones, these were exclusive for this, however I have found out,
now there's a lot of them kept this very secret, but they're no longer brewed in Scotland,
I don't think any of them are as far as I'm aware, I was trying to read the correct,
but they're now all brewed in Belgium, so although sadly, the wee heavy has largely
kind of disappeared outside of very much specialist beer shops, yet because of the Belgian love for it,
you can enjoy a good old-fashioned wee heavy today, as long as you decide to buy it from Belgium.
You've not left me many questions because you've been that was very comprehensive,
I am intrigued by the fact that I may have misinterpreted this, but the fact that the
Belgian Scotch Ayles don't typically appear in Scotland, they don't you literally have to get them
from an im-port complete. Is there a particular reason for that? Is it a legal reason,
no, I just don't know, it's considered non-canon, probably the non-canon, yeah, I would probably go
with that, as far as I'm aware, it's you can get them in specialist beer shops, I wonder does it
just that maybe they don't want to be seen to be taken away from the local brewing industry,
I wonder is at the reason why? I suppose that would depend on how prolific
Scotch Ayles are in Scotland, as in Scotch Scotch Ayles. Yes, sadly not, not that.
Now, could that be cause and effect or is the Scotch Ayles phasing out organically,
which could actually leave an opening for the Belgian Scotch Ayles to come and fill that gap?
I think it's just mostly down to people's thinking habits, generally in Scotland, you look at
more popular these days, it's far more a country that was a lot more, not exclusively,
but a lot more lag or drinkers, a lot more lower ABVs, but I think that's actually
down to drinking culture in Scotland, drinking culture in Scotland for people who enjoy beer,
people don't seem to know how to actually sit and sip and enjoy a beer, they kind of want to
neck it off the time. So of course, if you did that with a 10% beer, you're not going to be
around for too long in the night, you'll be going home quickly. Right, okay, now there's a time and
a place for doing that with a beer, I wouldn't have expected that Scotland was the place.
Sadly, yes, if you go into a lot of eateries, not all of them, but a lot of eateries, and you'll
get a whine list as long as the sheet of paper and probably print on both sides, and you ask
what beer do you have, and they'll say 10 and slagger, you don't have any other beers, and they might
say something like Stella or Peronir something like that. Yeah, okay, so I think it is more down to,
obviously it is down to a bit of supply and demand, sadly. Okay, we're going to segue just slightly
here. If you were to ask the Scottsperson on the street, what their favorite beer style was,
what would be the overwhelming response? Probably slagger IP, that is the overwhelming,
you mean you will, I'm not saying excuse me, I'm not saying excuse me, but you'll get, if it's an
older person, guaranteed, does the Appain to Heavy, that would be just a bit nearly all, you might
give some people like Appain to light, which is mild, don't neglect, it's practically the same
beer. You'll get the, you know, people like me, who will say you'll still get maybe a few people
for we Heavy, but those should be few and far between. Right, so what does that mean then for the
Scottsperson beer industry, if you take away the Largo's and the Light Tales? The problem is,
the Scottsperson beer industry is very much split, the all-time ones, like the big names that
you're so well known, tenons, macurons, young girls, I mean, young girls is practically vanished.
That's a huge brewery, but it's been bought over that many times now, it's vanished.
You look at the macurons, you know, they were owned by Scottsperson, you Castle, who became bought
by Heinrich and they've just practically killed off all of the beers, which is really sad,
but at the same time, I'm saying it sad, but once, respect, they were never fantastic beers.
The local macurons wasn't, they were decent, they were all right, you wouldn't generally say,
wow, that's amazing. It has left a real void in the market and when I think that there was
next to no craft breweries in about 2000 at all, very, very few, there was the odd one or two.
Now, there are hundreds, my idea, I maybe even say thousands, because it's not them dotted
in tiny, we've religious and things around Scotland and because Scotland is so remote,
I mean, you've experienced this, a lot of them will only deliver, they're small, they're not
brewing millions, they'll deliver to their own local areas and getting them, you can't get them
but they're very expensive, you know, so your problem is you might go to a place and find a lovely,
I mean, I can think of, I went to the Olipple Beer Festival and I had the AL of Athel and I thought,
this is lovely, I'm going to start drinking this more regularly, I've never been able to find it,
I ever again, so, I mean, I can find it, it's on the website and it shows me it's still a
produce now that I can't actually order it online, so you've got that issue, so yeah,
you've just got delivery and logistics are actually a bit of a problem, right? So this is why I'm
always keen to try and support local breweries when they're starting producing beers to
keep them up because at the end of the day, it's way better than what the big breweries were producing.
Anything would be, yes, arguably, I've got to ask one more question and then I think it's probably
about time to start cracking these bottles out. Do you think that Scotland is becoming a microborionation?
Yes, it is now. Well, there's a definite split, there's your lagger drinkers and they just want
tenants, you know, they're very loyal to ten slagger, which I don't get. I really, I really can't
understand it. It's the nothing else though. No, no, there are other things, but just they're very
loyal to, I mean, I remember that when the local brewery here started producing, which is now
sadly closed. There's other ones, but the one I'm thinking of, he started producing and he was
producing Klansman, which was a golden ale, and then what he did is he pumped it through
knife rotaps to make it more like a lagger, and a lot of the lagger drinkers who tasted it said,
oh, that's really nice. Would you drink it? Oh, no, no, I want my tenants. But you're like,
so it's really terribly frustrating, but you've got, there's no surplus on people. No,
where you got very much two splits at Asplit, sorry, it's very much two halves, and you will get
ones who are, they want that pint a lager, and you'll get the other half who will, I want to try
something new, I want to try different things. So I'd say that's the split on this street. I think you're
probably here to ask for people's favorite beer. If you get rather than say you're favorite style,
if you go favorite beer, I think you would probably depending on where you're out of course.
You're either going to get a range of locally spears that you've generally never heard of, or
ten as lagger, you know, that's going to be a little answer, which in one sense is actually good
for the craft beer market in school, because there's so many of them, no, it's, it's lovely.
I mean, I've had tenants, I've had, was it four variants of tenants? I think you used to be able to
get back in the 1980s when I shouldn't have been drinking to sing, but nothing really blew me away.
A lager is a lager is a lager, there are different taste profiles, but ultimately the
end of the day is a lager. It's nothing special, in my opinion, and I apologize. No, I don't,
I don't apologize. To all the people I may have offended by saying that. But when you've got so
much choice, so much variety, so many styles, so many flavour profiles of all the beers. I mean,
we're in your own episode 11, and I have learned so much. Why would I go into a pub, and order
what is probably on the most prominent pump in the entire bar, and that's calling, or that
to be fair, I used to drink calling, and I used to like it. I know, I'm sorry, I have my card in.
But see, that's a problem. There's so many people who want to vary. I mean, you enjoyed it at
the time, but would you go back to it now? No, because I know better. Yeah, exactly. And that's
where the problem is, we need to get people trying these beers and trying different things,
because they'll then suddenly realize, whoa, that's actually a heck of a lot nicer. I mean,
even when it comes to Lager, you can get good Lager. But, you know, I mean, Lager by itself,
the whole Lager, Lager is actually not, the name isn't actually Lager originally. This is
the Lager episode, but the term Lager is actually referred to storing it underground at a
cool temperature for a long period, and it let it mature. What gets produced as Lager today,
generally, is something that is made in the morning, and is finished practically by the evening.
There's new age in it at all, and you're like, this is why it's bland, this is why it's tasteless.
Lager should actually have some flavour. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Anywho, I think we should probably
move on. Yes, because I'm definitely thirsty, you know. So, I have in front of me a bottle, which is
actually, it is silly. I mean, managed to get this, yeah, literally. I got this from a
biz of Europe order that I placed well before Christmas. In fact, I ran about the time that was on
the search for Christmas sales, and we were doing the different Christmas sales styles across two
episodes. And I thought, big brain, I'll order ahead and try and get the styles that we're going
to be doing in the early part of 2026. So, yeah, I failed on the last one, because the one previously
we decided wasn't a valid Scotch ale, but I managed to get myself two Belgian Scotch ale's.
I can't tell you what the first one is, and the reason for that will become apparent very soon.
But the second one is literally silly. So, it's from the Brasserie de Silly, which is a Belgian
brewery, and the ale is called Scotch Silly, or Silly Scotch, whichever way you want to put. We'll
call it. The bottle is, it's a lovely brown bottle, green labeling. Scotch Silly is born from a
unique tradition and throughout the years as grown into a reference beer for its particular style.
Lovely red colour with more than a hint of copper is hidden below a beige head.
Complexer roamers, bubbles, a lot of sense of brieosha companies by raisins, fruit, jam, and
fresh raspberry. Well, I'll be looking at it for that, definitely. But initial impressions of those
of honey and caramel flavors of prunes and a rose malt come through the finish. And there's a
lot going on in there. It is eight percent, which is moderately strong. And I'm going to show
up talk him. I know him there. Here we go. Oh, hello. Oh, do they say prunes? Yes.
Oh, that's interesting. It says the prunes come through in the finish, but I'm definitely getting
getting them in the in the aroma. That is a gorgeous colour. It's a beautiful ruby colour.
Yeah, quite a bit of colour agent. You think with a ruby or an amber ale, it's a lot more transparent.
So the colour is quite it's quite a clean colour. But this one actually seems to have quite a
big head on it. I really need to go back to school and learn how to pour a beer. But no, the
colouring is gorgeous. It's almost an orange hint of orange in the colouring, which you wouldn't
typically expect to see in a beer. And I've done myself a disservice here because I'm
actually waiting for the inch and a half of head to go down. In fact, somebody can go and get
me a spoon. That'll help. Right. So now weirdly, I'm not getting a lot, a lot through the nose
right now. But when I first opened the bottle, it was, it was very, very strong. Let's give it a try.
Oh, wow. That's very multi, as you would hope and expect. It is quite sweet as well.
I definitely getting some of the fruits that it mentions, the fruity jam, the raspberry. That
prune is still coming through surprisingly. I didn't expect that to. I don't recall
tasting that on the first run when I had this. And I don't remember this, which is really weird.
But yeah, very, very multi, very sweet, very fruity. I'm sticking my nose back in there.
I'm definitely getting some sort of like caramel, but kind of a muted or a dull caramel, not the,
the really sweet burnt sugary type of caramel that you would expect to see in a beer like this.
This is very good indeed. I've almost, almost glad I forgot and I had this before.
Mm, absolutely. Well, there you go. It was a nice surprise for yourself. Well, tell us what you've got.
I have got Macshoof, which, and, well, you don't need to see if you've got a bottle there. I've
got the older style label. Despite the fact I just ordered this, it's got the noom dwarf, whatever it is.
In front of a week cake with the, oh, no, the new one doesn't have the cake, of course.
No, it doesn't, but it's that bagpipes. Oh, you also got bagpipes as well. The bagpipes,
he's got the tartan-thru's, my one as well. So, yes, very stereotypically Scottish.
On the cake, mine says Brudon. So, I've got a sign. You could assign with that, yeah. That says Brudon.
Right, so let's get this open.
Uh, nice bit of smokyness coming off there. Not smoky flavor, I just meant it's more
coming out of it. Mm, it's multi. There's a peppery spicy note. Yeah, I'm getting that's
where I'm getting multi peppery spicy. That's from the bottle. So, let's put it.
Fairly lively head, not quite as lively as yours, but still quite a lively head there.
So, and as you can see yourself, you thought that you, it was exactly the same as your
own. It looks black on the camera. Mm, but it's kind of certainly more. This is more, yeah,
this is mahogany. This is already brown. It's, I think it's slightly browner than your room was.
I split the, the red ruby red. In the glass, this has gotten quite a bit more boozy on the nose.
There's notes of toasted brown sugar. Yeah, it's not a spicy at all.
Yeah, see, from the bottle, I'm going to compare the two of them now. From the bottle, much
peppery spicy. I don't see how much peppery, but it's just spicy note. No, it doesn't, that
removes, but it does smell boozyer from the glass. I have to confess, so, right, it's going to
finish that off. Right, there we go. That's actually settled down quite nicely, and it's not totally
gone, so it's a nice head on that. Mm, cheers. Cheers. Yeah, multi toasted caramel. There's, whoa,
there's an extra layer. I did not notice on this beer. I've always seen that fruity,
or taste it to see. That fruity, dark fruits, dark dried fruit. Again, raisins, kind of figs,
but there's a lighter fruit coming through on the back end. Like a green apple, or a pear, or something.
Which I've not actually noticed before. Mm, which actually takes the sweetness,
lingering sweetness, it's very often with the Belgian score of the shields. It's taken that away
almost. You don't have the lingering sweetness. It's not necessarily bad or good. It's just
slightly different. I've not noticed that with this much shift before. It's definitely got the
Scottish flavoring. Yeah, you've got that malt-heavy front end. You've got the toasted caramel
coming through you. No, no, we're near as boozey in the taste as it actually smelled. But that's
actually dangerous, because that on a hot day would be dangerous. That's eight percent similar to yours.
I think I could knock that back very easily. Mm, okay. Oh, actually quite gassy.
That's one thing, this one isn't, even though it did flare up a bit in the glass. It's not,
it's not fizzy. Mm, no, no, I don't mean fizzy. I mean, the kind of after you've
drank it, it's giving you milk burping. It's what I kind of gassy, but when on to go stir,
it's not fizzy at all. I'm tasting it. You know, I don't know, have I just never waited long enough
for that? But that's something really different. I quite like that, actually. It's good,
what would otherwise be quite a sweet, a very sweet, lingering finish. Normally with these,
you get the kind of sweetness along with bitter fruits. But it actually cleans up the palate quite
nicely. That's, yeah, I really like that. This is something that is very, very nice indeed.
Yes, oh, I certainly would have this. So looking at the label, Maksuf is a resident halted,
starting off with its alluding ruby red hues with a lively frothy head, but not as nowhere near
a frothy as a silly. It leads you to an exciting taste of Anna's seed licorice and caramel,
blending a place in my field with a balanced depth and color. Keep on track and you'll reach the
final hint of pear with a delicious little light bitterness. At 8% ABV, this is one for the
daredevil's. That's what the box is. Okay. I'm not getting licorice. I must admit, I'm not,
and I'm not getting Anna's seed. There's a spiciness to it that is there in the background,
but it's definitely nowhere near. Anna's seed to me would be clawing and dominant. This is not
but that is very nice indeed. To be honest, I'm glad it's not exactly how the description sees.
So I'm on the fan of Anna's seed, but you're absolutely right. It can and very often
does dominate. I mean, there's nothing I like out of sight as well, but I just tend to find that it's
it's a wee bit like, to me, it's a wee bit like cooking with stoutton. It's an art. And
right, they're the often, it just dominates the food. And that's what I find with the drinks,
it can dominate. We have a thumbs up from my eldest. We have just had a live tasting
with no commentary, which is part of the course, but he tends to react quite harshly to
certain nails and certainly those that have a strong nose and he did react to it, but then he tried
it and he was like, double thumbs up, double thumbs up. Yes, that's good. So double thumbs up
from your eldest, from your kids. What about father? What does father give it to?
It is getting better, which is not really what I expected. If I, I've just looked at what I rated
this on an on tap to when I had it just before the new year, I would have given it it a seven
or half, which I'd still have pretty decent score, seven and a half out of ten is pretty decent.
Yeah, it is. But I think I'm going to change that based on on this tasting. I think maybe I
didn't go into it in as much detail then as I have done now. And I think there's a lot more
going in there than I probably gave it credit for what I first tried it. So I think I'm actually
going to put this down as an eight and a half. Oh, very good. Because this is really, really nice.
I do still have one left from the order I made, although I have a very distinct feeling that
might get stolen by my eldest. So there may be a fight over it, we shall see. But yeah, definitely
I'll get eight and a half out of ten for the Scotch silly. And do you know what I'm actually thinking
along the same lines as that for the Macshoof? I probably go along lines of eight and a half.
I'm really enjoying it. It's very good. Had I not had the Gordon's Scotch ale, I may have done
it higher. But to me, that Gordon's one is the the permical of the Belgian Scotch ale's. So I can see
where I can see what I like it. I can see where I prefer the Gordon's version. I mean, this is
obviously the danger. And this is why we recommend people do alter the scores if they feel it.
You may try something and it blows you away. But then the more you drink it, the more you reduce
okay, prefer that one over that one. They're not all five or five or ten out of ten,
just as he. Yeah, I think probably had I tried this first. As the first ever Scotch ale from
Belgium, it probably would have been full marks. But I think after that, after a good few,
the discerning palette, I think I'm going to go up at eight and a half. I think that's about
where it is. Pardon me. Okay, well a question for you then. Why didn't you go for the Gordon's
for this? Because I specifically bought this for this and we did I did the Gordon's for the
as yet to be unreleased reserve cushoof. Oh, of course you did. Yes, my apologies. Make sense.
So yeah, all in all, that was a fairly successful review, I think, eight and a half each.
So yeah, awesome. Yes, absolutely, yes. Okay, so did we decide we didn't have any feedback from
previous shows to mention? Yes, we're very disappointed folks. No feedback as far as we can see.
We went back with the overall shows. Very disappointing. So no new feedback at all. So if you do
want to give us feedback, then please do leave us a message on a comment on the show. That's
about actually know the best way is to actually record your own version of this show,
that cus this is a community podcast. However, you can leave a comment on the shows and we will
read it out. You can also message us on MasterDone. You can message us on untapped if you wish.
The only problem is I'm liable to forget to read it out. I'm being perfectly honest.
So if you want your comment for a day out, please leave it as a comment on one of the previous
shows. And also, yes, that's the better way of doing it. Yes, and also, if you want to recommend
any styles, then please do. Don't wait for the future style to come up like put a poster on the
if I comment on like this show of Belgian scotchales and just say, hey guys, I want you to review
so it will be or I want you to review whatever. If there's something you're actions and
and I'm going to put the caveat of if we can get it because yes, there are some limitations. Actually
there are a lot of limitations. I don't want to do beer and discredit because somebody wants us to review
just to say, well, I'll just produce you for example. There's a beer in Britain called Ashai. Is it
Ashai or Ashai? Do you know what I mean? I've heard of one of the code Ashai. Is that like a
like a a log, a bottle typically sold in restaurants? It's it's a bottle. Yeah, and it's
got a silver label. And it's full of either Chinese or Japanese, right? I'm not really sure
because I'm not very fluent now. Yeah, that's the choice the same one. Yeah, probably is. And
then when you actually read the very bottom, despite all this foreign writing on it, it says
Bruden Britten. You know, so it's not really fair to say. And in the same way, I've had
genuine Italian beer and Moretti and it's nothing like what we have here. So you do the
disservice to say just because it's Bruden the country. Oh, this is what it must be like. Is
this like drinking Guinness out side of Ireland? But yes, yes. Yeah, no, I get it.
That is it. Awesome. Well, why don't you tell us what it is we're going to be reviewing
next time. Oh, I'm continuing with some of the favorites of mine. Although to be honest,
or the sex style, I've only relatively recently discovered, but I have taken a liking to it.
And we are going to be continuing. I think as far as my word, this is the last of our winter
warmers. So after this one, we should be coming out and maybe going to more spring beers,
but this is going to be a Baltic porter. Can also be called an imperial porter. So keep an eye
it. If you want to actually get a hold of one and join in with us, then yeah, you're more than
welcome. So we're looking for a Baltic or imperial porter. And I only hope I can find one because
trying to find the beers that you've suggested so far has been quite a challenge for me.
And before we start to be recording, I know Carol, I mean, I have too many beers anyway,
but I don't have a Baltic porter. So yes, I'll be continuing with my search for a Baltic porter
over the next week or two. But yeah, coming out of the winter beers and into a more springy
style, I think the supermarkets will be a lot more forgiving to those styles, the lighter styles,
than the darker ones. So let's hope. Absolutely. Right in. So join us again tomorrow for another
exciting episode of Hacker Public Radio.
You have been listening to the Hacker Public Radio podcast, at hackerpublicradio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording a podcast, then visit the HPR site to find out how easy it really is.
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Episode: 4589
Title: YouTube Subscriptions 2025 #15
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4589/hpr4589.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:14:35 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4589, for 2026-03-05
Today's show is entitled, "YouTube Subscriptions 2025 #15"
The host is Ahuka and the duration is 00:14:31
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "Part fifteen of my list of subscribed channels"
You are listening to a show from the Reserve Q. This show was submitted in January 2025 to cover
occasions just like this, where there are gaps in the regular schedule.
Hello, this is Ahuka, welcoming you to Hacker Public Radio and another exciting episode.
So with that, I'm going to continue on what I have been doing for the Reserve Q in this go-around,
um, which is, I'm recording in January of 2025, and I'm looking at my YouTube channels that I am
subscribed to and discussing them. So I'm going to start this time with TimeGhost History.
TimeGhost is something we've mentioned before, one of the real-time history groups that came out of
the Great War, uh, channel. Um, now, TimeGhost is one of those groups, and for their major projects,
they have dedicated channels like World War II, um, Korean War, things like that. Um, but they
did smaller things as well, so they have a TimeGhost History channel, um, where they did something
like, uh, between, like, uh, between two wars. So, like, you know, what went on between World War I and
World War II. Um, they did one on, um, Ukrainian identity, um, talking about the war in Ukraine. Um,
they did something on Israel and Palestine and asking questions about, are the British the ones who
really started all of that? Um, so, they also have a channel called TimeGhost Podcast. Um, I'm not sure
they're doing it anymore. It looks like they released about, uh, six videos a couple of years
ago and then stopped. Um, but I, as I often do with these, I'll just leave the channel in because
there's no reason not to, something might pop up. Uh, next one is, uh, Toby Hadoke's channel. Uh,
Toby Hadoke is, uh, someone who's very active in the Doctor Who community. Um, he is active with Big
Finish. Um, he goes around to conventions. He's got a comedy monologue called, uh,
Moths Ate My Doctor Who Scarf that he does at conventions. So, he's an interesting fellow and I
like to follow what goes on. Next channel is Tom Sedell. Uh, Tom Sedell is a, uh, artist, cartoonist
particularly, um, who has a online web comic called Gunner Krieg Court, which I quite enjoy.
And this is his channel. The next one is called Touropia. Uh, and this is a travel-related channel.
Uh, and they're sort of the, their bailiwick is to go to a place and say, you know, what are the top
things to do here? What are the top areas you should visit? What have you? So, uh, the length of the video
can vary a lot between a, you know, 15 or 20 minute, um, all the way up to an hour, depending
on what sort of topic they're taking. So, they did, uh, 12 best places to visit in Vietnam. That
was about a 20 minute. The 50 best places to visit in Asia, that was an hour. Um, the 23 most beautiful
islands in the Mediterranean. That's about 41 minutes. Uh, so, you know, 12 best places to visit
in Peru, 18 minutes.
Now, the next channel is, uh, TPM TV. TPM stands for Talking Points Memo. And that is a press
organization in the United States that, uh, I follow pretty closely. And in fact, I'm a, uh,
subscriber, paid subscriber. Um, so it's, covers politics, basically, what's going on in Washington
from a liberal point of view. Next channel is Trek Culture. Now, there's a, a organization called
What Culture that is just sort of geek things in general, but then they set up specific channels.
Uh, and so there's a Who Culture, uh, and there's a Trek Culture. There's others, but those are the
two that I subscribe to. Um, and this is videos, uh, you know, talking about, um, Star Trek. Um,
the lengths can vary a little bit, but on the average, they're probably 15 to 20 minutes. Um,
then there's a channel called Tall Tapes. Um, this is about Jethro Tull. I mentioned before, uh,
progressive rock is, uh, something I very much enjoy. I'm a big Jethro Tull fan. So, uh, a lot of
this is concert footage, uh, and, you know, people may have, um, shot this. Uh, in other words,
an audience, uh, recording for a lot of these. So, it's, it's not necessarily very high quality,
but, uh, there's also some documentary stuff that gets in here.
Then there's Ursa Ryan. Uh, Ursa Ryan is another one of those game people who does a number of
things, but does a lot of civilization, and that's what I'm interested in. Uh, and same for the next
channel, which is Van Bradley, um, who will discuss other things, but mostly does civilization,
and that's why I am subscribed to it. Then there's Veritasium. Uh, and Veritasium, he says,
is an element of truth. Videos about science, education, and anything else I find interesting.
Um, so, the, the host is, uh, fellow named Derek, and so, um, he did things like, uh, people said
this experiment was impossible, so I tried it. So, and it, something involving thermite. That was about
a half hour long. Um, do people understand the scale of the universe? You know, 15 minute, um,
uh, why don't railroads need expansion joints?
So, it's, it's, uh, science in general. Uh, next one is Viking. Uh, I'm, this Viking,
Viking is in reference to the cruise line. Um, my wife and I have done two Viking river cruises,
one on the Rhine and one on the Danube. Uh, enjoyed them both tremendously. Uh, so, I'm subscribing to
the channel, and then, in addition to the Viking channel, the Viking channel is mostly relatively short,
um, um, uh, promotional kinds of things. And you're talking like two, three minutes. Then there's,
they have another one called Viking TV with longer ones. And those typically would, uh, involve, uh,
involve interviews, uh, with people, uh, regarding some of the things that you might do on a Viking
cruise. Um, so, you know, Christmas on the Rhine, um, is one of the things they do. Um,
you know, beyond the brochure, taking a look at, like, the Lyon and Provence is one of the ones they do.
The Antarctic Explorer is another one they do. Then there's Vlog Brothers. Um, and this was the channel
that was started long time ago by two brothers. And they would just make it a point a couple of times
a week. They would record a video to talk to the other one. And, uh, that led to them doing Crash Course
and creating the company called Complexly, and which is now involved with, um, PBS Digital Studios. But,
you know, this is the channel where they are still doing, um, those, uh, videos. One on Tuesday and one on
Friday. So, Tuesday, John Green, who you might know as an author, um, does his video. And then his
brother Hank does, uh, his video in response on Friday. And they're typically, you know, about five
minutes in length, but they don't stick to that necessarily. And there's, um, Washington Monthly.
Uh, Washington Monthly is a magazine, again, from a fairly left liberal perspective on politics in the
United States. It's one of the ones I support. Then there's Who Culture. Um, uh, we talked about
Trek Culture a few minutes ago. So, this is the one about Doctor Who. Uh, it's the same group of people,
uh, talking about, uh, Doctor Who, uh, and specifically the different episodes.
Then there is Walter's World. And this is a fellow, um, who is named Walters. That's his last name. Um,
and so he and his wife and children do, um, travel around the world. And so he'll do videos about,
uh, things that he's learned in doing that. Um, so for instance, he just did one on, um,
five big travel rule changes for 2025, how you need to get a visa now to get to Europe.
I don't remember exactly when that kicks in. I think it's in a few months. Um, that was about
five minutes. Then Mistakes Tourists Make in Austria. That was about 15 minutes. Um,
so he does these, a couple of these a week. Um, then there's World War II. Um, this is another
time ghost production. They, they did a fantastic job, um, of covering World War II. Again, real time.
So each week we're covering the corresponding week, um, in the war, but also they did two,
uh, extra special productions. One was about Pearl Harbor and the other was about D-Day.
And in each one, uh, what they did is they just expanded, uh, or, you know, zoomed in kind of
to, uh, do, uh, do hour by hour what was going on. Um, and so the D-Day, it's, they cover 24 hours
of D-Day with about 24 hours worth of video. Um, so, you know, it's a really good one. If you have
any interest in World War II history, check it out. Then, um, XKCD, uh, which is a web comic that
I think geeks are fairly familiar with in many cases. And, um, Randall Munro, the writer also,
um, uh, wrote some books called What If, and then created this What If channel where he does videos
about, you know, what, what if we put a pool on the moon? What would a magnitude 15 earthquake be
like? What if you swam in a nuclear storage pool? The next one is You Can't Unhear This.
Um, and this is a channel about the Beatles, and what it does is it digs into some aspect,
um, typically, you know, 10 to 15 minute videos. Like, there was one on paperback writer, how
that changed the Beatles sound forever, the amazing recording history of Here Comes the Sun,
uh, the drum mystery in the Beatles song, Dear Prudence.
All right.
So, with that, I have concluded all of the subscriptions in my YouTube subscription list.
Took a long time to do that, but then I subscribed to a lot of channels.
Well, I hope this hasn't bored you too much. This is Ahooka for Hacker Public Radio signing
off and, as always, encouraging you to support free software. Bye-bye.
You have been listening to the Hacker Public Radio podcast, at hackerpublicradio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording a podcast, then visit the HPR site to find out how easy it really is.
Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by anhonesthost.com, the Internet Archive, rsync.net, and the HPR Community Content Delivery Network.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
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Episode: 4590
Title: Playing Civilization V, Part 9
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4590/hpr4590.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:14:37 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4590, for 2026-03-06
Today's show is entitled, "Playing Civilization V, Part 9"
The host is Ahuka and the duration is 00:14:17
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "We continue our look at the game mechanics of Civilization V."
Hello, this is a hookah welcome you to Hacker Public Radio and another exciting episode in our ongoing series on computer strategy gaming
And we're continuing our look at civilization five and
Why don't we want to talk about today primarily is city states now city states
Was a newly introduced feature in civilization five and they play an important role in the game
They represent the small countries that are not running the world
They do not produce settlers
So they do not expand beyond the one city
Though that city can and will expand its borders in a similar way to how your cities can grow
They do not start with a military unit, but they can produce military units and defend themselves
They can also build buildings in the city, but not wonders
They do have a single vote each in the world Congress or later
United nations making them a key to a diplomatic victory
Now city states start out neutral with regards to the actual players
But your interactions with them can affect how they feel about you
For example, if you send units through their territory, they will get hostile
But if you give them gifts that makes them friendly
So
If you wish to go to war with them
You can and you can take them over
This will affect your diplomatic relations with other players and other city states
But if you have decided on a war of conquest as your victory type that won't matter to you, right?
As mentioned if you want to go for a diplomatic victory
You want to be allied with as many of them as possible to get their votes in the world Congress or the United Nations
But even if you don't need their votes, there are other benefits from friendly relations
There are two levels to friendly relations, friendly and allied and the benefits get better as relations improve
Now there are five types of city states
There's the militaristic
The maritime, the cultured, the mercantile and the religious
Now there's benefits to having relationships with each of these kinds of cities
If it's a militaristic city state and your friends with them, they will periodically give you a unit
Which will appear in your city which is closest to the city state
If you're allies, they'll give you units more often
Maritime
A maritime city state if your friends, they will add two food to your capital city
If your allies, they will add one more food to every city you have
This can be a great way of growing large cities
Cultured city states share their culture with you
At one rate if you are friends and at double the rate if you are allies
So if you are going for a
Culture victory which is one of the victory types
Obviously you want to make sure you are allied with this many of the cultured city states is possible
Now mercantile city states give you and added three happiness if your friends
If your allies you get the three happiness but in addition get access to a luxury resource
That cannot be obtained any other way and that also adds happiness
And you know managing your happiness as we've seen is one of the key things in in safe
So five religious city states give you a one-time bonus of faith when you first meet them and provide added faith
perturne
Now note that cultured and religious city states increase the amount of culture or faith they provide with each new era
So the earlier you develop your relations with them the better the benefit
Yeah, how do you manage your relations
There is a mechanism in the game which keeps track of points to define your relations with the city states
On this numerical scale neutral has a value of zero
Friendly is a value of 30 year above and allied is 60 year above
In the other direction once you go into negative numbers they become angry
If you go negative enough it becomes war
Now a city state can only ever have one ally if only one player has more than 60 influence points
That player will become the patron of the city state and they will ally to that player
Now if two or more players have more than 60 influence points
Then the ally will be whichever one has the most
Now as the game goes on you may get a message that a city state you had as an ally has suddenly decided to ally to someone else
This is frequently the result of the other player gaining influence points in some way often by gifts
You can also gain influence points by promising to protect a city state
But do this with your eyes open if you do not follow through and your promise it will enraged the city state
And you will lose a lot of influence with them
Now your influence with the city state has a natural resting point at zero or neutral
That means that barring other factors a positive number will fall over time and a negative number will rise over time
So for example, let's say you sent one of your units through their territory
Now that'll put you into negative numbers. They'll be angry for a period
But if nothing else happens they will return to neutral
On the other side
Even if you ally with the city state you don't stay allied forever unless you find ways to keep adding influence points
As a variety of ways of doing that one way is to eliminate barbarian camps near the city state
In fact, this is one exception to the rule about sending units through their territory
If you are doing it to attack the barbarians you were seen as a protector not an invader and there is no penalty
Another way to gain influence is by completing a quest from a city state
Each city state you are in contact with will periodically give you a quest and if you fulfill it you will gain influence points
That can include killing a barbarian camp or killing nearby barbarian units, but you can do that at any time. You don't need a quest
Others might include acquiring a great person of a certain kind
Building a world wonder
Bullying another city state
Finding a natural wonder and so on
Now just because they've given you a quest you don't need to do it. You don't need to fulfill the quest
For example if you're strategy calls for ally with other city states
Like you're going for a diplomatic victory ultimately you might want to pass on bullying another city state
There's no penalty for not fulfilling a quest just a bonus when you do fulfill one
Now personally in my games I never bully city states
But just not my style of play and I win a lot of games
Okay another way to gain influences with gifts the most effective is gold and
One large sum is more effective than several small ones
Now for a diplomatic victory strategy you should plan on having a large treasury as you approach the endgame
So that you can buy allies in time for the crucial vote
You can also gain a small amount of influence points by gifting units
I make it a practice to do this whenever I have units that I don't want any longer
These could be obsolete units that have no upgrade path for instance
I don't want to pay maintenance on them as that's a drain on my treasury
And I could just delete them but gifting them to a city state gives me a small amount of influence
Another way to get a big jump
In your influence with a city state is to capture and then return one of their workers
Okay, now I don't mean capture their worker when it's still their worker, but for instance
Very often a barbarian will capture a city state worker
And then that city state worker will have the red color of the barbarian and then you capture it
And when you do that you have the option of keeping the worker for yourself and in the early game
I would probably do that because the worker is so valuable
But at a certain point I have enough workers and getting the 45 influence points for returning the worker is a more effective use
Remember that you have to keep earning influence points to keep up your relations
So even if you get an ally of a city state for a few turns
It will naturally decay back to neutral
By around the middle of the game if you're playing well you can start to invest the resources needed to maintain your relationships
And in particular if you are going for a diplomatic victory
Which relies on having a lot of allied city states
The best way to go for that is to have a strategy focused on getting as much gold as possible
And so that's something to keep in mind when you're deciding which empire you want to play as and things like that
City states get involved in wars if you're allied with a city state and you get into a war with another player
The city state that is allied with you will join in the war
Now of course the same is true for the other player so the war between the two players could also involve three to four city states trading as allies
Now you cannot make peace with a city state while it is allied to a player your war with
You first have to make peace with that player or wipe them out if that suits you
However, if you can get more influence with that city state and supplant the other player
You can get that city state to ally with you and then you can turn around and attack your enemy
Generally a large cash gift can do this once again showing the utility of a fat treasury
Now final note about exploration
And which is a very important thing you you always need to be
Focusing on you cannot have diplomatic relations with the city state you haven't met
So this reinforces the idea that you have to explore the map as soon as possible
Of course you have to balance this with other priorities such as expanding your cities and defending them, but
You know finding the right balance is what all the civilization games are about
Now in most maps this means you should be giving some attention to developing your naval power and technologies
There seems to be a bias to city states being coastal and in many cases they are in small islands
Of course there are a number of motivations for exploring the map
First of all you need intelligence of what you're up against with other players
And unless you're on a very large land mass you'll what to find added lands for settlement
Finding natural wonders adds to happiness in your empire, so finding them all is important
And last the unexplored sections of the map have a strong tendency to spawn barbarian units against you
Early on you cannot traverse ocean tiles and need to stick to coastal tiles
The unit at this part of the game early on is the tri-ream which you can build once you discover sailing
Now I usually build one or two tri-reams in a coastal city to go around the coast of the land mass
I'm on and scout out the situation
If another land mass or island is sufficiently close and you can usually see clues to that
on the map
I can cross to it without entering with ocean tile and extend my exploration
But to really explore the whole map you need to get to caravels
This renaissance area unit becomes available when you discover astronomy and is essentially a naval scouting unit
It can enter ocean tiles
So
You know one of the things I will focus on
You know I'm looking at my research
Is
Yeah, I will say okay, I need to get to astronomy and one of the tricks you can open up the technology tree
And if I click on astronomy it will automatically fill in any of the predecessors that have to be
Researched first to get there so if I say astronomy is my ultimate
Objective here my number one priority and so okay you got to research these other three things first
It will automatically take me through that so that's just a little tip
So this is a hookah for hacker public radio signing off and as always encouraging you to support free software
Bye bye
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording podcast, click on our upload link
to find out how easy it is.
Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by an AnHonestHost.com, the Internet Archive,
rsync.net, and our mirror network.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
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Episode: 4591
Title: A Bit of Git
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4591/hpr4591.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:14:39 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4591, for 2026-03-09
Today's show is entitled, "A Bit of Git"
The host is Lee and the duration is 00:14:13
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "Lee relates the git adventure that occurred while working on a work logging project"
Hello, I'm Leigh.
Style be relating the experience with the distributed version to troll system, called Get,
that happened this afternoon, 26th of December, we call that day here, Boxing Day.
Phone when it doesn't know, Get was crash by Linda Spenderdick to Vowd's, who is a finish
in the American software developer.
It's also known for being the craternly developer of the Lynette's kernel, which is running
on about 70% of the world's computing devices.
So, this afternoon I sat down and browsed onto the online repository of a project I've been
working on.
The project was a simple work session logger with both desktop and web versions.
The web version uses.net core, which is an open source framework, a little similar to Java,
and the desktop version uses Kirigami, a GUI development framework based on the KDA
management environment, but with libraries that allow the app to run in other environments.
The code hosting service, Get Hub, reminded me I had two outstanding issues to work on.
I sat about addressing those, a did by Claude Code, a professional coding tool that can
be conversed with in-chat, and is able to help with common software development tasks such
as writing debugging and testing code.
And it's just one of a number of such tools available that became possible with advances
in low-cost parallel computing, the accumulation of large amounts of human-produced digital
data and developments in computer science.
In particular, what is known as the Transformer architecture that weighs how different
words in text are related to each other statistically, and by doing this can build a massive
new data set known as a large language model, which can then be used to understand a process
both natural language and computer languages.
Today I made seven changes to the code of my work logging project, each one deserving
a commit, that's when you save the state of the code to the version control system.
First change, add some padding beneath the list of days to left pane, so when a scroll
down to the most recent, it's in the middle rather than hard to reach the bomb.
This was for both the web app and desktop app, then commit.
Second change, in the web app, stop code blocks in the word description going off the right
hand-edge, this requires some CSS tweaks, CSS being short for cascading style sheets,
it's the language that lets you change all the visual style of a web page without having
to adjust all the contents, then commit.
Third change, increase that padding for the web app, because it wasn't as much as I
typed, then commit.
Fourth change, get the web app to render work session notes as marked down rather than plain
text.
It was not even difficult, as a text component has that as an option, then commit.
Fifth change, fixing the Cloud Sync screen, which should regress, to splatting its contents
all over the window, instead of containing them in a mobile dialogue box.
A long bell should have been ringing for me at this point, so I distinctly remembered
fixing this once already.
I kind of assume maybe somehow I'd unfixed it with what I'd just been doing.
Anyway, despite my spy-desense tingling, commit this as well.
Sixth change, I just CSS layout a bit more, as the code blocks were still not responsive
when the browser window was narrowed.
Then commit.
Fifth change, adjust the CSS layout even more, for when the window is very narrow, like
on a mobile phone, then commit.
That was all I wanted to do for the day, it had not taken very long.
These changes were tested, both the web-based and desktop-based versions of the app, both
looked okay, and were behaving well.
So, the next step was to push my changes to the public repository.
This is a place where others can access the source code, download it, and make use of
it themselves, if they want to.
It's not like code hosting platform called GitHub.
There are other such platforms such as GitLab and BitBuckit, so name just a couple.
It is managed by the provider, and for small projects like my one, a free or low-cost
use.
There are also alternative ones like Gitty that can be hosted on your own infrastructure
if you want to have more control over things.
When I tried to push my changes, I got an error though.
I found out my branch had diverged from where I was pushing it to.
This was a classic mistake, I not pulled the code from the public repository prior to
starting work on it.
I just assumed I was working on the latest version of the code.
Then I remembered what had happened a few days ago, Monday to be precise, this been Friday.
I've been using my Dell laptop.
I had a synchronization software called Resilio Sync running on it and seeking all my files
between the mesh of different PC, servers, and laptops I use, and I thought this would
have updated things for me, but apparently I had not done so on this occasion.
So doing a fetch and looking at the log of commits in Graph Form, showed there was already
a fixed and a mode of dialogue issue in the public repository.
Even the fixed and previously was slightly better, because it explicitly made the Sync
dialogue not visible into it needed to be displayed rather than relying on any assumptions.
So two branches of the project had diverged.
At this point, if I had reason to believe other people were working on this code, it would
be necessary to start from the remote version and merge in my changes as new commits.
That would end up with quite a messy history, but there was another way that would keep
the history clean and easy to understand when looking back at these changes.
The operation to be performed was called a rebase.
This let's local commits be replayed one by one on top of the remote branch.
Plato talks about it in an episode of HPR, 2573 for June 13th, 2019, called Foundations
of Git Rebase.
So stepping through my commits, and I got to the one with the modal Sync dialogue box,
this had to be staged but the commits skipped since the fix I mentioned was already in place.
Having done this, the log of commits was very examined and looked now correct, so I pushed
this to GitHub.
At first I thought this was all fine now.
On closer inspection I could see attribution messages had been added, mentioning co-authorship
by the Claude Code to I'd been using.
Normally that would be fine by a reason for pause.
This was because the desktop version of this app, in the cart down form, had been deployed
on flat hub, which is the most common source for obtaining flat packed packages.
These are a new generation of software packages used to install software and Linux distributions.
This type of packaging system has two main advantages, first it's agnostic as to which particular
Linux distribution you're installing the software on, because it includes important dependency
libraries bundled with it.
Secondly, it incorporates sandboxing that limits the privileges the application has on the
system it's installed on.
This reduces potential side effects with the caveat that when privileged access of some
kind is required, this must be allowed for explicitly.
An example might be writing a file onto your home directory, which by default a sandbox
program would not be allowed to do.
Why was I bothered?
Well I remember that flat hub has deliberate policies around distributing code produced
by generative artificial intelligence systems.
And this is for good reason, on my still commercial large language models have been trained
from massive amounts of data that came from the public internet, especially source code
repository such as GitHub.
Arguably systems like Claude have used this information to learn how to program, which
is skill, but it's still plausible it remembers for baitum some of its training material.
In the same way that I remember punished by heart I was taught at the school, even though
I've primarily exposed to those texts to learn the pan's fan different forms of literature
and skills of comprehension and discourse.
If I produced a piece of writing and included word for word, some verse I'd remember
without attributing it to the offer this would be considered intellectual theft.
In the same way, large language models generally use a knowledge of programming to generate
completely new code put together a new ways.
If we exclude trivial common repetitions or idioms, it's likely to be distinct from anything
that existed before.
There's still the danger and LLM-Y output large amounts of someone's work exactly as it was
remembered.
Even open source licenses often demand proper attribution for the original program's work,
so it's basically not okay to redistribute something very close to what they wrote without proper
attribution.
This leads to a legal grey area between what is copying code someone else wrote and what is
termed fair use.
Saying all this, I don't think I've stolen someone else's code, but ering on the side of
both caution and pragmatism, I don't want to advertise too much in the public repository
what tools I've used if there are policy implications.
To fix this required rewriting the git history again,
it includes a way of doing this called filter branch, which could be combined with a text
replacement program called said.
That's SCD.
And speaking of said, I have a repurposed anti-region enclosure.
I got it out of the valves and put an old Android tablet in the face.
It shows a world clock, the weather, and foca flashcards in Dutch and Spanish,
so as well as a Latin conjunction, I know said means thirst in Spanish.
The English command line term said is a program that takes in some input text,
then a pattern, which is basically a string of text that encodes some rules it must apply,
and it produces output having applied those rules.
Unfortunately, the filter branch command that was tried didn't do anything.
The second attempt used the git command called rebase again, along with an exact parameter,
telling it to commit with amendment, a version of the original message,
using said to remove the unwanted mention of Claude.
Looking at the git log provided assurance this had worked.
I thought now this would be all resolved, but no, the history was still divergent
from the remote repository.
Changing the commit messages had again made it look like the changes were on the different branch,
even though the changes themselves were identical.
A normal git push would not work.
Luckily there's a way of overriding this problem by doing what's called a force push.
This is not something that anyone typically should do when the remote repository is shared
or public, since it will invalidate version control for anyone else working on this code.
Because this was quite a new project, and I was pretty sure I was the only person working on it,
and the divergence has happened only recently, I decided to go ahead and update the remote
repository this way anyway.
Finally, there was both for clean history and the commit messages stated just for each change
was not what tools I used.
Here's what I learned about git.
First, rebasing lets you replay commits.
If two branches diverge, you can replay your commits on top of the remote branch,
and keep the history simple.
Second, if conflicts occur with the rebase, they can be solved,
as you have the option to continue skip or abort entirely.
Third, with interactive rebasing, you can do powerful things like run arbitrary commands and each commit.
Useful for amending commit messages, for example.
Fourth, rewriting history changes commit hashes.
So even if the file changed is identical, the history has changed, so this needs to be born in mind.
A force push will rewrite the remote history, but it should be done with caution.
Only few are the only person working on the branch.
You're okay with the published history changing, and you've checked your changes are correct.
Six, using filter branch and said can be a bit tricky.
This is why I did the interactive rebase instead.
Here are the various commands that we used, git status, this checks the current status.
It especially tells you if there are any new on modified files and which of those files have been staged.
git fetch origin, this fetch is the latest history from the remote repository.
git log dash dash one line dash dash graph dash dash all dash dash the correct dash 15.
This draws a graph of the commit history.
git show origin slash main dash dash that or git show some hash and some file name.
Ever of these will show details of the commit, git rebase origin slash main.
This rebase is local commits onto the remote branch.
git add some file, stages of particular file, git rebase dash dash skip, this
skips the next commit when rebasing, git show dash dash, step capital HAAD, or git log dash dash format
equals in double quotes per cent capital B dash one capital HAAD, either of these will check commit message.
git rebase dash i sum hash dash dash exec in single quotes sum command, this runs a command like
git commit dash dash amend when rebasing, git push dash dash force, this does a force push.
I'm to put a reference to these in the show notes.
That's all for now, thanks for listening, bye bye.
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording podcast, click on our upload link
to find out how easy it is.
Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by an AnHonestHost.com, the Internet Archive,
rsync.net, and our mirror network.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
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Episode: 4592
Title: Happy by shower # 2
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4592/hpr4592.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:14:40 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4592, for 2026-03-10
Today's show is entitled, "Happy by shower # 2"
The host is Antoine and the duration is 00:05:21
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "Other things that make me happy"
Hello, hello, welcome to HPR, hello, hello, this is the episode happy by shower, number
two, other things that make me happy.
I also happen to be happy when I see my dogs well, they're both a little wood and have
had grave sicknesses.
One, the girl, is taken medication because of a problem, maybe on this pine, that interferes
with walking, but in general, both her and him, a little white male, who almost died
because of stone in the ureter at around the pandemic, are today good and then grateful
seeing them in the state and they suffer when they suffer.
The hot weather is also more comfortable for them and for me in general, so even though
we are having too much hot weeks here in Kuri Chiba, it's a soft, nice weather.
Generally, I take a cup of coffee on the early morning, sometimes, I give a little
run, or go cycling to my duties, without coffee and even without bread.
Only then, hours later, I take the coffee and maybe eat something hours after a week.
The exercise, the bath with nothing nor the stomach, and oh, the coffee after, especially
espresso, or American, my current favorite, espresso with hot water, that's good, it's a
good feeling outside of the routine.
I learned to like to share things, I like to share what a judging partant, as much as I
appreciate doing that, they feel as a burden, an account or a published content, are like
something and constantly caring that may condemn what it comes to be, or may create expectations
on others that see them, that they can fulfill, or are being the road in a manner that they feel
so insecure, so if you're good and safe and erasing everything under my control, sometime after
having created an account or published something. I feel well, and it makes me happy to have
an out of sleep in which I don't wake up more than once, if I wake up early spontaneously
and rested, better yet. Good sensation makes me happy. To be true, when I spend the first time
on the morning reading the Bible with prayer, even on a not keen on doing that, man, my head and my
body end up being marvellous. Martin Luther, the one of the reform, is said to having said,
I have so much to do that I will spend the first three hours praying.
A piece of opinion, an asked, if you are constantly doing something, you think it's too easy,
you may not be doing it right, or you're not doing the right thing. Let's see what's wrong
and do the right thing. One last thing that makes me happy is when my swimming pool is clean,
it's been four years now, as with the other facts, it's good by itself, yeah, but has more
meaning, as I had many dirty problems with its water to the points that the neighbors called
sanitary authorities. I don't want to have anymore problems in this area, or in any other area
of living, but I know now and have to guide my heart to feel accordingly to what I know,
that any problems that arise are to result in my good and good to other people and other
living creatures too. So the difficulties even the hardest ones can be faced with peace,
because in all the future and being in a bad state, we will not help, we will not help in hiking
and overcoming whatever there is here now or right ahead. Our posture, our internal condition
in doing something, counts much together with the external things, visible or invisible,
dead we do. I thank you for listening, bye.
You have been listening to the Hacker Public Radio podcast, at hackerpublicradio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording a podcast, then visit the HPR site to find out how easy it really is.
Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by anhonesthost.com, the Internet Archive, rsync.net, and the HPR Community Content Delivery Network.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
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Episode: 4593
Title: Nuclear Reactor Technology - Ep 8 Generation Four Reactors
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4593/hpr4593.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:14:41 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4593, for 2026-03-11
Today's show is entitled, "Nuclear Reactor Technology - Ep 8 Generation Four Reactors"
The host is Whiskeyjack and the duration is 00:11:29
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "Future reactor technologies, particularly what are referred to as Generation Four reactors."
This episode is the eighth and final one in an eight-part series on nuclear reactor technology.
In this episode, I will talk about future reactor technologies, particularly what are referred to as generation four reactors.
Some of these will simply be additional developments of reactors that have already been discussed in this series,
but this will show what technologies are seen as being most promising today.
What is generation four?
Generation four international forum is an international organization whose membership is composed of many of the countries that are researching advanced vision reactors.
Their goal is to conduct a number of joint research projects to advance the state of the art.
The members agreed to participate in and share a research on advanced technologies.
Research subjects.
Here are the subjects undergoing research at this time.
Half of them are some form of fast neutron reactor.
The names they use here are for the specific projects and not intended to encompass all possible reactor types.
Lead fast reactors.
Lead cooled fast reactors use a liquid lead or lead bismuth cooling.
As the name implies, they use the fast neutron reaction.
Lead has a high boiling point up to 1,743C, favorable neutronic properties, and does not react strongly with air or water.
The reactor would operate at atmospheric pressure.
Fuel is your radium, Epletonium mixed oxide, or nitrite.
The main advantages of this reactor are lower capital and construction costs because of operating at atmospheric pressure,
and design simplifications which lead permits.
The problems we worked on are related to materials and chemistry.
Sodium fast reactor.
Sodium cooled fast reactors use a liquid sodium coolant.
As the name implies, they use the fast neutron reaction.
The reactor would operate at atmospheric pressure.
Fuel is your radium and plutonium mixed oxide or metal.
They have a great deal of flexibility in terms of how much plutonium they use or create.
However, the coolant is highly reactive with air and water, and requires an oxygen-free environment.
There is a long history of experience with sodium fast reactors to build on.
They are very well suited to producing plutonium with which to fuel other reactors,
including providing the plutonium driver for thorium fuel,
eliminating the need for uranium enrichment.
Gas cooled fast reactor.
Gas cooled fast reactors use helium gas coolant.
As the name implies, they use the fast neutron reaction.
The reactor would operate at high pressure.
Fuel is uranium and plutonium carbide.
Helium is non-corrosive, and unlike lead or sodium, it is transparent,
easing inspection of the reactor.
The high temperature helium can be used directly to provide process heat to industry,
as well as for producing steam for electricity generation.
However, without a moderator, the system has very low thermal mass,
meaning that temperatures can rise more quickly in the event of a loss of coolant.
It requires very pure helium coolant as hydrogen and cause
embrittlement of metals.
Very high temperature reactor.
Very high temperature reactors use helium gas coolant.
Unlike gas cooled fast reactors, they use a slow neutron reaction.
The reactor would operate at high pressure.
Fuel is uranium and plutonium oxide, or uranium and thorium oxide,
mixed with graphite in billiard balls, size spheres, or in blocks.
The spherical fuel variants are essentially pebble bed reactors.
Operating temperatures are 700 to 850C, and possibly more than a thousandC later.
As well as producing electricity, the heat could be used directly for process heat for industry,
including producing hydrogen.
There is a great deal of experience with gas cooled reactors of various types of drop-on.
Molten salt reactors.
Molten salt reactors use various molten salts as coolant.
Different variants use slow or fast neutron reactions.
Some will use conventional solid fuel, while others use fuel that is dissolved in the salt coolant.
Where the salt is dissolved in the coolant, there will be online chemical processing
to remove waste products and keep the chemistry and balance.
Advantage of molten salt over water coolant are operating at ambient pressure and higher temperatures.
Heat can be used directly in some industrial processes.
Problems to be solved include corrosion caused by molten salt and maintaining the correct chemistry
to salt when using dissolved fuel.
Supercritical water reactors.
Supercritical water reactors are water-cooled reactors that operate at temperatures and pressures
above the critical point of water, which is 374C and 22.1 megapascals.
Supercritical water has a behavior somewhere between that of liquid water and gaseous steam.
At the critical point, the supercritical fluid has a density of about one-third that of liquid water.
These can use slow or fast neutron reactions.
Fuel is uranium oxide, plutonium uranium mixed oxide, or plutonium thorium mixed oxide.
The moderator is light water, heavy water, or no moderator in the case of fast reactors.
They can be pressure vessel reactors, similar to boiling or pressurized water reactors,
or Kalandria and pressure tube reactors, similar to can-do reactors.
Supercritical water has been well-established in industry, but the first supercritical boiler being built in 1960.
Modern fossil fuel-fired steam generating plants use supercritical water boilers and turbines.
Supercritical water reactors can expect to have thermally efficiencies of 44 to 48%.
Current water-cooled reactors have thermally efficiencies of 34 to 36%.
The benefits of higher efficiencies are to get more power from a similar size of plant reducing capital costs.
Additionally, the characteristics of supercritical water allow reactors to be simplified further reducing costs.
Using supercritical water would allow nuclear power plants to use the same sorts of steam turbines as are used in fossil fuel plants,
reducing costs and increasing the supply chain availability.
With supercritical water, there is only a single phase rather than separate liquid and gas phases.
This simplifies the design and reduces the number of components, as no steam generators are needed.
Supercritical water reactors combine decades of experience with water-cooled reactors, with decades of experience of the supercritical water in multiple industries.
This is seen as the natural evolution of water-cooled reactors.
Cost estimates from studies done in Europe in Japan suggest cost reductions of 20 to 30%.
The main challenges revolve around developing materials that are compatible with both the very high temperature water and with radiation, particularly for the fuel cladding.
Concept designs have been made for both large and SMR size supercritical water reactors.
Episode conclusion. In this episode, we looked at the reactor types being studied under an international organization called the Generation 4 International Forum.
All of these reactor types, except for supercritical water reactors, are not new, and we have looked at them previously.
Supercritical water reactors themselves represent the natural evolution of water-cooled reactors.
I suspect that many of these research projects will not result in commercially successful results, such as the nature of R&D.
The supercritical water reactors would, on the surface, seem to have the most promise in terms of commercial use.
As they focus on bringing two very well-established technologies together, water-cooled reactors and supercritical water.
However, I'm not an expert in this field, so I'm just making an educated guess on that.
Series conclusion. This is the end of the series on nuclear reactor technology.
Episode 1 covered nuclear basics, including basic terminology and several verses military nuclear material.
Episode 2 covered nuclear fuel, including the different types, recycling of spent fuel, uranium, and thorium resources, and medical isotopes.
Episode 3 covered reactor basics, including slow versus fast reactors, moderators, coolants, steam generation, refueling methods, and the three main commercial reactor types.
Episode 4 covered the less common reactor types, including types which are no longer used, some historical developmental dead ends, and some types which may possibly be making a comeback.
Episode 5 covered fast reactors, including the different types, some of their history, why they were developed, and why they have so far only seen limited use.
Episode 6 covered thorium reactors, including what is thorium and how it differs from uranium, why there is interest in thorium, what sorts of reactors can use thorium, and why thorium has not yet seen widespread use.
Episode 7 covered small modular reactors, or SMRs, what is the reason for developing them, what are the different ways they may be used, and where they are currently being built.
Episode 8 covered generation 4 reactors, which is a collection of future technologies.
I hope that this series has been useful and informative on how nuclear reactors work, and what the different types of reactors and different types of fuel are.
I have focused on the past and present, without looking very much beyond what is already developed except in this final episode.
I have focused on the reactors, fuel and medical isotopes, without much discussion of mining, refining, converting, enrichment, fuel fabrication, or disposal.
I also haven't talked much about the rest of a functioning power plant, which includes cooling, steam turbines, generators, transformers, control systems, refueling systems, switch gear, transmission grid connections, grid coordination, and many many other things.
And of course, those entire grid itself, a very complex thing when operated at scale.
Nonetheless, we count on the lights going on when we turn on the light switch, while seldom thinking about all the things that go on behind the scenes to make that happen.
As the recent blackout in Spain shows, that is something that we can't take for granted.
With plans for net zero amounting to essentially the further electrification of everything, we need reliable sources of electrical energy to make that happen.
Without reliable electrical energy, available at the touch of a switch, we don't even have a Stone Age civilization, let alone a modern one.
So think about that the next time you turn on a light or listen to a podcast or do nearly everything else in your daily life.
This concludes the 8th and final episode of an 8-part series on nuclear reactor technology.
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording podcast, click on our upload link
to find out how easy it is.
Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by an AnHonestHost.com, the Internet Archive,
rsync.net, and our mirror network.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
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Episode: 4595
Title: WATER WATER EVERYWHERE!
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4595/hpr4595.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:14:43 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4595, for 2026-03-13
Today's show is entitled, "WATER WATER EVERYWHERE!"
The host is operat0r and the duration is 00:21:14
The flag is Explicit, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "operat0r talks about various home related water things"
You are listening to a show from the Reserve Queue.
This show was submitted in February 2025 to cover occasions like this
where there are gaps in the schedule.
Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Hack and Pulse Video with your whole stop
radio.
Today I'm talking about water meters and I'm probably three years ago, I had to do this
three years ago and what I want to heal and the thing with a lot of meters is you need
to be prepared to set off the main water meter at the street.
Where are your yard?
And I can explain the background.
So if you haven't messed with your water meter in three to five years, it's probably
buried.
So what's going to happen, it's not if when at some point your water is going to mess up
and you're not going to be able to cut off the main at the house, you're going to have
to come down here to the water meter, it's just your water meter, a lot of people don't
even know where they are.
So you have to spend 10-20 minutes trying to figure it out before something or you finally
stop that music.
Sometimes it'll start in the back and you've got a leak and you can't find your main
or you can't shut off your main or you can't get your main and you want to come down
to the meter and cut it off while you can't do that either.
I've been buried for 16 years.
A lot of these folks have no idea about any of that stuff and I'm sure you guys know
exactly what I'm talking about.
But if you don't, just start digging and you'll find this little plastic covered, plastic covered,
gate valve or ball valve, I don't know what it is.
And it's covered in plastic to kind of protect.
That might even be metal.
It feels metal.
You can't get it.
You can't get it.
You can't get it.
So what you buy is you buy a cut-off thing, like Home Depot or something.
It's a big cut-off key.
It's a big piece of rebar with a little scoop thing at the end.
And then you tell your spouse, hey, this is how you use it, turn it off this way.
So what I'm trying to do is make it so that's easily accessible.
And I'm not going to digging around to it to the point where there's, you know, about a three inches
three inches around it so that I don't have to do this every two years.
So I'm kind of digging around it and allowing it to get filled back up in about four to five years.
On the last time I did this, it was because of neighbor.
There yard had been flooded for I don't know how long and of course they weren't even up or something.
So I'm going to get around and find the shut off.
I think one of them finally came home or something like 10 minutes later.
And maybe they finally answered the door or something.
And this was like early and more than we were walking.
So we're walking and I see you know, flooding.
And then I ran the doorbell and something happened.
Sorry, excuse me, children.
Oh, no, no.
And they're all wireless now too.
I'm assuming if you had, if you were dumb and stupid, you could probably version of the protocol,
which I'm trying to spend a hundred times over.
And make it so you never have to use any water.
Eventually they catch you.
Just like a cable.
And give you a hard time, but.
So yeah, you want to have a sea bar.
You want to tell your spouse how to use it.
You want to check and make sure that the lid can go on.
And what caused me to do this originally was one of the kids's in your yard,
and step on the.
My phone's going.
Step down the thing.
And it just fell into the hole.
And took me to a 20 minutes there.
Not 20 minutes.
About five minutes to get it out.
But we had done it just to where.
It kind of opened up because this.
Limit classes.
No, it's a little.
So I have no idea how you did it.
But anyway.
And dig it out.
Get your T bar.
And then practice.
You know,
Bring it on to need off.
And just have your spouse be prepared.
If and when something goes wrong.
Here's the shut off for the house.
And then here's the shut off at the street.
And we'll.
You know.
It's a little help in general.
Wait for that.
Um.
But also.
You can buy.
The whole house.
Water detection systems.
Um, so when we're going on to leaking.
And try leaking.
They have a.
They're.
They're tech.
They're calling.
Make.
Figure that regular wireless one.
They've been kind of the leader in that space up until.
Everything got an idea dress.
So.
They're gone has wired.
Wireless one.
It'll hook up to the internet.
But now you can buy off.
Brand one.
For any number.
Off.
You can get like three for.
You know.
Sixty bucks.
Twenty bucks or something.
So I would.
I don't know if I'd.
I don't know if I'd pick the Zercon.
They've been around.
Um, but I have water.
Or.
On the.
For.
Everywhere in the house.
I've got two of the Zercon.
I.
I got two of the Zercon.
And then.
A kid of like three.
Three.
Three.
It was like the price of one.
Zercon.
Um, and then the kid I got comes with like.
I'm blind.
Um, so I don't know what you could put in here.
Make this less painful.
Um, maybe rocks.
But then the rocks will just get filled up there.
And notice that rocks dared to be up and said it's.
Start.
So I don't know what you're supposed to put down.
Maybe a screen on top of this.
I guess that's the whole point of the lead on the sausage.
Keep all this mud out of here.
So.
I've dug off enough around it.
Where it's going to break even at some point.
I didn't mean kind of a flat surface.
Um, but yeah, I've dug a bunch.
Fair amount around the actual.
Cut off.
Um, they also have like.
Uh, you're on copper.
And you can actually get them to come out and tap your.
Tap your.
You're, you know, galvanized.
And see you'll or whatever with a copper.
I'm about to go somewhere where it's quieter.
Uh, tap your galvanized with copper.
And then that way.
It still goes.
That way.
Somebody messes with kids playing with the water.
You can tap your galvanized with copper.
And then you can put one of these fancy.
Uh, fancy things.
Oh.
That will, um,
detect leak and theory.
And it can also like detect when you're.
Washing dishes.
They're.
Washing clothes apparently.
That's.
Theory.
The idea is you run your washer.
And then.
It says, oh, something is using water.
What is it?
And based on this pattern.
It'll, you know, detect that your washer being.
Something with.
Everything else.
Yeah.
Ideally.
And you do that.
Oh, my goodness.
You do that.
And then you can have like automatic thing.
And it'll tell you when.
You're using what you're supposed to.
But.
He bought you the real part.
You want is the.
I'm going to cut off.
So when you're out of town.
You can remotely shut your water off.
When there's a detective leak or just.
You know, hey, after three days of.
I do water usage or minimal.
You can have your water set off.
If you have a far away house or.
So we call.
I'll be there.
So.
You have far away house.
You're not there.
That.
You can set up some kind of.
More systems.
Where say is it.
The water's not being used.
You know, 5% of the water or whatever's not being used.
Within certain amount of time.
And.
Come up the water.
Or even better.
You have a detective leak.
Which.
And what I was reading.
If you're.
If you do the detective leak, it's going to detect.
Like a major bite.
Pipe bursting or something like that.
But that's not what usually gets us.
It's the.
You know, a little pipe that's going.
Shh.
In the in the attic or something.
And it destroys your whole house.
So.
I would just.
Be.
Aaron said a costume and just.
Uh, shut things off and can.
But you can have that is an option for you to.
Do some of that stuff.
Um.
What else do I have for like.
General maintenance on stuff.
Uh.
Your water heaters have a bleed out on the bottom.
And you can take a piece of.
Uh.
Uh.
Small form pipe.
Uh, this is a new one.
I can't shut the pipe down in there.
That's more.
But the one I had had a bigger office.
And you could shove something down in there.
And believe the bottom of the tank out and get roughed out down at the bottom.
Um, oh, that's nice.
There's a piece of styrofoam sitting right in there.
Pointable bit of the one of you.
Um, must have got blown up there from.
So there's like a bunch of plain wool stuff up here on the top.
From blowing the garage.
You know, I should need to get rid of.
But, uh, yeah, there's after a while the bottom gets starts to rough.
And then what happens is the heating elements on the bottom.
And it's on the bottom.
And the, you know, the sensor is on the bottom.
And they get roughed it.
And then you do replace your item here.
So that's why.
It's not the water heater itself, necessarily.
It's usually the sensory bits and the water heater go bad.
And then there's no easy to wait or a place.
Uh, some of those coils.
Um.
It's what I understand.
But anyways.
Um, leaks and leak sections.
Water in general.
Um, I built rebuilt this pump.
The pressure washer.
I don't think 1600 or something.
It's not crazy.
Um, I don't have the stock and taste for it anymore.
Uh, but I rebuilt the pump.
And it's not fun.
It's you're not into fixing motors.
And you won't be into fixing pumps.
Because it's basically a motor with water and anything.
Uh, whatever.
But you can buy.
Um,
uh, radiator fluid.
For, you know, snowy, whatever.
And I, uh, radiator fluid.
If you have just regular radiator,
I wouldn't be surprised.
That would work.
But works with water pumps.
Um, so it's a yellow little box bottle.
It's 11 ounces.
Preston radiator anti rust with pump glue.
Um, so, you know, I think this is for like more for like air commissioners or something.
I don't know.
Uh, water of water funds cooling system components.
Like a water, water pumps and cooling system.
So basically this is radiator fluid.
It's why you.
And you can look online as you get a little tea valve.
And I have a, uh,
Uh, pipes in a cut off valve.
And I screw that onto the bottom of the pressure washer.
When I've done with it.
And I'll, we get dry for a second turn off the turn off the motor.
Because you don't run a pump dry.
So it'll, I'll let it run dry for a second.
And then I will put the attached screw on attached to the thing.
And I'll pour the white liquid in there.
A little bit of it.
And I will turn over the engine manually with my tan with the crank.
And until quite good comes out.
And that way I know this has been flushed through the system.
And then I will cut off the tea valve.
Dumps the excess, twice the back end to the vessel.
Mostly sometimes I make a mess.
And then that gives it kind of winnerizes it.
I'm not in a winner right place.
But what happens is with the pumps is that there's metal and different kinds of metal.
And you got water and metal, different kinds of metal,
plus the other kinds of metal.
And it's just a match.
There's a recipe for,
an eventual failure in any direction.
So there is no one.
It would run.
But it would cut itself off.
I think just because of the valves would get all ducts.
Because they were all rested.
So I bought a pump for it.
And of course, it was the dry shaft was too long.
And I didn't really want to cut off the dry shaft.
So I raised the inch in block.
Like, you know, two, probably two inches.
It was the wrong size pump basically.
And I guess I could have just cut off the,
the end of the shaft there.
But I wasn't really super comfortable with that.
And I also think it would have less than the amount of torque that the shaft had on to the engine
properly.
Because I don't think the thing ran all the way down.
So either way, I would have cut it off.
I think Canada is that would have been an option.
But I think there wasn't enough of the amount for the,
so the rod has a cut in it.
And it's like a D shape.
This is what's explaining it.
And that D shape goes into the engine.
And if that D shape, if I were to cut it or it doesn't go up all the way,
then I'd have to like manually sand down the rest to go up up in the dry shaft.
I think that was the problem is that it was just too long.
And the shape of the rod changed as it went down a shaft.
So I just couldn't just cut it off and then show it up in there.
So I had to get, I got like, that's a stack of washers.
And set that on top and put it in between the engine.
And I just make sure that the engine doesn't rattle around too much.
Because they, you know, it's going to rattle and eventually rattle itself apart.
So I try to watch it when it twists, they're twisting around a lot.
Which that means the dry shaft is like twisting around and dropping.
I'll go in there and tighten it a little bit.
And then I'll give it a few more.
A few more goes.
But yeah, pumps are gross.
You've got to make sure they're winter ice.
You make sure there's not any water in them.
Put that radiator fluid in the runaway room once in a while.
This one has been doing nothing for a year.
And it started on the second frame.
I primed it.
And the second frame started right up.
So, and this is used.
My dad had it.
And then of course, let's somebody borrow it and got really.
You think I'll see that people borrow you to.
What else?
Water.
Oh, these little anything.
Please don't, they tell you.
Please don't use your yard with the regular.
With the regular.
With the regular fresh washers.
Head.
Get one of these rotating ones.
And they are pain in the butt.
This one is a big metal one.
And it's cheap.
And by cheap, I mean, it might have been 60, 70, 80,
100 dollars.
And basically, it's the bar.
With some higher mass involved.
And when the pressure comes through, it's kind of certain pressure.
The thing comes out and it spins itself around.
And it does wonders here.
I mean, you can do your driveway in no time.
And if you want to opt at the cost, you can have, you know,
when your kids or somebody.
Or do some do some driveway.
Do a few driveways.
Then it will pay for itself.
Because I think it's awesome.
What I had, the problem I had,
is that it wouldn't spin.
And then because it wouldn't spin,
it wouldn't activate the mass that allows it to spin
and allows the pressure to, like,
differentials of differentials of kick-ins.
So it wasn't spinning.
So if it wasn't spinning, then it would kind of,
that's kind of pressure system would kick in with the internal.
And I don't know what you call it.
Like a suction base or whatever base pressure system.
So the pressure got too great on the end of the sprayer.
It was kind of overflow into this other direction.
And then it would kind of few at the top of the thing,
and not to sit around.
So it took, I took it apart.
And I'm like, well, this looks like it's missing a screw.
And then I realized it's some kind of weird pressure system
to where if the thing doesn't start spinning
and it doesn't get enough of the pressure to release
through the proper channels.
It kind of, the pressure is of going up to another direction
and viewing out of the top of the thing,
and kind of bubbling up.
So this one is a little piece of crap.
The commercial grade ones, I guess, are, you know,
probably $200.
And this one is either non-lahine.
It's maybe two-to-low pressure.
My pressure washer is two-low pressure for it,
or it's just their old garbage,
and you've got to buy it.
It's super commercial grade ones.
Now, you want to use your plumbers,
plumbers tape when you can.
These things, all these things have vowels,
so you want to replace little grommets.
And you can go to,
in the harbor spray,
but, you know,
eight-hour wear, wherever your eight-hour wear types are,
and buy different kinds of o-rings,
and you can just buy a bunch of o-rings through these things.
I don't know what the exact size is,
but you buy o-rings to replace them.
When I originally got it, the o-rings were kind of shot,
and I have a longer extension that I use.
So I haven't had the Daisy channel together yet,
but when I do, I'm going to have to find some o-rings for them,
because they kind of make sort of a mess,
but I don't like any leaks when I do my stuff.
So usually it takes me a good hour to get set up,
because, you know, I've got to plug everything in,
and I've got to clean it,
and set it all up,
and it takes me a good 15,
20 minutes to set everything up,
because I'll find a leak,
and I take it hard,
and then I end up doing this,
some other kind of project that comes up,
so the whole thing's been done taking a very minute.
That's that for pressure washers,
wanting to use,
yeah, so if you're faucet outside,
it's giving you problems,
and you don't want to play a plumber to fix it,
you just have to add another faucet to it,
and you can do this up to one time.
So if I originally,
I think the front faucet I read is,
I was able to get enough,
get enough copper or steel,
and whatever it is it's on there,
I just put spray foam on it,
and I don't think you're supposed to use spray foam outside,
I have to carry it out,
because I used to tangle around
through the wood and screw it into the house.
But I was able to re-attach a new,
or no, I haven't done that.
I can't remember what I did,
but if you're lucky,
you can take your faucet apart,
and go to Home Depot or something,
and get some bits,
you need to replace the inside,
just the inside part of your faucet,
which is kind of interesting.
So, let me go all this stuff.
Anyway, that's pretty much it.
Fossets attaching faucets,
white flitters,
they're all garbage timers for your irrigation system.
The one I have is,
I don't know what brand it is.
It's not the waterbird thing,
it's a decent, a decent brand,
not the Orion either,
those are garbage.
But I dug out irrigation system,
and I did it wrong,
so I dug another irrigation system.
So if you're going to do it,
do the math, right?
You can do three to four if you're lucky.
You can comfortably do three,
but our yard is tiny,
so I just have two waterheads,
one at the end,
one at the bottom,
but I had dug for,
I don't know,
it's four or five different spray heads,
and then realize there's not enough
to run them off at the same time,
and if you do that,
then you have to do the switching thing,
and the pain of that.
So, don't even bother.
If your yard is small,
just get two to three heads,
and you should be fine.
We're facing area,
you can set it a little servo.
They have wireless ones.
I wouldn't do that,
because as soon as you have some kind of wireless things,
you're going to have to go in there and place batteries,
and how are you going to have to pay the blood
to replace batteries,
and you're just going to kind of wireless things,
or maybe they are wired,
but their wireless connectivity,
and I'm not going to put some wireless things,
and that's just to get up every 10 years or six years,
and get it to do what it's supposed to do.
So, I just had the waterbird one
from,
and that I reclaimed from somewhere else.
Anyways, that's it for water,
and stay safe,
and if you're real fin of this,
and you made it as far,
please record an episode,
probably needed if you're hearing this,
because it's probably going to go into the back up here.
Cool, take it easy.
You have been listening to the Hacker Public Radio podcast, at hackerpublicradio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording a podcast, then visit the HPR site to find out how easy it really is.
Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by anhonesthost.com, the Internet Archive, rsync.net, and the HPR Community Content Delivery Network.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
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Episode: 4597
Title: UNIX Curio #2 - fgrep
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4597/hpr4597.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:14:46 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4597, for 2026-03-17
Today's show is entitled, "UNIX Curio #2 - fgrep"
The host is Vance and the duration is 00:11:50
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "Searching without regular expressions"
Hi there, I'm Vance and welcome to Unix Curio number 2.
This series is dedicated to exploring little known and occasionally useful, trinkets lurking
in the dusty corners of Unix Lake operating systems.
Imagine, if you will, a Jane Austen novel about three sisters.
The first is well known and celebrated by everyone.
The second, while slightly smarter and more capable, is significantly less popular.
And the third languages in near-total isolation and obscurity.
These three sisters live on any Unix Lake system, and their names are Grepp, E-Grepp, and
F-Grepp.
I will assume that you are already familiar with Grepp.
Grepp works pretty much the same, except that she handles extended regular expression syntax.
The E is for extended.
When you're writing shell scripts intended to be portable, be careful to call E-Grepp if
your expression uses the plus symbol, question mark, vertical pipe symbol, or curly
braces as metacaractors.
Some versions of G-Neu-Grepp make no distinction between basic and extended regular expressions,
so you might be surprised when your script works on one system, but not another.
If you go to the POSIX-Grepp specification, linked from the show notes, you will find
a link to the specification page describing basic and extended regular expressions.
This might help you understand the difference between them and where you would need to use
Grepp or E-Grepp.
But our Unix Curio for today is poor unnoticed F-Grepp.
While the plainest sister of the three, she really doesn't deserve to be ignored, sometimes
she's exactly what you need.
The F in her name stands for either fixed string or fast, depending on who you ask.
She does not handle regular expressions at all.
The pattern she has given is taken literally.
This can be a great advantage when what you are searching for contains characters having
special meaning in a regular expression.
As an example, suppose that you have a directory full of code files and want to find
which files reference a particular array element.
If the language that these files are written in uses square brackets for array elements,
this won't be straightforward.
Regular expressions in Grepp treat a set of characters inside square brackets as representing
any one of the characters listed in that set.
Actually, it's a little bit more complicated than that.
You can look up bracket expressions in a reference about regular expressions if you want
the gory details.
To find text containing a literal set of square brackets with Grepp, you would need to escape
each square bracket with a backslash character.
You can see the show notes for an example of what I mean.
If what you're searching for contains other characters that are special to Grepp, you
would similarly need to put backslashes before these to force Grepp to search for the literal
characters instead.
This can get tedious if your search string has many non-alphanumeric characters and
you don't remember off the top of your head, which ones have special significance in
regular expressions.
Before anyone jumps into correct me, I should point out that there are other possible
ways to escape medicaractors in a regular expression.
A backslash is just the simplest approach, so that's what I'm describing.
Thankfully, there is an easier way to deal with these special characters.
Just use F-Grepp instead.
F-Grepp treats each character as simply representing itself.
You can therefore search for patterns including dot characters, square brackets, and
asterisks with abandon.
They will only match themselves.
Of course, you lose the flexibility of regular expressions, so F-Grepp isn't the right
tool for all occasions, but when you need it, it's there.
Where I most often find F-Grepp to be particularly handy is when searching through log files
for IP version for addresses.
With ordinary Grepp, a pattern containing an IPv4 address with dots would probably match
a bunch of addresses you're not interested in, because the dot medicaractor will match
any single character.
To make sure you only matched a literal dot, you would have to escape each one, or better
yet use F-Grepp.
While I was researching this episode, I discovered a capability all three of these
sisters have that previously I didn't fully appreciate.
You might be familiar with using the vertical pipe symbol with E-Grepp to match either
what is to the left of the symbol or to the right.
The similar thing can be accomplished by using a pattern list instead of a single pattern.
Anywhere that you would give a pattern to Grepp, E-Grepp, or F-Grepp, such as on the command
line or from a file, you can instead supply a list separated by new lines.
The utility will then match lines that match any of the patterns in the list.
So in my IP address example, I could feed a list of addresses to F-Grepp instead of just
one and get back all of the lines from the log file that matched any of the addresses
in the list.
You should note that to provide a pattern list on the command line, you will need to
enclose it in single or double quotation marks to prevent the shell from trying to execute
the command when you type a new line.
But what about the claim that F-Grepp is fast?
On many systems, including those with canoe utilities, there is just one single binary
that changes its behavior depending on whether it is called as Grepp, E-Grepp, or F-Grepp.
This is actually in line with the POSIX standard, which seeks to move away from E-Grepp
and F-Grepp in favor of a single Grepp command.
This Grepp command takes the Hiphon uppercase E option for using extended regular expressions
and the Hiphon uppercase F option for doing fixed string searches.
Back in 2010, when I first wrote this article, I tested Grepp against F-Grepp for speed.
I found that when specifying a single pattern on the command line with the GNU version,
F-Grepp wasn't really any faster than Grepp.
The main overhead that is saved with F-Grepp is the effort necessary to compile the regular
expression before the searching starts.
However, when I tried using the Hiphon lowercase F option to specify a file containing
a list of a couple dozen patterns, F-Grepp could consistently produce a 20% time savings.
One systems where Grepp and F-Grepp are different binaries, there can potentially be a
more dramatic difference in speed and even memory usage.
I hope you'll excuse me for going a little bit off topic, but I wanted to briefly touch
on pro-compatible regular expressions.
I already talked about the basic and extended regular expressions, and the differences that
are between them, pro-compatible regular expressions add some extra capabilities beyond
what extended regular expressions are able to do.
These are supported by several programming languages, not just Pearl, and the GNU version
of Grepp can also be told to use them.
However, they are not part of the POSIC standard, and other Grepp implementations typically
do not understand them.
So it is good idea to avoid them when writing a shell script intended to be portable.
When you're writing a script in Pearl, Python, or another language that supports them, before
using these pro-compatible regular expressions, it's advisable to investigate which versions
of the language support them, and whether support is built in or provided by an additional
library.
Then you can advise potential users what they need to have to run your script, or you
might instead decide to use a type of regular expression that has wider support.
Getting back to our hypothetical Austin novel, the neglected sister would probably be driven
to a bad end, to be only spoken of afterward in hushed whispers.
Don't let that happen.
Whenever you need to search for a string, but don't require the power of regular expressions,
get into the habit of calling on F-Grepp.
She can be very helpful and deserves more intention than she gets.
You'll save yourself the trouble of worrying about medic characters, and maybe some running
time as well.
Thanks for listening, and keep an eye out for our next Unix Curio, which will be about
the base name utility here on Hacker Public Radio.
If you have a question, or a suggestion for a future topic, please comment on this episode
on the HPR website.
You have been listening to the Hacker Public Radio podcast, at hackerpublicradio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording a podcast, then visit the HPR site to find out how easy it really is.
Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by anhonesthost.com, the Internet Archive, rsync.net, and the HPR Community Content Delivery Network.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
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Episode: 4598
Title: Recording good audio using open source tools
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4598/hpr4598.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:14:48 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4598, for 2026-03-18
Today's show is entitled, "Recording good audio using open source tools"
The host is Shane - StrandedOutput and the duration is 00:40:24
The flag is Explicit, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "This is my advice from several years of podcasting and tinkering with audio software."
Hello and welcome to another episode of HPR. My name is Shane. I have recorded an episode
before. I'll include a link to that in the show notes accompanying this episode. That was my
introductory episode. If you'd like to get to know a bit more about me. This episode is intended
to be a part of a series about being creative on Linux and open source software. But not
necessarily limited to those things. So this episode in particular is going to be about recording
good audio in the context of recording a podcast basically. So I'll cover several things. So I
will cover kind of the sort of philosophical angle of it, which I'm very fond of. I'll cover
the hardware that you need. I'll cover the technique of actually speaking into the microphone.
And I will then go briefly because it's a very dense topic. I will cover
editing the podcast. The software you used to record, et cetera, et cetera. Today I'm focusing purely
on creating good audio and creating good podcasts audio specifically. Now this doesn't
necessarily have to be just podcasts. This could be voiceover work. This could be narration for a
story that's then incorporated into a video. This could be an audio book, whatever. You know,
anything where the speaker speaks into a microphone needs to sound very present and very
authoritative and the tone of the voice catches your attention. That's kind of the that's the
point when it comes to this kind of thing. When you're talking about like I don't know if there's
a specific term for this, but I would say single speaker audio. That's how I would phrase it.
Before I get into specifics, what gives me the right to talk about all this? I have been on
a Linux podcast called Linux Lads for the last seven and a bit years. We have gone through the
trials and tribulations over the years of improving our audio piecemeal. And I think we've gotten
to a point where we sound quite professional. I myself have actually recorded a voiceover real
professionally in a studio and gotten some coaching on that. I have had some experience with
audio editing and sound engineering, not professional, but you know, self-taught. I do have
enough information to be dangerous, as they say. So I'll start with some tips for just speaking
into the microphone, which I am not following at all. The reason I'm not following those tips is because
I'm just on my own speaking into what microphone and I'm very used to having at least two or three
co-hosts. I'm also aware there's a dog barking in the background. There's probably
sirens in the background, but as many of you may know, we're having a bit of a heat wave in Western
Europe over the last few weeks. And it's just too warm to keep the window closed and air conditioning
is not a thing in this part of the world. So this advice that I'm not following myself right now
is breathing. So you need to sit upright, you need to have your chest cavity, be as big as possible,
so that you're not struggling to breathe as you talk. So I would recommend that before you start to speak
you're in a comfortable position, you're upright, you're not hunched over, you're not leaning
too far back, you're just in the middle in a very natural position. As I'm saying this, I'm starting to do
it. So you're in this position, your lungs can fill with air, they can empty air without much effort.
That makes your voice sound a bit more natural and that bit more professional because that's how
the professionals do it. Someone's on TV, they're standing up with a microphone, they're up,
bolt upright, they're breathing naturally, they're they're sounding pretty good. In a radio show,
you've probably seen video feeds of radio shows where they're sitting upright in their chair
or they're leaning slightly forward, talking into the mic and it just makes them sound obviously,
they have professional audio equipment and stuff as well to make them sound great and they have
years of experience. But that's where the breathing comes in, isn't it? Like they know how to
measure their words and they know how to breathe so that they can sound as good as possible.
So they don't sound like they're choking on their words like I'm a little bit myself right now.
There can be nerves that come into it. So you know your breathing can be a little bit shallow and
you're really, you know, you're a bit unsure of what you're saying. So you're kind of, you know,
you're not really taking in the breaths and letting them out in a nice calm manner.
Because I myself am not following that advice right now, I'm not going to spend too much time
speaking about that and I'm going to get to what I really know. As I said, I'm used to speaking
with other people on a podcast. So when I'm doing it solo, it's that bit more nerve-wracking.
I wanted to leave that in just to demonstrate the importance of that breathing. So let's talk
about the fun stuff hardware. A lot of HPR episodes would tend to be recorded by people who
don't have the same experience with audio recording and audio editing as other people who
maybe do that on a more regular basis, which is completely fine. I mean, once the content is good,
it doesn't really matter. If you do want that spit and polish on your recording and you do want
that extra little bit of professionalism, then there are some very easy steps and some very
cheap purchases you can make to make that happen. So first of all, don't record on a webcam
mic because it's just going to sound absolutely terrible. Don't record on a phone mic, unless you
have a particularly good phone. If you can get a USB microphone, make sure it's not the cheapest
one you can find off Amazon. I would not recommend anything by Blue Yeti. Personally, I just don't
think they sound very good for the money that they cost. I don't know how much they cost these days.
When I last checked, it was in and around a hundred euro, which I just don't think it's a
product that's worth a hundred euro. It doesn't have the audio quality. If you already have one,
okay, fine. What I will say though is the environment that you record in is incredibly important.
Probably more important than your microphone and I'll come back to microphones and recording
equipment in just a moment because I think it is also important. But the environment that you
record in is incredibly important. So if you're recording in your kitchen with tiles and hard wood
and bare walls, it's going sound echoey and tinny and rubbish. If you're recording in a bedroom with
lovely soft pillows and a big duvet and shelves and clothes and wardrobes, that's going to sound
better, obviously because it absorbs the sound and there's not as much echo. It's not going
to sound as hollow and echoey. Currently, I am in my office slash future child's room with
there's three bedrooms or three bedrooms. My god, there's three doors on a wardrobe here and I
have basically opened the doors and wedged blankets into the top. So I've just three blankets
draped over the top of these bed wardrobe doors and then I have the the baby's future caught,
which I haven't gotten around to assembling properly and I have my dressing gown and some pillows
draped over that. So that's created quite a nice sound environment and there's probably still a
bit of echo and there's probably some incidental sounds from outside because I had the window
a jar because it's a bit warm. But the point is is that you have to do the best with what you have,
you know and I'm sure if you have an apartment or a house you're going to have one very small room.
I'll share with you an anecdote from the early days of recording Linux Lads. So I was living
in a rental house with a housemate and my housemate was an artist and she had a spare room or a
boxroom as we'd say. Just full of just other shit, just wardrobe full of old clothes that she
used in art projects and boxes and boxes of them just random random rubbish. That was the best room
to record it. I had a blue snowball microphone which is a very bad microphone, don't buy it and
it was what I had at the time though so I used it. What I would do with that microphone as they place
it on a cardboard box, get another cardboard box with one of the sides cut out, place it on top,
place a towel on top of that to stop it from rustling too much and then honkered down
nearly on the floor and speak into the little hole in the box and that's the only way I could get
this to sound in any way good was by entoming it in cardboard and towels. So that's the lengths
you would go to and that was in a small room with a lot of clothes and boxes and soft material in it
and it still didn't sound very good. Your hardware does sort of matter even if your environment is
you know it's kind of a 50-50 as far as I'm concerned. Your environment matters about 50%
and then what you're recording through matters the other 50% and then of course there's editing
and etc etc but I don't think that has quite as much of an impact you know it's as they say like
you can only take things out in editing you can't put them in you can't make bad audio sound good
you can make good audio sound bad but you can't do it the other way around so to get to the good
stuff hardware what would I recommend my first I would say decent sounding audio setup was
the microphone I currently using actually know that's not true sorry my first good microphone was
an audio technique at 80 2020 the thing with that was was that it was a condenser microphone so
a condenser microphone is very very good for recording vocals from music in a very well-treated
audio environment in a studio so it's actually not the best mic to use for podcasting unless
you are literally in a phone booth with styrofoam all around you yes your voice will sound great
but also the dog barking 6 doors down will also sound great so a dynamic mic is the way to go
for most people because you're going to be in a domestic situation you're going to be
unless you live out in the woods then you're going to be in an apartment close to or in a city
or even in a house I'm in a house but I am quite close to a city there's a busy road nearby there's
there's a hospital or two nearby there's dogs and everything there's cats fighting so
you know I'm going to pick up ambulances and police cars and cats and dogs and people shouting
on the street coming home from the pub so you know you pick up all that stuff and so I'd recommend
a dynamic mic and a dynamic mic is what people use when they're on stage so that literally picks up
the zone just around it it's not quite as sensitive as a as a condenser mic so just to get
down to brass tax and give you actual recommendations here mine is a sure SM58 so that's a pretty
common microphone that's that's a bit of a standard you know so many people use that same microphone
I got a mic stand for about 20 quid in my local music shop it's it's if anyone's curious it's a
stag desktop mic stand so it's got a very heavy metal bass and then a little poll that juts up
and you can just slot the microphone into it and it's because the bass is like made of solid metal
and it's very heavy it doesn't move it doesn't rattle it's and create any additional noise and
then I have some acoustic tiles on the desk that I picked up years and years ago from a whole
sailor for almost nothing and they just sit on the desk and just absorb any additional reflections
that come off the bare walls in here the thing is though if you have like a stage microphone like
a dynamic mic phone or a condenser you need an audio interface because the connector for that is an
XLR which is a big beefy circular connector that doesn't fit into a computer so you'll need an
audio interface thankfully those are cheapest chips the one I'm using did cost me about a hundred
quid but I got it second hand and it's a bit more than I really need it's got four inputs and four
outputs so that means you can plug four instruments or microphones into it I do also
play guitar sometimes and I mess around with synthesizers and stuff so that's why I have this
but it's it's still more than I need really so the audio interface that I started out with was the
barringer u4ia um2 so that's u-4ia um2 so that is a single input audio interface the thing is
very very cheap I actually had it I got it for nothing actually because my partner is a singer
and she was given it as a gift by by a friend in the past but if you were to buy it
second hand or even new in some places it would cost you only about 20 or 30 quid it's a very
plasticy light piece of equipment it's got three knobs on it and a couple of buttons you can plug
your microphone your XLR microphone into it you can plug your headphones into it it does direct
monitoring so that you can push about and then you can hear what's going into your input so you
can just make sure that it sounds alright it's got a couple of knobs there so you can you can
adjust the gain so that's like how much amplification is on your input you can adjust the volume
on the headphones etc so lovely little piece of equipment and great for traveling you can plug it into
a laptop it's completely USB powered as well you don't have to plug it in separately so if I was
to recommend anyone just like right at the beginning starting out who just wants some decent audio
I would say I sure SM58 a barangir u4ia um2 and then the only extra fancy stuff that you need is
an XLR cable which can be picked up for a five or ten quid and obviously the USB cable for the
audio interface which is similar to what you would have for a printer it's that big square
square USB one I don't know what the name of that standard is but I'm sure you can find out
online I'll put it in the show notes if I if I if I find out now I will say the sure SM58
has gone up in price over the last few years when I bought it it was only about 60 euro
these days I don't know if it's just become quite popular because it's quite a capable microphone
for the price and maybe inflation and cost living has pushed up the price at a bit I don't really
know but it's now retailing for about a hundred quid I don't know why the price has gone up maybe
sure I actually thought oh wait this square to popular microphone let's jack up the price a bit
who knows but um yeah but honestly dynamic microphone don't spend less than 50 or 60
units of your own currency be that dollars pounds euro guineas you know boolean whatever I don't know
just get something that's not very cheap but not very expensive and I think you'll be all right
it's going to sound better than any USB microphone that you will buy now that said there are
good USB microphones out there but I don't think you're going to get one for cheap you know I think
if you buy that barrenger audio interface you buy the kind of mid range dynamic microphone
then I think you're just going to get better audio done with those USB microphones like a blue
yetty just for comparison here just just to illustrate what I'm talking about here so I'm looking
at a website here a blue yetty USB microphone is 145 euro now that's on the higher end I suppose but
you're looking at a hundred to a hundred and fifty quit for that one microphone which honestly
is not a good microphone it does not sound good it does have some features that might appeal to
people who don't really care about audio they just want to start streaming a game or they just
want to record some audio very quickly and they just want to know for solution with no extra
equipment or cables they can plug it with USB into their computer and they're they're away
yeah fine I get it but the audio is just very bad it's not good it doesn't sound good for the
price you can spend 20 or 30 quit less and get in my opinion better sound so I don't know
maybe it comes down to space convenience who knows but that's my two cents on the
issue I think if you get a cheap audio interface a cheap condenser no sorry no condenser a cheap
dynamic microphone then you are going to get superior audio quality done one of those USB stream
or microphones unless there is some product these days that is completely blowing everyone's minds
and I'm just not aware of it so as I talked about earlier you could record on your phone
you could record on your iPad you could record on your on like a little dictifone if you want to be
really old school if you do want to follow what I'm saying here and you want to record on a very basic
XLR mic setup you know with your sure SM58 and your barringer audio interface I just want to
stress though those are not the only options I'm just saying that those are those are very solid
options if you're looking for a low price point that will give you the best bang for your book
obviously if you spend more you'll get more unless it comes to USB microphones of course
but what I'm saying is that spend more on the microphone yeah there's better microphones
there's there's there's there's other sure models and there's 18 models like audio technique
and stuff that do offer you like really really buttery sound that really sound really nice
I would say though if you're in a very poor noise environment always go for dynamic mics
just avoid condenser mics some condenser mics can actually handle a poor noise environment
better than others but I would say if you're a podcaster you know if it's a single speaker
kind of in deal that you're trying to accomplish you know a podcast or narration or a voice over
I would say stick to a dynamic microphone especially if you're in a house with other people
or you have kids or you have pets or you have you know you live in a built up neighborhood
I would say just stick to dynamic microphone so when it goes to the software that you used to record
I'm I'm gonna focus on Linux honestly because I have not been a Windows user for
I want to say six or seven years I've been a Linux daily driver for for quite some time
so the only recommendations I can authoritatively give here are in an express
I would just say use audacity audacity might seem a bit intimidating for the average person
but it really isn't you look at the top you see pause play stop skip back skip forward record loop
those are the big square buttons on the top I think a monkey could figure that out you know
you hit record you record you hit play you play hit stop you stop you hit pause you pause
these are buttons that have been on every remote control for the past 40 years so
and longer probably so I think audacity is the way to go
one thing I would make sure to do is to click the audio setup button
if you're recording for a podcast it's a very good idea to record in mono
by default it will assume you're recording music and record in stereo
so that's two channels left and right
mono records on just the left channel so if you don't record in mono or sorry if you record
mono into a stereo track and then you listen back to it you will only hear it in your left ear
because it's only on the left channel that's just one little thing to be aware of it's
a simple enough matter to just go to tracks mix and then mix stereo down to mono
but not everyone will be aware of that and those are menu options you know audacity just
to be clear so you go tracks mix stereo down to mono and that will take your two stereo tracks
and mush them into one so all that does is basically take the left ear of the stereo track
and put it on both the left on the right it makes no difference whether you record in mono
or you record in stereo on the left channel and then mix it down to mono it really doesn't matter
some very seasoned audio engineers might have a different opinion I don't know but yeah it doesn't
but I would say just for your own kind of convenience just record in mono so you know you'll
see it in audacity when you're recording you'll have two lines moving across the screen
and you'll only see one of them produce a waveform produced of the bumpy bumps and the one
below it will produce nothing and that's an easy way to tell if you're recording in mono you'll only see
one line and that will have the bumpy bumps on it so I'm trying to make this as
simplest possible for people so that there isn't any confusion here editing your audio is another
thing entirely to share a bit of my journey on Linux lives on the podcast I started out editing
podcasts in audacity audacity has changed quite a bit over the years when I originally started
using it it didn't have non-destructive editing so non-destructive means that when you delete or
change a part of the audio in the track that you've recorded it it doesn't completely delete it let's
say for instance there was a cough or a fumble in the audio or someone said something and then
ten seconds later said oh no I want to do that again something like that with destructive
audio editing which which was audacity at the time you would have to go back you would have to control
Z you would have to undo every single action and you would have to go back and say you made a mistake
in the editing you have to keep control Z control Z control Z keep on doing everything you did
for the past five minutes until you got to a point where that little piece of audio reappeared
and wasn't deleted anymore with non-destructive audio editing you can trim clips you can
like basically drag them from the edge and you know shorten them or lengthen them or you know split
them into new tracks but then when you split them into new tracks you can shorten them or lengthen
them again and all the audio on either side of that little clip that you have produced will still
be there it's all still there so you have a lot more flexibility in terms of editing so my work flow
when I first started Benix Lads when I was the editor I'm not the editor anymore we have another editor
who is not a host thank god what I would do was in my little workflow in audacity was to import
everyone's audio track into audacity run the noise removal tool so it would take 10 seconds
at the start of the episode to just basically say nothing I would take that 10 seconds of silence
run it through their little noise removal algorithm which is actually incredibly good I'll get to
this later but other audio programs don't seem to have as good a noise removal algorithm and I don't
understand why and just remove the background kind of falls in the room you know the room tone
as they call it and that would just give your audio just a little bit of a level up so if you just
capture 10 seconds of just the background noise of the room obviously if a dog barks or an ambulance
goes by it completely ruins it because it's going to identify that frequency and it's going to
cut that frequency out from everything else in the recording so you have to be selective about
period of audio that you select for your noise removal because it's going to sample that audio and
think right this is the background noise this is what we don't want and then if I apply this to
the rest of the track it's just going to remove all of those frequencies it's happened on several
occasions where there was something left in that little sample for the noise removal algorithm
and then it removed that frequency from a person's audio for the rest of the recording and it sounded
really weird I used to do the entire podcast in audacity but then what I started doing later on was
because the editing experience in audacity was not great since then it has introduced
just non-destructive editing so that means you can resize and you know adjust the length of clips
split them up transfer them to different tracks increase or decrease the length without
deleting anything so as I got used to audacity I started to notice pain points and friction
so I moved on to ardor so I will say that even though I moved on to ardor audacity's noise
removal tool was still fantastic and I would even to this day I would still use it because I
have not found an equivalent in other applications and I know other podcasters who still
swear by it they say the noise removal tool and audacity is fantastic and they just cannot
father musing anything else it's one of a kind the ease of use with ardor though is in the editing
it has it has always had non-destructive editing right from the beginning and even having used
more recent versions of audacity that do have non-destructive editing now I would say that ardor
ardor's workflow is still far superior they've made not to throw shade audacity they've made
great strides there but ardor's editing workflow is just miles ahead still it's just a different
animal in terms of audio editing software audacity's definitely aimed at a more
beginner kind of market and ardor is definitely aimed more of a professional market you know
them audacity's like a sound recorder with some additional features and it's thoroughly meant to be
more of an entry level to mid level kind of tool whereas ardor is targeting more of a professional
audience so they're both very good for what they are so it's good to use them in tandem you know
let like I used to we we we now have an editor for the next lads and I don't do the editing
myself anymore which is good because I personally don't enjoy audio editing but yeah audacity
is great for the initial treatment and you know trimming kind of the silence at the start the
silence at the end just getting all your tracks ready for editing and removing the noise
doing the initial treatment and then exporting them as kind of a lossless format like flag or
something and then plugging them into ardor for like chopping them up and you know putting fades
on the end of things and the beginning of things and making everything sound good so
while you're editing in ardor the whole point is to cut out all the fath and the fumbles and
the things that people didn't mean to say and like let me repeat that and that and that
cutting all that like awkward stuff out entirely depends on your style but if you
want to leave some of that in just for humanity and character that's also fine but
if you leave too much of that stuff in it's going to sound a bit
on professional and rubbish if it sounds like something you know your
cousin or your brother might have recorded on their laptop then it's not something that people are
going to want to listen to again and again so if you're trying to produce like in our case
we're trying to produce a podcast that people want to listen to every two weeks you do want
a certain level of quality now there are other podcasts out there that do have that level of
quality and I think they they slightly exceed our level of quality they do take take that care and
attention to making audio that sounds quite good but on the next slides we kind of embrace more
of a ad hoc nature if you will so personally we're happy to leave in some of the imperfections
that said the audio needs to be listenable it cannot sound harsh or irritating to your ears
it cannot sound grainy or staticky or harsh or annoying or any of those things like it needs
you need to be able to listen to it for half an hour when I was publishing YouTube videos the advice
I always heard was people will put up with bad video but they will not put up with bad audio
and that's very true how many YouTube videos have you clicked on the video quality was terrible
put the audio quality was very good and you keep watching it I think that's what happens with
audio and video so with video you see an image and the image makes sense with less information
that's my theory anyway I think you need a lot more you need a lot more audio information to kind of
understand a scene then you do visual information all the things I've said don't necessarily mean
you have to live up to a certain standard nobody's expecting you to do that if you just want to
record something that you are passionate about and that you want to speak about don't worry about
audio quality just do it don't be too concerned with what people think of you or how professional
your audio sounds or any of the things I've just said I would thoroughly encourage anyone to just
record a HPore episode and just upload it and learn by experience and if you listen to it
and you want to improve your audio quality and you want to improve your sounds then by all means
use the advice I've given in this episode but what I would say is that don't aspire to a standard
that someone else has said the advice I'm giving here simply just if you do want to reach a certain
level and you want to sound a certain way then by all means follow my advice but if you're happy to
talk about a novel you love if you're happy to talk about your hobby or something on the internet
that interests you and you don't honestly care about how it sounds you just want to convey
what you enjoy then by all means go ahead so I'll finish on some very easy easy tips that you
can use so say you're using a webcam mic using a built-in mic on your laptop you're just using
something that you have and you're really not bothered buying new equipment or you're really not bothered
delving deep into audio editing or anything like that so what I would say is be in a small room
with some soft things around so be in a small room some cushions a bed things like that
and then record on your laptop you can maybe boost the effect a little bit by wearing a hoodie
you know I've often recorded with a hoodie on and the hoodie upper on my head that acts as a sort of
audio booth effect almost it it's surprisingly effective if you really want to go the whole
hog I would say get a blanket and put it over your head on the microphone that's actually quite an
effective way to get your audio sound quite good the only danger there it though is that as the
microphone or as the blanket moves around it will rustle like that against the microphone
and against the microphone stand and against the laptop or against your clothes and it will sound
really bad so I don't know come up with your own solution there and just those are just some
easy suggestions you know just put some soft material around you to absorb the sound as much as possible
you would be quite surprised how good you can get a bad microphone sound in the right environment
contrary to what I said earlier in this episode yeah if it depends on the level of quality
that you're going for you can get it to it it's kind of a difference between getting its
sounding quote unquote professional and sounding not irritating to your listeners is the point I'm
so you can have poor quality audio but the sound that you're producing won't be abrasive in
anyway so I will come back with another episode on on this if you do have any suggestions or questions
please reach out to me on info at strandedoutput.com that's STR, A&D, E-D, O-U-T, P-U-T.com
you can also get my website on strandedoutput.com you can reach out to me on mastered on my handle there
is also stranded output I'm I'm happy to receive feedback I'm happy to receive messages feedback
criticisms insults whatever you have if you insult me I will hone you down and kill you though
just so you know other than that I will see you in the next one and thank you very much for listening
You have been listening to the Hacker Public Radio podcast, at hackerpublicradio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording a podcast, then visit the HPR site to find out how easy it really is.
Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by anhonesthost.com, the Internet Archive, rsync.net, and the HPR Community Content Delivery Network.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
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Episode: 4599
Title: Women in digital and games event
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4599/hpr4599.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:14:50 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4599, for 2026-03-19
Today's show is entitled, "Women in digital and games event"
The host is Dave Hingley and the duration is 00:03:48
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "Raising awareness of a forthcoming event to encourage more women into digital and games"
Hello and welcome to a new episode of Hacker Public Radio.
I'm still in the middle of a field with a dog recording this on my phone.
So if it's here lots of wind noises and pops and apologies but there we go.
It's the first of March and yesterday.
It's the first of March and yesterday my original plan was to go to a Cambridge Raspberry Jam.
But they saw that at tickets.
So we did our next best thing which was we decided we went to the Centre for Public Computing.
Also in Cambridge.
Great day.
Super fun time.
It was great seeing all computers I had as a kid.
Playing the games that I used to play.
And trying to work out why I could not get to the past level one of the neighborhoods.
I used to do that every time.
That was a kid.
I tried to code on a BBC micro.
And realizing that the keyboard layer is changed.
It's shift keys in the wrong place.
It's one figure that's what was there.
It was a lot of problems in the space about prominent women in computing.
And I think that was great.
It's great to read and learn about these pioneers.
Historically computing has some figure of an image problem.
It is seen by many as a boy's club.
And I really want people to challenge that notion.
There is nothing in parenting computing that sort of says this is just for girls or this is just for boys.
It's just a thing and you can get into it or not.
It's with that in mind that I'm going to plug and the event that's happening.
He will run here in various events.
27th of March 6 p.m.
That's the west of a college.
They've got an event called Women in Digital and Games.
So get ready to connect, learn and be inspired at this awesome in person event.
Celebrating amazing women in the digital and games industries.
Wherever you're a student, professional, just curious.
Come hang out, hear stories and boost your network.
Don't miss that on an empowering evening field of energy and inspiration.
And I'm going to say this sounds like it could be a very interesting event.
If you're young woman interested in getting into computing is unsure.
Then does literally no barrier to this.
The ticket is free, just turn up hear the stories.
Hear what people's experiences are like working in computing and in games and in technology.
I'm sure you're going to find it inspiring.
And this could be the stepping stone.
The thing that sets you up on your incredible careers.
As I mentioned, tick to free.
It's something to be able to come last for about two hours.
It takes a free links on the event, right links on the show notes.
And I hope if you do to attend that you have an inspiring evening.
And if you do so, maybe record an episode of faculty probably read you all about it.
In the meantime, take care.
Join some of our brand new episodes of faculty probably read you.
It's going to be about something completely different.
But what I do not know is not the thrill.
Anyway, take care. Bye now.
You have been listening to the Hacker Public Radio podcast, at hackerpublicradio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording a podcast, then visit the HPR site to find out how easy it really is.
Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by anhonesthost.com, the Internet Archive, rsync.net, and the HPR Community Content Delivery Network.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
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Episode: 4600
Title: The First Doctor, Part 5
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4600/hpr4600.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:14:52 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4600, for 2026-03-20
Today's show is entitled, "The First Doctor, Part 5"
The host is Ahuka and the duration is 00:15:26
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "A continuing look at the first Doctor Who."
Hello, this is Ahuka, welcoming you to Hacker Public Radio, and another exciting episode in our series on science fiction and fantasy.
And we're going to wrap up the first Doctor Who, William Hartnell, in today's episode.
We've been following him from the very first episode of Doctor Who, An Unearthly Child.
And he was in the role for just over three years.
So, we've got a lot of stories to talk about, and the first one we're going to talk about today is called The Celestial Toymaker.
It's a wonderful story, and the Toymaker is another foe many Doctor Who fans wanted to see return.
And in 2023, it happened.
And in the story, The Giggle, he returned, played this time by Neil Patrick Harris, and it is a very good story.
But in this introduction of the character, he is played by Michael Goff in a Fu Manchu-like costume.
And he has great powers, but is bound by certain rules, which makes this interesting.
When the TARDIS lands in his world, he sets them games they have to survive to escape.
They're games based on children's games you might be familiar with, but they have a twist.
The Doctor is told he must solve the Trilogic puzzle in exactly 1,023 moves.
And Stephen and Dodo must win their games before the Doctor wins his.
This story is pure entertainment, but very well done.
However, Hartnell's decline continued.
In this story, there are scenes of the Trilogic puzzle where a hand moves a piece,
but it's not Hartnell's hand, it's another actor.
And Hartnell does not appear at all in Episodes 2 and 3.
Producer John Wiles had a plan to replace Hartnell,
whose contract was up at the end of the season,
but he was overruled by BBC head of cereals, Gerald Savory,
who extended Hartnell's contract, leading to John Wiles quitting the production.
Hartnell would continue for now, but something would have to happen eventually.
Next is the gunfighters.
Now, depending on your point of view with this one,
it's a historical story.
It is either embarrassingly bad or delightfully camp.
All a matter of perspective.
It takes the TARDIS to Tombstone, Arizona,
at the time of the famous gunfight at the O.K. Corral.
Now, I've been to Tombstone, Arizona,
and it is extremely camp or embarrassingly bad.
I've seen that they do a reenactment of the gunfight of the O.K. Corral there every day.
Now,
Stephen Taylor is mostly silly,
trying to act out childish fantasies of cowboys.
The setup comes from the end of the previous story,
when the doctor bites into a candy and yells in pain.
He needs to see a dentist.
And Doc Holliday, aside from being a gunfighter,
is a dentist.
Mistaken identities happen all over.
Now, this is light fluff.
It's enjoyable if you give in to the silliness.
So, I wouldn't say don't watch it.
I'd just say go in knowing that you're going to see something very silly and very camp.
Then the next story is called The Savages.
This is another story about who are the bad guys, really.
In that respect, it's similar to Galaxy 4.
Now, in this case,
Dodo and Stephen are captured by what appear to be Stone Age savages.
The doctor, meanwhile,
is taken to the City of the Elders
and is greeted warmly.
It seems they have been following his travels for some time
and are great admirers of him.
Now, Stephen and Dodo are rescued by soldiers from the city
and reunited with the doctor.
Then Dodo slips away and stumbles on experiments being conducted on human beings.
So, the Elders turn out to be the real savages here.
They're experimenting on what we thought were savages,
who are just unfortunate people that they are exploiting.
And they're basically trying to take their life energy for themselves.
The lab is destroyed in this,
and the two groups decide to live together in peace.
But they realize they need a leader who is from neither group
and choose Stephen to be their leader.
So, another companion goes.
Only Dodo is left.
Then, the war machines.
This is kind of an AI gone bad story.
At this time in history,
we're certainly primed to see AI gone bad.
In this case, a professor has built a computer
to help manage the communications in the new post office tower,
which, in fact, was a new building in London.
But the computer turns out to be more than anyone realized.
The doctor gets it right away
when the computer correctly gives the meaning of TARDIS.
Then it turns out the computer can hypnotize people
and make them its slaves.
It does this to several of the professors involved
and has them build the war machines
that will enable it to take over the world.
Dodo is hypnotized and tries to trap the doctor.
But he figures it out and restores her.
Then she is sent away to recuperate.
We won't ever see her again.
Meanwhile, the secretary to one of the professors
by the name of Polly
and a young sailor named Ben
join up with the doctor
and they defeat the computer.
At the end, they realize they have Dodo's TARDIS key
and enter just before it takes off.
So now we have two new companions.
Now, this is a fun episode.
The props are the usual for this time at Doctor Who.
They're pretty cheap and they look it.
The writing is good.
The story has enough twists and turns
to carry you right along.
Hartnell was really good in this story
despite the problems he was having.
The next is the smugglers.
Now, this is another historical story.
But instead of being based on any particular incident,
it tells of a general occurrence in English history.
The English government chose to support itself
primarily through customs duties on imports,
which of course created an incentive
to avoid those duties by smuggling.
And that definitely happened a lot
in the Cornwall area of England.
It was also one of the issues
that started the American Revolution,
but that's not the story
we're going to be telling here.
Now, the TARDIS crew
encounters a former pirate
now turned church warden
who tells them a secret
before being killed by another pirate.
Ben and Polly capture a man
who they think is the murderer,
but he is in fact
an undercover revenue agent
and in the end helps defeat the pirates.
It is a good story
and the most memorable character
has to be Cherub,
the pirate who murdered the church warden
and kills other people
and is very sinister.
So this is a story
where all the episodes have been lost.
So I got it through reconstructions.
So you may or may not
want to subject yourself to that,
but I'm a completist.
What can I say?
And finally, we come to
the 10th planet
and that is Hartnell's final story
and it takes the TARDIS to Antarctica
where the travelers are taken
to the snow-capped base
of the International Space Command.
They are managing the return
of the manned space mission
Zeus 4
and everything goes wrong
when a new planet appears
dooming the mission.
Then we meet
the second most memorable enemies
of the Doctor,
the Cybermen.
They explain that they are
from the planet Mondas,
which is Earth's twin,
hence the 10th planet,
and they need the energy
from the Earth
to keep their planet going.
The general running the base
is of course pig-headed
and does everything possible
to make things worse
than they have to be.
This adventure turns out
to be too much for the Doctor,
who explains that his old body
is just wearing out
and when they get back
to the TARDIS,
he collapses
and starts to change.
In the end,
he is replaced by Patrick Troughton.
Now, Hartnell was becoming
increasingly difficult
to work with
as far back as the Time Meddler,
where you could really see him
losing his lines.
And there are lots of stories
about him hiding notes
to remind himself
about what he was supposed to say.
But the BBC
didn't want the show to end,
so they did something unprecedented
and replaced the lead actor
in a popular series.
To explain it away,
they invented regeneration,
something the Doctor's race could do.
We now call them
the Time Lords of Gallifrey,
but that part did not appear
until the end of Troughton's run
as the Doctor.
For now,
the Doctor was just a member
of an unspecified alien race,
and the only other member
we had met
was the meddling monk.
At least,
we assume he is of the same race
since he has a TARDIS.
So,
that completes
the first Doctor.
So,
you know,
brief overview of the era.
Whatever else you might say
about Hartnell,
he created a franchise
that has lasted
for over 60 years
as I record this show.
After a slow start,
he really developed the character
and became identified with it.
In the beginning,
he was a very stubborn
and unlikable old man,
but as the series progressed,
he mellowed
and his humor
started to come through
even more.
Now,
Hartnell himself
returned to the role
one more time
in the third Doctor story,
The Three Doctors,
1973,
which was the first time
Doctor Who
had a story featuring
multiple incarnations
of the character.
In this case,
the first Doctor,
William Hartnell,
the second Doctor,
Patrick Troughton,
and the third Doctor,
John Pertwee.
But due to his declining health,
he had a limited role
in this particular story,
appearing only on a TV screen,
and he passed away in 1975.
Now,
he was portrayed
by Richard Herndall
in another multiple Doctor story
called The Five Doctors
in 1983,
which was broadcast
for the 20th anniversary
of the program
during Peter Davison's run
as the fifth Doctor.
In recent times,
David Bradley
has portrayed
the first Doctor,
first in a docudrama
called
An Adventure in Space and Time,
2013,
which was produced
in honor of
the 50th anniversary
of the program.
This show tells
the story of
the first Doctor
and how the program
came together
in a dramatic form,
and I recommend it highly.
Bradley would reprise
the role
in 2017
in The Doctor Falls
and Twice Upon a Time,
where he played
opposite Peter Capaldi's
12th Doctor.
And then again
in The Power of the Doctor
in 2022,
where he appears
alongside
other previous Doctors.
It is perhaps notable
that the first three Doctors,
William Hartnell,
Patrick Troughton,
and John Pertwee,
have all passed away,
but only Hartnell's
first Doctor
has been revived
so often.
I think that tells you
something about
his importance
in the history
of Doctor Who.
So we've finished,
now,
took five episodes
to go through
everything that
William Hartnell did.
Now,
in those days,
they,
it was almost
a year-round
television program.
You know,
I think there was,
you know,
like 48,
they had a 48-week season.
And so they had to record
a whole lot of episodes
and do a whole lot of stories
in order to fill
all of that.
you know,
by the time we get
to Tom Baker,
they're now down
to 26 episodes.
It's one half
of a year.
You know,
now in
the 21st century,
they started off
doing 13 episodes
as a season.
and then
the last couple
of ones
it was like
eight.
So,
you know,
they're not
putting out
as much content
as they used to.
And as far as
what I'm going to do
with this
is
I will
come back
with
Patrick Troughton.
We'll start talking
about some of
his shows
and maybe
work my way
through
all of the
classic.
I don't see
the point
in
doing
the
stories
that started
in 2005
with Christopher
Eccleston
because I think
pretty much
everyone who has
any interest
in Doctor Who
already knows
about that stuff.
So,
you don't need
me to talk
about it.
But that still
gives me a whole
lot of stuff
to talk about.
So,
there will be
more
Doctor Who
related episodes
of my
Science Fiction
and Fantasy
series.
So,
this is Ahuka
for Hacker
Public Radio
signing off
and as always
encouraging you
to support
free software.
Bye-bye!
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording podcast, click on our upload link
to find out how easy it is.
Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by an AnHonestHost.com, the Internet Archive,
rsync.net, and our mirror network.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
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Episode: 4601
Title: How to be a better writer
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4601/hpr4601.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:14:54 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4601, for 2026-03-23
Today's show is entitled, "How to be a better writer"
The host is enistello and the duration is 00:09:59
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "By taking apart large language models' writing style, we can learn to be better writers."
Hello there, welcome to Hacker Public Radio. I'm Ann Estelo. If you've ever thought
now you dreamt about creating your own podcast and getting it published, head over to
the Hacker Public Radio website. There are instructions there. It's really easy to get
you started. I'd urge you to do it. So this episode is about improving your writing.
And the way that we're going to be doing this today is by examining the writing style
of large language models, LLMs, which we laughingly call AI. Now, most people can spot
text that's written by a large language model. It's that kind of feeling of soullessness
and impersonal tone, use of the M-capitalized headings. Things like that. But I thought it
might be interesting to examine some text produced by an AI and then maybe try and do something
different. So the first thing to keep an eye out in for is that LLMs are good at spelling
and grammar. And so to be a good writer makes a mistakes. Don't be afraid of making
mistakes. Don't be afraid of misspelling words. Your spell check will probably pick those
up anyway. But don't be afraid of making grammatical errors. Sure, there's probably a grammar
Nazi out there, who might me, who may well pick you up on those and laugh at you behind
your back. But in all seriousness, I spend eight, twelve hours a day reading the internet.
And I would much rather read a few human mistakes than the type of craft that a large
language model will produce. Second thing, verbosity. Large language models are verbose.
They overdo it and they subscribe to the edict that the more words they use, the better.
So as a writer, try and use one word instead of two or three or more. Here's an example
of a kind of thing that I mean. It's an exit from a blog post on the Open AI website,
Open AI, of course, being the company that produce chat GPT. I think it's important to give
Open AI some credibility. And if you like oxygen of publicity, because give it 12 months
or so, and the poor souls will all be out of business. Okay, here's something that chat GPT wrote.
Rapid Consumer Adoption of AI has created a powerful flywheel. Come on, accelerating the
pace at which the technology is being brought into work and professional settings. Close
quote. Okay, let's pair this down and turn it into consumer use of AI has brought it into
the workplace. It's shorter, it's tighter, it means the same thing. Here's another sentence
from chat GPT. Open quote, the history of general purpose technologies, M- dash, from
steam engines to semiconductors, M- dash, shows that significant economic value is created
after firms translate underlying capabilities into scaled use cases. Close quote. Okay, so
let's cut this one down. Technology, comma from steam engines to semiconductors, comma amplifies
firms abilities to create value. Again, shorter means the same thing, not written by an AI.
So, the lesson if you like is, after you've written something, be your own judge. Go through
every word with a red pen or traditionally it'll be a green pen, an experiment with word
removal. Take out a word. Does the meaning remain? You may feel you've lost nuance, but does that
really matter? Perhaps it does. If you're writing creatively or writing poetry, for instance,
it certainly would matter. But is the nuance important in every sentence? Pairing down what
you write incredibly effective. Initially, it's a bit of a pain and it can be more than a bit
soul destroying. Essentially, you'll be coming your own editor and writers on the whole,
hey, editors, but 99% of the time the editor has a point. Eventually, dear listener, the process of
self editing, this process of cutting out your own velocity becomes second nature. And one day,
I guess, I hope you'll realize that what you're writing is sharper and it's more to the point.
When you do wax lyrical, when you do throw in adjectives and adverbs and descriptions and so on
and so forth, you'll feel it's necessary and it's notable and it's notable to your readers and your
readers will thank you. Now, AIC is terrible at this aspect of writing, it adds useless words all
the time, sentences that get there, point over and just a few words typically, chat GPT spins out to
be dozens of words long and the grown-up phrase for this is taughtology, but you can think of it
if you like as laboring the point. Say it once, say it simply. This brings me to a little adjunct
which I guess I could call rule 2A, which is all about syllables. Stop using as many syllables,
sounds really stupid. The tendency comes from new words springing up all the time and they're often
pointless extensions of existing shorter words. Usage is a really common one. Usage is now used
instead of the word use. Here's an example. I made this one up by the way. My usage of the train was
my choice. Sounds okay, but better surely would be my use of the train was my choice or even
I chose to use the train but yeah. Orientate is another one used instead of Orient capability
is now used commonly instead of ability. Why the extra syllable? Don't get me started on
methodology. A methodology by the way listeners is a set of methods not a method. So when was the
last time anyone explained their method or methods? They don't anymore, they explain their methodology,
everyone describes their methodology. Okay, so we may be going a little bit far in stripping out
extraneous syllables but the point remains. There are a few ticks or giveaways that a piece of
text is created by an LLM and so therefore you might want to adapt your own writing so that you don't
exhibit the same ticks or you might like them. I don't know. First one, the rule of three. You see
this all the time and it's become a habit I think now exhibited by human writers. The rule of
three goes like this. Such and such a thing is or it's like x, y, and z. I'm going to quote from the
wikipedia article, link in the show notes, quote reads, the rule of three can take different forms
from adjective, adjective, adjective to short phrase, short phrase and short phrase. LLMs often
use this structure to make superficial analyses appear more comprehensive. It's a superficial analysis
made less superficial by chucking words at it. So this refers back to rule two, pairing it down.
Next tick that you might want to avoid, be aware of comparisons, not only but also, or not just
something, but something. It's not just about something something, something, something,
semi-colon or M-dash. It's something different. A variation on that is it's not only about something,
something, but something else, something else. Wikipedia calls these parallelisms
that explicitly state that a particular item doesn't possess the first characteristic at all.
It's not only about this, but it's about something else. So in summary, how to be a better writer.
First of all, be human, make some spelling mistakes, make some grammatical mistakes. For a reader,
it's good to know that there's a human behind the keyboard, not a piece of silicon in the form of
a large language model. Rule number two, be your own editor, go back through what you've written,
and if you're using tallologies, repetitions, and you're being too verbose, take words out.
Does the sentence have the same meaning? If it does, great. You don't need three words. You
need one. Rule number three, if you sound like an AI, people will think that you are an AI,
and will be less inclined to read you. So you can try and avoid some of those ticks. Like,
the rule of three, for instance, the not only but also not just something, but something.
In conclusion, then there are two calls to action. First of all, go and read the Wikipedia article.
If you're that way inclined, there's obviously a great deal more detail in that than I've
latched on to and spoken about today. It's a good read. For instance, there are lots of
mentions of words and phrases that large language models use now and have used since
2022 and how those words have changed and the second call to action, of course, is
going to record your own episode of Hack a Public Radio. That's all. Thanks for listening.
I'm Emma Stello and this has been Hack a Public Radio.
You have been listening to the Hacker Public Radio podcast, at hackerpublicradio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording a podcast, then visit the HPR site to find out how easy it really is.
Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by anhonesthost.com, the Internet Archive, rsync.net, and the HPR Community Content Delivery Network.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
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Episode: 4603
Title: On the Erosion of Freedom in Open Source Software
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4603/hpr4603.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:14:57 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4603, for 2026-03-25
Today's show is entitled, "On the Erosion of Freedom in Open Source Software"
The host is HopperMCS and the duration is 00:17:31
The flag is Explicit, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "I discuss recent events and an unfortunate discovery while attempting to compile software."
Good morning HPR. It's sure been a minute since I recorded anything for you guys.
But I have some things I kind of want to talk about today. I'm a little bit calmer.
It's a really good day today. Data recording is March 11th.
I just got done signing an operating agreement with a new business partner.
My consultancy firm was just recognized as an LLC by the state.
It's a good day, man. It's a really, really good day.
But today I really kind of want to talk about the erosion of sorry about the filler words.
That's the other thing. I'm not editing this. I probably should edit it, but you know,
I only have so much time in the day.
And I'm also sorry about the might quality. I don't have the greatest mic.
My setup is kind of on the threats right now.
But the main thing I want to talk about today is the erosion of freedom and the open source software community.
Because I, it's kind of upsetting. You know, this may be a sort of shorter episode.
But I just find it very, very disturbing that we have multiple governments in the Western block.
And it doesn't really matter which side of the aisle you're on because they're all doing it.
They want to implement tracking at the operating system level that is just not okay, you know?
And so one of the things I look at here is the fourth amendment.
And I just cannot get past these people violating the fourth amendment the way they are.
And I'm sure you could probably make arguments that, you know, they're violating the first amendment by forcing you to write code that you didn't really want to write.
You can argue that there, I think I saw somebody say that it violates nine and ten, but I don't know how that works.
But it's just, it's not a good situation. And so I'm looking at debuffs, right, because that's how they want to do it.
And I'm looking at specifically California and Colorado because California and Colorado only require attestation, which is fine at face value.
But you look deeper into it and it's the ulterior motives, right?
I don't trust anybody saying, hey, we need everybody's ID and one giant database effectively.
And we want to separate everyone into two pools, kids and adults.
That's kind of my, my big brain, you know, I have a problem with this because right now, as it stands, I'm just going to be honest.
And I know this is, I'm going to mark this episode as an NSFW because it's, it is a touchy topic, but I really do think that there is a bunch of pedophiles with some money involved that are in government.
And it's the US, but it's probably not just the US, let's be real.
That want to, as far as I'm concerned, right, putting these two pools of IDs, you know, state IDs or whatever they start requiring, you know, New York requires apparently a driver's license or something like that, absolutely insane.
I really hope this shit gets shot down.
How much more easy do they need to make it to target kids, you know, it's like these, these laws, you can all, you can tell where they're going.
But it's, what's, what's that phrase, a wolf and sheep's clothing, right?
They're going to tell you, oh, it's for the safety of the kids, for the safety of the kids, we saw the abstine island stuff, right?
And again, that's why I'm marking this as NSFW, the amount of hatred that I feel for these people is absolutely unreal.
And I say this, knowing, I have a very calm tone, right?
But I am seeding right now.
It's bad, man.
It's bad.
And what agitate to me is the fact that this is tough, it is now affecting me because, you know, I grew up with Windows XP, right?
If, if that gives you a sort of, uh, I guess time frame, you know, of when I came up, right?
Windows XP was new.
It was probably only a couple years old when we got our family computer, very unfortunately, my, at the very computer that led to me getting into technology,
was initially specked out and mostly built by my uncle, who was being paid by my dad to build it, and then something happened with the original mobile.
It was a really, really old early 2000s MSI board from what I remember.
They, uh, sorry guys, I, I have untreated sleep apnea and my brain is just not working.
He got this case that had like dog ears on it. It was really cool.
And fully specked it up at the mobile fried.
And so he needed an extra 200, I think, from my father, who then joined his dad and they both really, really laid into my uncle.
And unfortunately, my uncle took his life.
So it's kind of, kind of like the closing time by semi sonic, you know, it's that, that one line that goes every new beginning comes from some other beginnings and, you know, that kind of kind of describes how I ended up in the software field to begin with.
And so I started young man, I was like six, you know, I was in kindergarten and that was the first time that I was able to really, really start learning how computers work.
And I'm not going to lie to you, it really pissed my parents off, you know, they really hated the fact that I would go in there.
They still, to this day, both of them are technologically illiterate.
And so they act like, you know, the word configuring is like a bad word, you know, like, oh, I don't want to configure this. I'm like, well, you're either going to configure it or it's going to remain broken and just not work, you know, take your pick.
But I digress. So I got in really, really young, really young. And that's why I want to talk today about this law and I want to talk today about another project that I was kind of kind of working around with.
Really, I'm disturbed by the way that things are going right now and I don't think it looks good and I don't think I really think that, you know, I'm looking at system 76 and I just can't respect them the way that I used to.
I get that you have to make money and I get that you have people working for you, but at some point there, there comes a hill that you need to be willing to kill on and that's this one.
There's there is no, oh, yeah, let's just let the court's handle it. No, this is a blatant violation of your rights. Everyone's rights.
Privacy is a human right. That is a hill that everybody who values freedom should be willing to kill on.
And I look at system 76 and they're just schmoozing it up with some of these guys in Colorado.
And these guys are giving them the, yeah, yeah, it's a fight. Just go away. Go away. We don't want you touching our privacy invasion laws. Go away.
Yeah, yeah, we'll do what you say, but go away and, you know, not really. So, you know, and that's just my opinion, the opinions are like assholes, you know, everybody has them, but I just, I'm, I'm irritated.
I'm irritated and I'm sure the lot of people listening to this have probably come to similar conclusions.
I don't know that anything I'm saying here is new, but I got to get it out there, man.
The second thing is that I ran into an interesting case of embrace extent extinguish and happened a few years ago under my nose and I didn't realize it was happening.
Now, something I've noticed about the false community is that half of them are okay with properly licensed code in C sharp and the other half are like, oh, that's cancer, you know.
I'm just going to say if I have to choose an object oriented managed language, right, I don't care for Ruby or Python and I don't care for Java. I've worked with C sharp.
I've worked with the above mentioned and just personally, I prefer C sharp, you know, that's just that's just how I am.
I get the Microsoft, sorry, Microsoft is F and terrible, man. It's, it's bad.
You know, I question how long.net core is going to go before they start just putting un, what's the word I'm looking for here.
Unvetted AI swap code into it. That's, that's my main concern, you know, and at that point I would just stick to older versions and not worry about newer language revisions, but I used to use mono develop in high school and it was a big part of we had there was a guy named Mark Suter and I don't know if he's still there. I hope he's doing well, you know, great guy.
He, he was probably one of the most interesting teachers I've ever met and one of the few teachers I had in public school that I actually respected.
But I will say that he ran a programming and video game development class, you know, he would teach you the basics of programming and then he would then
chuck you into something like unity or unreal, which is, you know, it's great, you know, it's teaching you skills and I think that more people like him need to exist in the education system and unfortunately people are too busy focusing on a mitochondria instead of, you know, useful skills and I know that's a meme, but it's also, you know, having been through 10 years ago.
It's the truth and so I used mono develop both as part of unity and standalone to, you know, really teach myself the language and I wanted to see what happened to it and so.
I'm standing, right. There's a long line of stuff happening from.
So Miguel de Acazza, the guy that started genome.
Then went on to work at Novel where he developed an open source implementation of C sharp and dot net and all that called mono.
Novel folded, got to got bought out twice and somewhere around that time.
Excuse me.
They switched, you know, copyright of mono over to Miguel's company and there, it was called Zemian, I believe.
And then something happened and then Zemian became Xamarin.
Microsoft bought Xamarin.
And with it, they bought Miguel and all of the stuff.
And so I tried to compile mono develop seven, thinking that the tarball would have everything included that needed to be, you know, developed or not developed by compile.
And interestingly, I found two things, one innocuous, right, my get is no longer a thing.
It's, it's not hosted anymore, it's understandable, you know, stuff like that happens all the time, right.
Those dependencies needed to compile.
They could be found elsewhere, you know, and I was able, I was actually able to achieve that.
The other half of the dependencies, and this is where embrace extent extinguish, you know, or at least the comparison to comes from, we're hidden behind an azure wall.
I immediately was hit in the face by a username and password prompt.
For a back end azure service that I don't even know if exists anymore, but they hid when Microsoft bought out Xamarin.
They hid a lot of the stuff needed to actually compile mono develop behind a wall, it's an off wall.
And so I'm looking at this like, this is what happened, right, it was an open source project got taken over by Microsoft, they added to it, they added features to it.
And then they put half the project behind an authorization wall that the user, you know, outside users can't compile from.
And that about kills it, you know, that's it.
All she wrote.
And so I'm kind of irritated about it, you know, and I get, I get the most people like, yeah, who cares, gauges is Microsoft, you know, of dot net sucks, yeah, I get that.
And I guess if that's your opinion, I don't really know what to tell you, I guess this episode just isn't for you, you know, but for me it's it's deeper than the dot net stuff, it's it's not about what the software was about.
Excuse me, the original goal of the software.
Then getting bought out and just half that being put behind a wall intentionally, just so that people can't use it.
And so I'm looking into what's needed because.
I kind of want to use this as an opportunity to learn the avalanche framework and I have issues with how they're.
Requiring jet brains in order to do it. I'm sorry, but I just can't be bothered to pay.
I can't remember it was like 79 or something like that for writer. I'm sure writer is a great tool, but.
You know, I'm I'm not really on board with this is an open source product and then we recommend that you use a proprietary IDE, I'm just I'm not on board with that.
And so avalanche is a C sharp project mono develop is also technically supposed to be a C sharp project.
I figured why not try to.
Keep it in the family quote unquote and use the two related and so come to find out mono itself is owned by wine now, which is interesting.
But I don't know man, I just I needed to get that off my chest because I'm I'm irritated about both things.
The the laws and stuff and just the general state of freedom being actively eroded, I look at a bone to replace and core details with what was it called you, you tell us just terrible man, it's terrible.
But I, I don't know man, but thanks for tuning in, this is a relatively short episode, I just needed a rant man, I've been meaning to get this off my chest.
Once things that my consultancy firm pairs of get started hopefully I will have more to share about the actual substant of engineering stuff that I'm working on because we've we've got a couple of things and in the works here me and my business partner Adam Ron, we are going to develop a couple of tools and I I can't wait to share them because it's you know some of some of the hobby is people are really going to like this stuff.
I can't say much about it, but it's going to be fun man, but thanks for tuning in and I'm out.
You have been listening to the Hacker Public Radio podcast, at hackerpublicradio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording a podcast, then visit the HPR site to find out how easy it really is.
Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by anhonesthost.com, the Internet Archive, rsync.net, and the HPR Community Content Delivery Network.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
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Episode: 4604
Title: Quick Tips for January 20 26
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4604/hpr4604.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:14:58 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4604, for 2026-03-26
Today's show is entitled, "Quick Tips for January 20 26"
The host is operat0r and the duration is 00:14:05
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "Quick Tips for January 20 26"
Hello everyone and welcome to the episode of HackerBook Radio with your host, Operator.
It's going to be pretty short, I'm going to go through my quick tips.
Looks like I've got enough to kind of do a little short episode for you guys.
Quick tips are basically just, you know, kind of things that I think about,
that add value, kind of like those stupid viral videos on social media where they show,
like how to make a pancake with a square, like it, you know.
So, um, so these are, um, for me, uh, one of the first ones I've got here is Macha, the sugar blend.
So when I make my Macha, it's a kind of powdery green tea.
It's almost like I make up at this point.
Um, it's extremely messy.
So to kind of prevent some of that messiness and ease, what I do is I blend it up.
I'm sure the Macha people would just die roll over and there, whatever.
Um, but, uh, I take the Macha and I mix it with sugar and I put it in like one of those coffee grinds.
So that way, um, I just put the puts it put it in there and I'll have to worry about adding sugar or too much sugar and not enough sugar.
Um, but yeah, that's kind of how I've been doing it.
Um, then we've got super glue.
So you've probably seen online, so super glue making sort of a combination.
It does work.
I've used it to fix like two or three things now.
You have to kind of let it sit overnight and harden.
It almost makes, like, a lot of things.
Um, you have to kind of let it sit overnight and harden.
It almost makes, like, a very strong epoxy type of seal almost.
So you get this very strong seal with the, with the, the baking soda and glue mix.
Uh, you want to have enough baking soda to soak it.
But not too much that it's like a goo, uh, when it kind of dries.
So you want it soaked, but you don't want it like too much glue.
Um, likewise, you don't want too much, uh, baking soda.
So I had, I didn't have the baking soda all wet, essentially.
Um, you could, yeah, I even used the gel for it for that.
So, you know, that's, your mouth may vary, but, uh, just, you know, that actually does work.
If you haven't seen it before, um, tile batter pad on top left speaker in middle.
I have no idea what this is about, um, on top speaker in middle.
Let me give it to me a second.
Yeah, I thought about it for a while of no idea.
It says tile batter pad on top of speaker in middle.
I don't know.
Anyways, moving on, uh, blowing out a candle.
If you've ever blown out a candle and it explodes in the face, you simply just put your hands in front of it.
Or maybe a couple fingers and then you blow around, uh, through your hand.
And it will kind of diffuse that and wrap around.
So it won't make a big mess.
Um, that's, that's kind of a fun one.
See, if you are transferring, transferring large data sets by Harry Lary.
Um, yeah, so when I do large data sets,
Julie's speaking, I use our sink with VARC.
You know, there's been a ton of, at least one or two episodes about our sink.
But, um, yeah, I'd be interested to know the story around our sink and how it's.
What it has to do with the HPR and maybe the people around it.
Um, because I use it for a lot of stuff.
I'll use it for my backups after having failed backup.
Cloud providers and all that mess multiple times.
So, um, yeah, transferring large data sets I use our sink.
And then they have like a desk scene.
We'll still do like a CRC check.
What you have to do on large files, the like images.
Uh, encrypted images that do whatever.
So that's, uh, kind of that one.
Let's see, uh, phone machine.
Yeah, so you can look at this online.
There's really only a couple posts online about how this works.
Only because it's probably pretty straightforward.
So I have a giant backpack lower.
You can do this with any size lower really.
You take that blower and either make a funnel or, uh,
some kind of larger apparatus to wrap a wet.
A wet towel on around.
And then you either have a liquid filled with bubbles or have the bubble liquid.
I have a backpack lower of the takes of water for like,
spraying for bugs or whatever pesticides.
And I mixed this solution in there after like, you know,
trying to clean thoroughly cleaning it out at the best I can.
Um, but the idea there is you just take the blower,
aim it inside of a big trash can.
And then put a towel or something that's porous.
But we'll let stuff through and make these little foam bubbles.
And then you aim it upside down inside the inside of the trash can.
And then you kind of seal it all.
And you turn on a blower and it makes like a big foam.
An instant foam party thing.
So that's kind of cool.
I'll probably just do not the backpack.
Blower because that there's not enough water in the backpack.
And also nobody wants to put like, you know,
something that's had bug residue in it for bugs tray.
Um, through it's to their eyes or something like that.
So anyway, you can use a kitchen poo to do it.
It actually doesn't work quite as well as like,
the blue stuff like a dawn or whatever.
Uh, but, um, yeah, that's kind of interesting.
It's interesting a little set of to do for like kids for days and stuff.
So I'll probably take the blower and just do the blower trash can method.
And uh, get like a big towel or, uh,
think it's a blanket or something like that.
Let's see, final straps.
Or I do with vinyl straps.
Yeah.
So I just had to look this one up.
Vinyl straps.
Yeah.
You don't really see these anymore.
They're more still in commercial.
A lot of them are just doing the messes right now because it's kind of harder to replace the message.
And they're mess meshes.
And everybody throws everything.
So I'm talking about these lounge chairs.
And if you're, oh, like me,
all the lounge chairs had nylon or vinyl straps.
And those vinyl straps, you, uh, to fix them, you would have a big giant strap of a roll of vinyl.
And then you would poke a hole in it and then, you know, either use a screw or whatever.
But the key is, if it's hot outside, you can just do this with heat and just stretch it out naturally.
But if it's cold, you're going to have to like submerge it in some kind of liquid to stretch it.
And there's like a calculator's out there or whatever.
The problem is we have a set of four that are relatively old.
They're starting to sort of kind of rust.
And then you had to ask yourself, okay, if I spend $99 to fix these chairs,
are they going to outlast any of the other crappy by today?
And the answer is probably yes.
So when, if and when we're ready, we're going to strip the chair chairs,
uh, repaint them with some kind of rust only and think.
And then I will buy, I will spend $100 and I will repair these vinyl chairs.
Because they will last longer than any of these other, you know, nylon strappy,
mixed strap, crap pieces that crap you buy today.
Um, so you do have to be weary about the cost effectiveness of it.
Right.
Um, and get an idea, you know, this is kind of this sling fabric they say.
Um, I had a neighbor already through and give away one of those that because it was broken.
So, um, we have a lounge chair in our backyard that's like kind of rigged up.
But you can buy a kit that comes with a little, the little, the little, the little screws,
or the little one way pins.
They're kind of like the things that you're in your car,
that when you get a car and you take a part that whatever the falls out.
So little vinyl screw pins, holding pins, whatever.
Um, it's quite a mess and it's kind of an art form,
but uh, definitely do it if you got some furniture that's going to stay together
because you do not want to buy any new stuff because it's all garbage.
Let's see, fabric belt foot trick.
Um, so yeah.
Um, so if you, I have a bunch of these, I don't know what they were popular before,
but I have these fabric based belt straps.
And they're like for shorts or pants or whatever I bought.
And I've got like three or four of them.
Um, and the problem is, is they, they, um, they tend to loosen up on me.
And they also kind of are just kind of flappy.
So that, you know, you'll have this long flaps sticking out.
And you're going to see could cut it and then re sew it
back together to have an normal size belt,
but they're usually oversized over length to too long.
Uh, what you can do is you basically put the belt on like you normally would
and then you flip it inside out, right?
And then you do the shenanigans to get the, it's like a two loops
and you put the fabric kind of through the loops
and then you tighten it.
And then once you've since you've flipped it, you can flip it back
and it will kind of be inside out.
So we'll hide that flap.
And it will also kind of keep it more secure from like coming disconnected.
So, uh, that's kind of what I do with when I do where the, the fabric things.
Cause it's, it's better comfortable with wise if I'm going to be going
around the house or if I'm going to be working a lot.
I actually like the fabric belts because they give away a lot more than like a
traditional leather belt.
So if I'm hunched over and I'm trying to keep my pants from falling down,
I'm hunched over for a long time.
I don't want this thick.
And this is like three inch belt to inch belt.
Something crazy like that.
Um, yeah, this is like a two inch belt.
Um, I don't want to be leaning over.
Um, my fat gut.
Uh, trying to deal with that.
I don't want to just, uh, you two,
deal in I.S.
Um, I won't put the shenanigans in for any of this stuff.
It's kind of self-expand forward.
YouTube downloader is YouTube.
YouTube downloader is legacy thing.
Microsoft got rid of the repo.
And then it just spun back up as YouTube.
Um, so it's Y T D L.
And then YouTube D L I N S.
One word is Y T D L I N S.
Y T D L I N S correct as for Android.
And the cool thing about that one is not only is it a downloader.
It also supports, um, sponsor block.
So when you download the video,
it's at those sponsor.
So the ads are moved from that video.
So that's cool.
I've been using that to download different things.
Or tutorials or whatnot.
I'll see.
What?
What?
Web paper towel over.
Microwave feed.
So microwave dry stuff out.
It's the refrigerator that that's cycle of their refrigerator.
Dry stuff out.
And so what I've been doing to kind of keep the paper towel from flying off.
And then your soup explodes.
Because you got mashed potatoes in there.
Or got forbidden.
Like, uh, what's a clam chowder.
We'll explode like big time.
And, and it, you know, the, the, the wind, the blowing from the microwave.
We'll blow off here.
Whatever.
And then whatever in microwave explodes.
And you have, you know, a towel.
A paper towel is like having an off the microwave.
And explosions obviously.
You wet it.
And that kind of does two things.
It keeps the thing from sliding off.
And it also provides a little bit of moisture to your food while you're, uh,
heating it up and stuff.
So good, good, good times.
Um, see, we've got a couple more more.
Um, use blender clips instead of chip clips.
So, um, we have the big bigger binder clips.
Um, a lot of chip clips are just awful.
Uh, we have a bunch still because of the chip.
Uh, so we have a bunch of chip clips.
Um, but they kind of just dry rot overtime or low crack or something like that.
They're, they're pretty bad.
But you use big binder clips.
And you'll never have to buy any more chip clips again.
Um, so that's kind of weird.
If you're asking for chip clips for Christmas or something,
don't, don't do that.
Just ask for big binder clips.
And use those for your chips or whatever.
This small ones are great for like if you have stuff in the microwave.
And you want to, you know, like microwave vegetables.
And you want to seal them back up.
But you don't want them to have the chip clips or too big.
It's kind of put in our tiny microwave or the tiny, uh, freezer.
Sorry.
And so, you know, there's limited room in the freezer.
And you can't have the giant chip clip in the freezer.
And it's cold off or plastic.
And that's going to help the dry rot.
So if you use the binder clips, um, smaller binder clips like medium size,
that will work with like vegetables.
With like vegetables or vegetables, just like that.
So anyways, we're kind of 12 minutes or so.
So this last one is basically when Amazon got rid of the things to get me.
Or I'm sorry, when Amazon got rid of their arbitrary ad arbitrary item to wish list,
uh, you could actually do it back hack it with using some special code.
Um, there were plugins with Chrome.
There were like you add arbitrary stuff titles, pictures, and links to your Amazon.
They since flocked to that down. Also.
I have been busy.
Uh, when my wife uses is things to get me.
Now, things to get me does have a, uh, Chrome extension.
The thing about it is you have to configure it.
And you have to allow it to kind of run on every webpage.
So, um, it's kind of like, a little thing yet to make sure you do.
And then it'll pull what the plugin will do for you is it will pull the images from the website that you're on.
Um, so if you say at this page, sometimes that doesn't work.
What usually you like to do is be on the page and add it from URL.
So you get like a cookie and a session token and everything to actually pull it down.
Um, so that kind of seems to help.
But in general, I use, um, things to get me.
And I use the plugin to manage.
To manage the, uh,
Dating of new items and stuff like that makes a lot lot easier.
Anyways, that's pretty much it for the quick tickets.
Take it easy.
Happy new year.
Yeah, happy new year.
It's already second.
So whatever.
Happy holidays and take it easy.
Thank you.
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording podcast, click on our upload link
to find out how easy it is.
Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by an AnHonestHost.com, the Internet Archive,
rsync.net, and our mirror network.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
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Episode: 4605
Title: Lee locks down his wifey poo
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4605/hpr4605.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:14:59 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4605, for 2026-03-27
Today's show is entitled, "Lee locks down his wifey poo"
The host is Elsbeth and the duration is 00:08:25
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "Lee and Elsbeth get hitched"
Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.
I would like to welcome all of you today
in the Oaks Room in the London Bar of Satsuan,
which has been duty sanctions
according to the law for civil marriage.
My name is Melina,
and I will be leading the couple through their ceremony
at Lynn here is the registrar today
and will be registering for marriage today
and has to leave our responsibility
to make sure that the declaratory words are said
and emerge to get your sight.
We are here today to witness the joining and match on me
who would like to thank you all for coming
to celebrate the beginning of their new law
together as husband and wife.
To share in their happiness
and to witness their marriage found.
Marriage is intended to provide love
and friendship, help and comfort
and to support each other to both the joys and sorrows of life.
Marriage is making a commitment
it calls for trust, understanding and encouragement.
Have found in each other happiness for fulfillment and love.
They now wish to affirm their relationship
and to offer each other the security that comes from
belief and binding vows
sincerely made and faithfully heft.
However, if any person present
knows of any lawful impediment to this marriage
then he or she should decode it now.
Before you are joined in match on me,
I have to remind you of the solemn and binding character
of the vows you are about to make.
Marriage according to the law of this country
is the union of two persons
voluntarily entered into the life
to the exclusion of all others.
So we're asking you now
three will you take to be your wife?
Will you be loving, faithful and loyal to her?
In living your lives together?
I will.
Will you take the lead to be your husband?
Will you be loving, faithful and loyal to him?
In living your lives together?
I will.
It is now time for your solemn declarations
and I shall ask each of you to declare in turn
that to the best of your knowledge and belief there is no lawful reason
why you should not be married to each other.
So do you want to go to the stand?
Thank you.
It's time to go to the stand.
We will be very happy to meet you, okay?
Are you late, free, lovely, to marry?
I'm free, lovely, to marry.
You are not okay, you are not okay.
Are you free to met lawfully married?
I'm happy to marry you, my child.
The moment has arrived
for you to make the contract with each other.
As you have asked those you love and most
to be with you on this special day.
So as to make your marriage contract before your friends and your family,
I invite your witnesses to come and stand
by the side of the bride and groom, please.
Show them then, lovely.
Please, I'm glad you let's just, please, I have to be.
I, V.
I leave my hand here.
Take V.
Take V.
So be my lawful wedding bride.
To be my lawful wedding bride.
Thank you.
I take the leave my hand here.
To be my lawful wedding husband.
It is now time for the exchange of women,
which is a tradition way of seeing the contract you have made.
The wedding ring is a non-broken circle.
It has no beginning and no end.
It symbolises unending and everlasting love
and it is an outward sign that the lifelong promise you have made to all of them.
So if you leave, just take them, please.
We've got to put that on.
If it just returns up to me, thank you.
I give you this ring.
I give you this ring.
As a symbol of our marriage.
As a symbol of our marriage.
I promise to care for you with love and friendship.
I promise to care for you with love and friendship.
To respect and cherish you.
To respect and cherish you.
To be faithful.
Always.
And to be faithful.
Always.
These promises I make to you.
These promises I make to you.
But the rest of my life.
But the rest of my life.
Thank you.
I accept this ring, I accept this ring as a symbol.
As a symbol of our marriage.
I promise to pair for you with love and friendship and promise to give for you with love and friendship
to respect and cherish you, to respect and cherish you, and to do a football race in the beginning for all of us.
These promises I make to you, these promises I need to have a rest of more,
a little rest of it.
My life, my life, my life, my life, my life.
So, before we conclude, I understand that we would like to make a wreathy.
Do not confuse duty, but what other people expect of you, they're under the different
duties of that, you'll choose to have the obligations you have assumed voluntarily.
Paying that that can entail anything from years of patient work to instigownness to that.
Difficult and easy, but there are more to suffer, but there is never a word at all for doing
my other people expect of you, and to do so is not merely difficult, but impossible.
It is easier to deal with a football path than it is with belief,
who wants just a few minutes of your time, please, just want to take one.
Time is your total capital, and the minutes of your life are painfully viewed.
If you allow yourself to fall into the bite of a green to such a bit less,
they quickly snow all to a point where these parasites will use up a hundred percent of your time
and squat for more. So I'm just saying now, and to be rude about it when necessary,
otherwise you will not have time to carry out your duty, or to do your homework,
and certainly no time for love and happiness. The termites will never go away here like
and leave none of it for you. This rule does not mean that you must not do a favor for a friend
or even a stranger, so like the choice be yours, do not do it because it's expected of you.
Robert A. Highly will be both time and natural wealth.
You have both said the words prescribed by law in the presence of witnesses,
which forms a long tradition of marriage in this country, and you have
symbolized your love for each other by their giving and accepting of rings.
This day will form a milestone in your lives,
to start a new phase in your life together. We hope that the feelings of love you have for one
and other deep and a growth stronger throughout the years to come. And I'll just give you the great
specials to care that you are now the new way to be.
You have been listening to the Hacker Public Radio podcast, at hackerpublicradio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording a podcast, then visit the HPR site to find out how easy it really is.
Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by anhonesthost.com, the Internet Archive, rsync.net, and the HPR Community Content Delivery Network.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
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Episode: 4606
Title: My Nerdy Childhood: From Floppy Disks to Dial-Up Dreams
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4606/hpr4606.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:15:01 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4606, for 2026-03-30
Today's show is entitled, "My Nerdy Childhood: From Floppy Disks to Dial-Up Dreams"
The host is Trollercoaster and the duration is 00:15:30
The flag is Explicit, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "Trollercoaster talks about his childhood and first years of nerdlyhood"
Yeah, it's gonna be one of those episodes.
An old fart telling you all to get off of my lawn
and be quiet about how terrible things are today
because everything was better in my olden time.
Everything was worse in my olden time.
So I'm gonna talk to you about my childhood.
Yeah, it was 1987 when my dad took me to Flonder Technology International
Flonder's aimed to be a technology hub for the world.
There were demonstrations of fuzzy logic.
As an 11-year-old, I could not wrap my head around that concept.
Actually, I still can't wrap my head around what it means.
Anyway, it's also here.
I first saw a guy moving a wooden block around
and a small arrow moved along the on the screen.
And that's when I decided.
If I ever wonder computer, it should have a mouse.
So the very next Wednesday, I walked over to the local computer shop
and there they actually had an Amstrad BC 1512.
And imagine, it had a mouse.
I asked if I could play a bit on their computer in the showroom.
The shop owners were so sweet, they allowed me.
And I also kept coming over the next Wednesday
and the next Wednesday afternoon.
And the next one.
And for roughly a year, the shop would be
my after school spot every Wednesday.
Then I spent hours there, playing with the computer,
drawing stuff in the gem windowing system,
one of the first commercially available cookies.
More than once, my mom asked me to tune down on going there
because I would certainly overstay my welcome.
And, and Patrick, the bosses at that place,
for some reason, grew soft spot for me.
Maybe because they saw my on the stfasination.
For sure, it was because all of the great things I created on those machines.
And obviously, my charming presence in the showroom
was invitation for the hundreds of other customers
that came hoarding in buying computers at the time.
Anyway, afterwards, they told me that they were a bit overwhelmed
by my shameless assumption that they didn't mind.
They were reluctant to send me home and expected me to buy a computer there.
Much sooner than I actually did.
And along that line, well, yeah.
That little 10-year-old had a certain charm, I guess.
By the time I had saved enough money,
the new machine in their showroom was the Schneider Euro PC.
This one had a whole computer built into the keyboard.
It was a coolest thing on the world.
I booted with the MS-DOS 3.3 floppy disk,
and then I had to start juggling.
Popped in the floppy with my old-time favorite game,
digger.
When I wanted to play with Spaceman,
I had to pop out digger and pop in Mrs. Spaceman.
No more needing to put money in the arcade, but there was the Durbo button on my PC.
And how I broke Miss Spaceman on my computer.
The game was written for a 4.77 megahertz machine
and my machine could go a whopping 9.54 megahertz
that actually wasn't the Durbo button.
It was a slow down button,
but I guess marketing didn't like that concept.
If I forgot to turn off the Durbo mode,
the average game lasted half a second.
But my first computer came with a bunch of floppys.
I already talked about the MS-DOS floppy
that I needed to boot my computer and some of the games I had.
Next was MS works 1.0,
the baby brother of MS office allowed me to write text,
have a tiny spreadsheet, and do some database things.
It secured my first summer job at the age of 13,
printing invoices for a nearby company.
Initially, I made the invoices with the typewriter.
I got paid like a viewbracks per invoice I typed,
making a bit of money every week.
I could get hit myself, I don't make a spritzard.
When I offered to take the invoices home
and bring them back when done,
the boss wasn't amused when I returned,
with the invoices roughly 15 minutes after leaving,
doing the work of a whole afternoon in a quarter of an hour.
Little did she know.
I worked multiple nights to write my little automation,
and soon enough they weren't willing to pay me the safe price anymore.
I guess that's where I learned my first marketing skills.
At the age of 14, I was very happy though, getting a bit less,
and didn't realize how important my skills were.
The other floppy I had was the one with GW basic.
So, I wrote my very first program soon after.
10, print, hello world.
20, go to 10.
And going forward from there, I took evening classes to their programming
and despite my young age, or maybe thanks to it,
I easily outpaced all the grownups in my class.
I felt like the computer expert.
I could do everything.
I was heamer.
And the master's of the universe.
Or one of the masters of the universe.
Games were such a great incubator for my computer skills.
But only did I learn about copy protection and how floppy's worked.
You really don't think I could afford buying all those games to you.
I mean, a game caused me a whole month of my allowance.
I also learned about memory management,
because the spite billgates back then thinking
that nobody would ever need more than 640 kilobytes of RAM.
I quickly coughed off the extra money to expand my RAM from 512 kilobytes to 768.
But that meant manually tweaking the boot procedure by editing the config.sis and auto-execute files,
because a high-members think, and unless you're my age,
you've probably already do stuff.
Maybe wondering, by now, what browser I was using?
Well, the internet doesn't exist yet.
The playing game required me to invite my friends and switch chairs
if you wanted to be in front of the keyboard.
Can you imagine that?
I could have also flipped out my Atari to 2600 and then pay in the videos.
But the computer wasn't playing on the side.
For starters, it was in my bedroom, and not in the living room,
and the Atari was way old.
We already had that for 10 years or so.
Another computer that's made strong impression on me was the Commodore 64.
Wow, the dead machine had cool sounds.
Those rough pixels didn't really matter for the gameplay,
and how that machine could pull all those games off with only 64 kilobytes of RAM.
That wasn't incredible.
Anyways, one special earlier that the C64 had on me when I was 12.
The big guys had their Commodore with a whole bunch of floppies with games on them.
And one set of games was for betting for us kids.
When I was outside, and then sneakily peeked through the windows,
Samantha Fox haunted my dreams for weeks, since that peek between the curtains.
Back then, there was no such thing as the internet.
All you had were floppies, computer clubs, back then, were popular places to treat floppies.
At the age of 14, we didn't wonder about the origin of software,
who just copied a troublemaker.
That's how I discovered all the great software, from RoboCath to Portland, Pascal,
all the serious things that you could use to impress your friends.
Never used them actually, but I had them.
We also exchanged cool games like Double Dragon 2, which was one of my favorite games.
And then there were those adventure games.
We all take pride in playing the Legend of Zelda, or Monkey Island.
Secretly, the most exciting adventure game was leisure suit of lazy Larry, looking for love in all the
games.
Friends told me how they could get cool games online, and also some of the stuff are
moms, and that's where it allowed to see.
So the next thing I stayed for was a modem.
And online doesn't mean the internet here.
It means dialing into a BBS.
It did a whopping 2,400 bought, or bits per second,
and often the first thing you need to have that need to happen,
was figure out if I had 7 database, or an apperity bit.
It took half an hour for me to get my animated panel and understand
they watch running over the beach.
It often paid off if I could sell them to my schoolmates.
One, or two pics on a floppy disk.
Yeah, a 720 kilobit floppy disk could hold 2 images if I was lucky.
The art was to dial up during off-big hours.
So in the weekends, and also after 8pm, all through the night.
I could convince my parents how during those hours connection was cheap.
Yeah, it really was compared to the other big hours.
We had for some reason my first month in dial-up cost my parents a quarter of a monthly income.
Somewhere over 10,000 Belgian francs.
But hey, at least I got 2,000 francs from all the floppy size sold at school.
Needless to tell, that moment that were furious.
Actually, no, they weren't.
They were too shocked to be furious.
When they asked me how I got such a big bill.
No way, at Earth, I was going to do it mid.
It was an Anderson who started up all my time.
Well, there's this simulator too that I had to download for school.
And I also let guilty to downloading some work to cartoons.
They had been saving up for a nice wristwatch for my upcoming birthday.
And well, let's say that my old casheo had to serve for a couple of years longer.
I promised to have a piggy bank next to my modem and throw money in the piggy bank every time I connected.
Suffice to say that my estimates never covered to the cost of the dial-up connections.
But that again, it was also their own fault.
If they would only just remember to not pick up the phone every time I was downloading my next picture.
It's their own fault.
I mean, they broke the connection.
It's their fault.
I can't help it. I was only 14 or something like that.
Anyways, those BBSs had forums.
And it was for the first time in my life that I was able
to communicate with the groups of people all around the country without having to stick a stamp on it.
Or my parents listening along. It was the first time that I developed friendships with people
whose real names I didn't know let alone their age, gender, or even where they lived.
And you know what? I didn't care.
So that was my first computer.
By the year 1990, I got fed up from juggling discs
and I started dreaming of a new computer.
Luckily, I had a nice summer job early on and could keep saving.
So I went looking for enough brand computer manufacturer
who could build me a mini tower with a real C-gate 40 megabyte hard disk in it,
running a 380 sticks SX and with a VGA card.
All of a sudden, I had 250 sticks colors and 640 by 480 pixels on my screen.
Instead of a of dos, the machine could boot in Windows 3.0.
I won't waste my time explaining what that Windows looked like,
but suffice to say, I no longer needed to type commands like X-copy, CD, or file name.exe to make something
I could just double click in the file manager.
But while they started the whole new era, it's also the end of an era.
By now, computers were starting to become mainstream.
It was in the following years, though, that I started reading about AOL in America
and how that was so much cooler than those BBSs.
Universities in Belgium had e-unit to communicate with other academics about news groups,
about IRC and how this was the wild wild west of the upcoming internet.
How I found a slackward disk that I couldn't figure out how to use.
There was no exe file on there and later learned that was a Linux distro.
There actually existed other operating systems, then dos and Windows.
But that's a story for one of you to tell.
I'm convinced, some of you will also have cool stories to tell.
Maybe your 10 years younger than me and the story of the internet is your childhood story.
Or maybe your 10 years older than me.
You could talk about your first personal computers, about the PDP, at your university,
or even about shared computer spaces.
Anyway, I'm curious to hear the story of your nerdy childhood, keep trolling, keep having fun.
You have been listening to the Hacker Public Radio podcast, at hackerpublicradio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording a podcast, then visit the HPR site to find out how easy it really is.
Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by anhonesthost.com, the Internet Archive, rsync.net, and the HPR Community Content Delivery Network.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
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Episode: 4607
Title: UNIX Curio #3 - basename and dirname
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4607/hpr4607.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:15:02 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4607, for 2026-03-31
Today's show is entitled, "UNIX Curio #3 - basename and dirname"
The host is Vance and the duration is 00:13:08
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "Pulling apart filenames"
Hi there, I'm Vance and welcome to Unix Curio Number 3.
This series is dedicated to exploring little known and occasionally useful, trinkets lurking
in the dusty corners of Unix-like operating systems.
Hopefully it doesn't seem like I'm picking on Linux Journal, but as with Unix Curio Number
Number 1 about Shaw, that's Hector Public Radio Episode 4587.
This entry has been inspired by an article of theirs.
See the show notes for links to the article and other references.
The author was demonstrating a clever bash shell script function that would take a file name
and send the file to standard output, or if the file name ended in .gz, it would decompress
the file and send the result to standard output.
This way you could run the function against a set of text files, some of which are compressed
and some not, and have only text appear on your screen instead of unreadable binary gibberish.
The way that he accomplished this was to take the value of the first positional parameter
given to the function, represented by $1.1, remove the extension .gz off the end if present,
and test whether a file with the resulting name exists.
If it does, the function would just run cat with the file.
Otherwise, if the name with .gz at the end exists, it would run g on zip with the height
and c option to decompress the file and send it to standard output.
The method chosen to remove the .gz extension was to pipe the name through an appropriate
pro command.
This earned the author some criticism on the website and in letters to the magazine for
cranking up a whole pro interpreter just to chop three characters off the end of a file name.
Our curio for today is a standard unix utility made for just this purpose called base name.
Along with its sibling, during name, it is used to pull apart path names to get the
part that you want.
What base name does is remove any leading path on the name given to it, and if a suffix
is specified as well, removes that also.
If a directory path is given, with or without a trailing slash, it returns the last
part with no slashes.
I'll explain with some examples, but they might be a little easier to understand if you
read the show notes.
It isn't always clear to listen to commands and code that are read out loud.
Running base name space slash bin slash gzip would return gzip.
That's the last part.
Running base name space slash bin slash gzip space dot SO would also return gzip.
In this case, since the path name argument that you gave it doesn't end with dot SO,
the only part that gets removed is the leading path.
But what if it does?
Running base name space slash user slash lib slash libz.so, space dot SO would return libz.
The final part of the path name without the provided extension.
The suffix can be any text, it doesn't have to be an extension or start with a dot.
Although that is the way that base name is most often used.
When you provide a directory name to the command, such as base name space slash user slash lib,
you would get the last part.
In this case, just lib with no slashes.
The counter part, dername does essentially the opposite.
It removes the last part of the path name and returns a directory name with no trailing
slash.
Running dername space slash user slash lib slash lib z dot SO would return slash user slash lib.
Running dername space slash user slash lib would return slash user.
Running dername against a name that contains no slashes simply returns a dot representing
the current working directory.
I should point out that neither of these utilities cares whether a file or directory with
the given name actually exists.
All they do is act on the text string that's been fed to them.
If you want to use the resulting output in a script, you should take care to use the
test command with the appropriate option to check that the file or directory exists before
trying to do something with it.
To give a historical perspective, base name came first.
It was present in Bell Laboratory's 7th edition Unix and made its way into the University
of California's BSD 2.9.
According to the free BSD manual page, dername did not appear until later in AT&T's system
3.
It did not go into the University of California's BSD until version 4.4.
Standardization of these commands followed a similar pattern.
Base name first appeared in 1987 in the X-open portability guide which preceded and
then existed alongside POSIX.
All it appears that a dername specification didn't emerge until the early 1990s.
Not all of these standards are freely available online, so it is difficult for me to track
down exactly when certain things were added.
However, it is clear that these utilities have been standardized for over 30 years, so it's
a pretty safe bet that you'll find them both unless you're using a very old Unix-like
system.
Getting back to the shell script, we can replace the name editing part by taking the output
of dername, space, dollar sign 1, follow it with a slash character, then follow that
with the output of base name, space, dollar sign 1, space.gz.
It will give us the same result and we can be sure it will work on any Unix-like system,
no pearl necessary.
Many of you might be thinking, I could do that with said too, and you're right.
Basically the command the original script fed to pearl would work exactly the same with
said, because said is a standard utility, it should already be present on every Unix-like
system, while pearl might not be.
One might suspect that as a general purpose text processor said would be slower than base
name and dername.
To see how they compared, back when I originally wrote this article in 2010, I ran each
method 5,000 times with a different randomly generated file name each time.
It turns out that the critics were right, as the pearl method took the longest time
to run at 59 seconds.
Using base name and dername took 44 seconds, a nice improvement, but said blew past that
at 34 seconds.
Probably the fact that the script needed to make only one call to said versus two for base
name and dername made the difference.
Helpful suggestions in response to the article revealed a shell curio.
You might have seen the curly brace syntax for parameters.
For example, say you have a file name in a variable named f.
To show the file name with a letter x appended, you can't use echo space dollar sign
fx because that means a variable with the name fx.
Instead you would put curly braces around the f and follow that with x.
The shell only interprets what's inside the curly braces as being a variable name.
Modifiers can also go inside the curly braces and one of these, the percent sign, is just
what we need to chop off that extension.
This works in bash, the z shell that's z as in zebra, the corn shell, and any shell
conforming to the posics standard.
However, it does not work in the c shell that's c as in Charlie or older implementations
of the born shell that predate posics.
We can rewrite the part of the original function that removes the dot gz using dollar sign,
left curly brace, one percent sign, dot gz, right curly brace, and forego any outside
utilities.
Performance.
After half a second to process those 5,000 file names, not bad at all.
Thanks for listening and keep an eye out for our next Unix Curio, which will be about
archiving utilities and formats, here on hiker public radio.
If you have a question or a suggestion for a future topic, please comment on this episode
on the hpr website.
You have been listening to the Hacker Public Radio podcast, at hackerpublicradio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording a podcast, then visit the HPR site to find out how easy it really is.
Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by anhonesthost.com, the Internet Archive, rsync.net, and the HPR Community Content Delivery Network.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
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Episode: 4608
Title: Simple Podcasting - Episode 1 - Preparation and Recording
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4608/hpr4608.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:15:04 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4608, for 2026-04-01
Today's show is entitled, "Simple Podcasting - Episode 1 - Preparation and Recording"
The host is Whiskeyjack and the duration is 00:23:08
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "This episode is the first in an 4 part series on simple podcasting covering Preparation and Recordin"
This is the first episode in a four-part series on a simple way to create your own HPR
podcast episode.
If it sounds contradictory to have four episodes on a simple subject, you only actually
need the first episode to see how to create podcasts.
Through remaining episodes are on steadily more complex subjects, with the later ones being
more in the realm of gratuitous hackery for the fun of it.
I am fairly new to podcasting.
I have done an HPR episode on old tool, another on the UCSDP system, and an eight-part series
on nuclear power.
Prior to this, I have never done a podcast before.
Despite that, a number of people wrote into HPR to say that they really liked what I did.
This means that you two can make a first podcast and have other people find it very interesting.
Since I am fairly new to this, I thought I would document how I went about it for the
benefit of people who want to do the same.
This describes things from the perspective of someone who is very new to this sort of thing.
Later on, I will get into sport advanced topics, and the finish off with some blatant
gratuitous hackery, like how to use LibreOffice Calc or GNU Octave in place of an audio editor
for some things.
Initial hurdles.
There were several hurdles to get over before I could record an episode, though.
One was obvious one to me was that I'm not a sort of person who could simply babble into
a microphone.
That meant that I needed to have a way of recording things that would let me exclude
pauses and repeat sentences that I had best up.
However, since I was due to podcasting, I didn't know how to use an audio editor such
as audacity.
After a bit of thinking, though, I came up with a very simple solution to that, which
I will get into a bit later in this episode.
Taking a topic, with the recording process solved, the next thing to do was to find something
to talk about.
The key to this is to have some place to keep notes.
I use a note taking program for this called ZIM.
There are other programs which do something similar, but ZIM is the one that I use.
Whenever I come up with an idea of a topic, I would add a note for it.
When I come across any information relevant to one of the topics, I add it to the note.
You might think that you don't know of anything interesting, but the fact is that a lot
of us are fairly sad individuals who are just as boring as you are, and so find things
like verbal tours through obsolete and obscure operating systems to be quite fascinating.
I am sure that you too know something obscure but equally interesting.
Writing a script.
Once you have a topic, the next thing to do is to write a script.
If you are good at talking off the cuff, then all you may need is a note line.
If you are like me, however, then you need to write down exactly what it is you're going
to say in a way which you can read back later.
In this case, start with a note line and fill in the detail after the outline is written.
Again, I use ZIM for writing my scripts.
It provides a simple way of organizing my scripts as I am putting them together.
It also provides character and word counts so I can estimate how many minutes of material
that I have.
When I started, I decided that I should target about 10 to 20 minutes for the length of an
episode.
That's a personal decision and not something you need to follow for yourself, but it gives
me a guideline to work to.
As a rule of thumb, I find that if I multiply the character count by 0.0011, that gives
me the approximate number of minutes of audio when recorded.
Your own number may differ from this, but it's a good starting point to work from.
If you think the episode is getting too long, don't worry.
You can split it up into multiple episodes.
Once you have this script written and have if necessary, split it into separate episodes,
start numbering the paragraphs.
This is related to the recording method, which I will go into more detail later.
Each paragraph or section should be equivalent to 30 seconds to a minute of audio.
If you are just starting out in podcasting, this may be roughly how much you are comfortable
with recording without pausing to collect your thoughts or stumbling over what you are
saying.
We will knit these sections together with a very simple piece of software later.
Recording Equipment You will need some sort of recording equipment, while some people may
talk about using a phone or an MP3 player with a record function or something like that,
I'll stick with recording onto a PC.
My recording equipment consists of a Maxwell headset with headphones, boom mic, and USB connection.
There is no part number on it, and I can't identify it further than that.
The cost was probably around $20.
Similar one's cell for $5 to $35 depending on where you buy it.
I already had this, so I didn't have to go out and buy it when I decided to make a podcast.
A boom mic that is a microphone that is on an arm attached to the headset is good because
it keeps the microphone at a consistent distance from your mouth without any effort.
The disadvantage of the particular model that I have is that there is noise in the signal,
which you can hear in my first two podcast episodes.
Despite the noise, people still like the episodes, so don't get too hung up on audio quality.
I will talk later about how to fix noise issues like this by filtering.
However, at this point, I'm just going to stick to the basics.
Recording software.
For recording software, I used no more record on Ubuntu.
This is licensed under GPLV2 or later.
It is very basic.
The only options are to select the file format and select stereo or mono.
The sample rate for flag is fixed at 44.10 kHz, which is what HPR wants.
If you are using different software, possibly on another operating system, the principles are the same.
There are probably equivalents which you can find if you look for them.
Perhaps you or other listeners could make an HPR episode recommending one.
When using no more record, use the menu located in the upper right of the window bar,
which has three small horizontal lines as an icon.
Set the preferred format to flag that's FLAC, set the audio channel to mono.
Recording.
Get comfortable at your desk.
Get it a cup of tea ready as your throat may get dry.
Set up the hardware.
If using a boom mic on a headset, adjust the mic so that it is roughly at chin level.
Avoid putting a boom mic directly in front of your mouth.
You just speak over the top of the boom microphone, not directly at it.
This will prevent you from breathing on the microphone causing noise problems.
If you have a different type of microphone, you may have to experiment a bit using short
test recordings to find the optimal position.
Using your recording software, make a short test recording and listen to it.
If it is too quiet and the input volume is already all the way up,
we can adjust this later with software.
If the test recording sounds okay though, then you are ready to start.
Recording using no sound recorder.
I will now describe how to use no sound recorder.
If you are using different software, the details may be different, but the basic principles should be similar.
Using the mouse, click on the record button.
It will start recording, showing the waveform of the recording as it goes.
To stop recording, click on the square stop icon that appeared at the bottom.
Give the recording a name using the numbering system starting at 01.
To accept the recording, click on the check bar button on the right.
To save the recording, click on the down pointing arrow on the right.
The file name will default to the name of the recording which we just gave it.
The number should match the paragraph numbers in your script.
The recording will be saved as a flag file in your home directory.
There is no option to save it anywhere else and you will need to move it to refer destination manually.
You can now delete the copy of the recording which sound recorder keeps
by clicking on the garbage can on the left.
This does not affect the copy on your disk.
You will want to delete these extra copies as you go along,
as there is no easy way to do this later, and an extra copy of the recordings will accumulate
in a dot directory somewhere and take up space.
If you make a mistake or otherwise decide with that paragraph,
just delete the file and record it again.
Keep the pauses at the start and end of each audio segment equivalent to normal pauses between words.
This is actually fairly easy to do.
When you are done, you may have anywhere between two and four does a separate flag files.
Here are the two most useful keyboard shortcuts for normal sound recorder.
Press Ctrl R to start recording.
Press S to stop recording.
You will still need to use the mouse to click on the checkmark button to accept the recording.
There are supposedly keyboard shortcuts to save the recording to disk and to delete the recording,
but these don't seem to work, at least not on the version 43.beda on Ubuntu 24.04
Starting and stopping via shortcuts is still useful, however.
You can use other software, and I will talk later in another episode about using command line software,
such as FFMPEG to record.
Tips on recording.
If you are new to podcast, or just are not good at making long speeches,
keep each recording segment short, admitted or less being a good target.
If you stumble over what you're trying to say, don't worry, just repeat the recording for that section.
Talk eat clearly and even measure tones at a reasonably constant volume.
Remember who your audience are. There are people who are listening to your podcast
whether you're doing housework, or gardening, or driving a car, or walking down a street,
or taking some exercise.
Very few will be sitting at a desk in a quiet room like you are when you are recording.
Try to make sure that what you are saying comes across clearly.
If the loudness of your voice varies too much, they won't be able to hear you in the quiet parts.
The worst thing to do is to trail off into an imperceptible mumble at the end of each sentence.
This series will not be able to follow you if you do that, and may give up on trying to listen to your episode.
HDR audio file requirements, HDR episodes are mono, not stereo.
If you send in a stereo file, they will convert to mono.
However, you may wish to convert to mono yourself for the purposes of better duplicating the final result
when you review your own work.
The easiest way to create a mono recording is to record it as mono in the first place if your recording
software has this option. If you are using Nome Sound Recorder, there is a setting for this.
I described how to set the Nome Sound Recorder to mono just a few moments ago.
If your software doesn't have a mono option, or if you have already recorded it and now
wish to convert it to mono, you can use FFMPEG to do the conversion.
Here is the command line description.
FFMPEG space dash i space, then the name of the input file, then space
dash AC space, one space, then the name of the output file.
Alternatives to Nome Sound Recorder, an alternative to Nome Sound Recorder is KDE Recorder.
This is also available as a snap in a bunch too. The license is GPL 2.0 or later.
However, I found it to be a bit more difficult to use than Nome Sound Recorder.
Selecting the microphone source was difficult. It shows several different sources,
rather than just taking what the OS says is standard. This may be because it is a KDE app running
in Nome. Perhaps this is easier if you use KDE. Every time I unplugged my headset and plugged it back
in, it added more audio sources to its list. None of them worked, however, until I selected the
correct one, exited the program, and then started it back up. All files are saved in the music
directory, there is no choice offered. Audio format selection is more difficult, it being a two-step
process. There is no option for mono recordings only stereo. Flack file recordings were 48
killer Hertz rather than the HPR's preferred 44.1 killer Hertz. Converting this would require more
post-processing using audio software to change it. It seems to offer no advantages over Nome Sound
Recorder on Ubuntu while making selecting sound sources more difficult. If you're using a
Nome Desktop, you are better off with Nome Sound Recorder. However, it is all a matter of personal
preference, and if you find that you like KDE Recorder better, then go ahead and use it.
Other alternatives. There are of course still other alternatives. Many people recommend using
Adacity to record. However, I don't know how to do that, and the premise of this podcast
episode is that you have something you would like to make an HPR episode of, but are put off
by the difficulty of learning how to do so. However, Adacity is a very capable audio program,
and I have nothing against it. I will describe how to use a feature in Adacity to help
overcome an audio problem that I encountered, but I will save that for another episode.
As well as GUI programs, there are also programs which allow you to record audio from the command
line. I will describe a couple of these in another episode. If you're wondering why you may
wish to use a command line program for this purpose, one of the advantages of this is that let's
us write scripts which automate the recording process and eliminate some of the manual steps
that I outlined above. Combining the segments into a single audio file. At this point,
you will have recorded your podcast episode as a series of several dozen flag files.
We will now stitch these separate black files into a single file. We do this using either
FFMPEG or SOx. FFMPEG is a series of command line programs for converting and manipulating
audio and video files. Various parts are licensed under the LGPLV 2.1 or later, and
GPLV 2.0 or later. Sox is also a set of command line programs, but for audio only,
SOx stands for sound exchange. Sox, that's SOx, is licensed under similar terms as FFMPEG. In fact,
SOx actually uses FFMPEG for certain operations. For our purposes here, with one exception,
you can do everything audio related with either FFMPEG or SOx, except for one thing which I will
get into in another episode. That one thing is related to doing some gratuitous hackery when
analyzing audio files, so it may be irrelevant to anything you need to do. Since the two are
more or less equivalent for our purposes, I will be providing examples using both.
Combining audio segments. The best way to combine multiple audio segments is with a simple shell
script. A copy of this will be in the show notes. Doing this with FFMPEG requires just two lines.
First, create the list file. Print F, space, double quote, file, space, single quote,
percent S, single quote, backslash n, double quote, space, left square bracket, 0-9,
right square bracket, left square bracket, 0-9, right square bracket, dot FLAC, space,
then right angle bracket, or right arrow, however you want to describe it, space,
podseglist dot TXT. This first line creates a file called podseglist dot TXT,
which contains a list of all the two digit numbered flag files in the current directory,
together with some other necessary text. I have assumed you wish to give these files two digits.
Add more digits if you feel this is necessary. The file name podseglist dot TXT is
purely arbitrary and you can use whatever name you wish. Now we need to concatenate the files.
FFMPEG, space, dash F, space, concat, that's C-O-N-C-A-T, space, dash safe, that's S-A-F-E, space, 0, space, dash I, space,
podseglist dot TXT, space, full pod, dot FLAC. The second line calls FFMPEG,
does it to perform a concatenation operation, turning the multiple files listed in podseglist dot
TXT into one and saving it in a file called full pod, dot FLAC. Using socks, the socks
version is simpler. You do socks, the S-O-X, space, left square bracket, 0, dash 9, right square
bracket, left square bracket, 0, dash 9, right square bracket, dot FLAC, space, full pod, dot FLAC.
This will concatenate all the two digit numbered flag files in the current directory into one file
called full pod, dot FLAC. Revealing. Next you need to review your combined audio file.
Listen to the resulting file. If you are satisfied with it, you are done recording and are ready to upload.
If you're unhappy about some part of it, you can rerecord just that section and run the combining
script again. The numbers in your script will help you find the appropriate file.
The people running HPR will worry about adding your introductory and concluding music, converting
it to mono if it is currently stereo and adjusting the output level to make the volume consistent with
other HPR episodes. If there are noise problems that you want to try to correct, I will cover that
in another episode in this series. Prepare the show notes. You will need to have a few things
ready when you go to upload your episode. These are the title, summary, tags and show notes.
The title should be something short but descriptive. If this episode is part of a series,
you probably want to use a consistent title and include an episode number. Next you need a summary.
This is a brief description of what the episode is about. Try to be clear about what it is you
will be talking about. However, there are limits on the length of the summary. The limit was 100
characters at the time that I was writing this. The title in summary will be automatically added
by HPR to the beginning of your episode, so put some thought into what you're right here.
The title in summary are read out by a text to speech program, so avoid difficult abbreviations
or words at the software may not know how to pronounce. Next you will need to pick some tags.
These are used for search purposes. I will let someone else recommend how you should pick tags.
Next, you need to have show notes. If you have written a script, you can simply copy
based a whole thing into the show notes. At one time, there was a limit on the size of the show notes,
but that limit was removed recently. Uploading the episode, I will let someone else describe the
process of uploading the audio file and associated title summary and show notes. However,
you will need to have an email address ready to use as part of the process. So if you have
multiple email accounts, you need to set along which one will be used as your HPR contact address.
Conclusion. The preceding is how I created my first two podcast episodes,
which were on OAuth tool and the UCSDP system operating system. Plenty of people wrote in to say
that they liked them. Nobody complained about the quality of my narration or the technical quality
of the audio. You should be able to do the same. Further episodes in this series, I have covered
the basics, but there is more that we can do to improve the audio quality if you are so inclined,
or if you encounter an audio problem. In future episodes of this series, I will cover the following.
Basic filtering with FFMPEG and SOx to cover general cases. It's a good idea to use this sort of
basic filtering on your audio, whether you notice any problems or not. DSing to improve perceived
voice quality slightly in order to overcome sound artifacts inherent to using at least some microphones.
Normalizing audio to adjust the sound levels for easier reviewing.
Analyzing the audio signal with audacity to discover the characteristics of an E Noise Problems that
you may hear. Advanced filtering with FFMPEG and SOx to solve specific problems such as I had with
my headset, or which you may have with environmental noise such as fans. Command-line recording
and playing a audio using FFMPEG and SOx. This can help automate the process by automatically
numbering this small audio files, which are part of the recording process which I have described.
I promise some gratuitous hackery and I will provide it in the form of describing how to do
audio spectrum analysis using LibreOffice CalExpreadsheets and GNU Octave Mathematical Software
in place of audacity when troubleshooting audio problems. This concludes the first episode in a
4 part series on simple podcasting.
You have been listening to the Hacker Public Radio podcast, at hackerpublicradio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording a podcast, then visit the HPR site to find out how easy it really is.
Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by anhonesthost.com, the Internet Archive, rsync.net, and the HPR Community Content Delivery Network.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
hpr_transcripts/hpr4609.txt
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Episode: 4609
Title: Proper Date Format
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4609/hpr4609.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:15:05 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4609, for 2026-04-02
Today's show is entitled, "Proper Date Format"
The host is Ahuka and the duration is 00:07:19
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "There is only one logical date format"
You are listening to a show from the Reserve Q. This show was submitted in February 2025 to cover
occasions like this, where there are gaps in the schedule. Hello, this is Ahuka welcoming you to
Hacker Public Radio and another exciting episode. And this is from the Reserve Q. So this particular
show is what I'm calling proper date format. Now, one of the things you quickly run into if you
correspond with people who are both in the United States and Europe, which I have done both in my
career as well as in my personal life, is that we don't write dates the same way. I know when I was
working as a project manager for Ford, you know, we had operations in Europe. And so many of my
projects, I had to work with people there. And, you know, thing about project management is, you know,
dates and times are extremely important when you're managing a project. And the thing that we ran into,
and, and now, of course, you know, my personal life, I run into it as well, because like, you know,
I'm involved with doing shows for Hacker Public Radio, and that's got people all over the world
listening. So I think we all know how this works. Now, we'll start with March 14th. Now, in the United
States, we like to say March 14th is Pi Day. And why is it Pi Day? Because in the United States, it is written
as 3 slash 14, 314. And we know Pi starts 3.14. So in the United States, that seems like a clever
little thing. Now, people in Europe would look at that and say, why do you think there is a 14th
month to the year? Now, suppose you want to make a joke about May the 4th. Okay, and that's Star Wars
Day, as in May the 4th be with you. In the US, we would write that as 5 slash 4. But in most of
Europe, it would be 4 slash 5. And it can be even more complicated once you drag in the rest of the
world. There is simply no uniformity. You can see it with, there's a page on Wikipedia, I've put a link to
that in the show notes, that basically shows you the date formats for every country in the world.
And it's just, there's no consistency, no uniformity at all. And we're not even consistent in how we talk
about dates. Now, in the United States, we might well say May 4th, as that does indeed match how we
write dates. But then we will insist that our Independence Day is the 4th of July. Almost like
we're not a British colony any longer, but let's use their date format for one of our most important
dates. Now, in my experience, each side thinks the other is a bit odd, but regards it as a harmless
eccentricity. But which side is correct in this? The answer, of course, is neither. The one absolutely
correct date format has been defined, and you can find it in the ISO 8601 standard, and I've put a
link in the show notes if you want to look that one up. The correct date format is four-digit year,
followed by two-digit month, followed by two-digit day, because that puts the elements of the date in
a logical order. Now, why is this the logical order? Well, suppose you were filing documents by date.
Would you start by putting all the documents from the fourth day, without regard to month or year,
into a group? Or would you first collect all documents for a given year?
Now, you might argue that filing documents is something people don't do as much of these days.
We have computers and digital documents. We don't need any stinking filing cabinets.
But that only strengthens my argument, as you can easily verify. For example, I'm writing this on
February 13th, 2025. If I use a date code for my digital file, and I make it 02132025,
what happens if I later create a file on, say, January 6th, 2026? That would then be 01062026.
Try this, and you will see that in your file manager, 01062026 will appear before 02132025,
because all computers treat the significance of digits from left to right. The most significant
always on the left, the least significant always on the right. Also, when you take a look at this,
you see why it is necessary to have two digits for month and day. You say, well, you know,
if I can write May the 4th is 5-4, why do I need 0-5-0-4? Well, try it, and you will discover
that you need that 0 for things to come in the right order. If you don't do that, then you're
going to get things that are going to go 1, 10, 11, 12, 2, 3. It's just, that's what happens.
So, you know, there's a reason for all of these. Now, with the ISO 8601 standard, the most significant
part of the date is on the left, and all of your files will be in order. And once you get used to it,
your life is easier. An example of this is photos. Now, my wife and I like to travel. We're retired,
and we can do that. And we take a lot of photos using our smartphones. And every photo we take
uses date, time stamps as part of the file name. And the dates all follow the ISO 8601 standard.
So, I can easily sort my photos in the order in which they were taken. And since I have over 13,000
photos in my Flickr Pro account, a little help with sorting them is really nice. I now use this
format not just for digital file names, but for most of my dating purposes. It really just makes sense.
And I hope you will also see the sense in this and adopt the ISO 8601 standard. So, this is a hookah
for Hacker Public Radio, signing off, and as always, encouraging you to support free software.
And since this is coming from the reserve queue, I'm also going to encourage you to record a show.
This is a community project, and it will only exist as long as people record shows for it.
So, bye-bye.
You have been listening to the Hacker Public Radio podcast, at hackerpublicradio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording a podcast, then visit the HPR site to find out how easy it really is.
Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by anhonesthost.com, the Internet Archive, rsync.net, and the HPR Community Content Delivery Network.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
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Episode: 4610
Title: Playing Civilization V, Part 10
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4610/hpr4610.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:15:05 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4610, for 2026-04-03
Today's show is entitled, "Playing Civilization V, Part 10"
The host is Ahuka and the duration is 00:18:16
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "We continue our look at the game mechanics of Civilization V."
Hello, this is a hookah welcoming you to Hacker Public Radio and another exciting episode in our ongoing series on computer strategy games
And we are still taking a look at civilization five and we've just got a few more topics to cover before we go into playing a game and
Illustrating all of these things
So the first thing I want to talk about is great people
And there are various kinds of great people that you get in this game and you get them by accumulating great person points
Each type of great person has its own type of great person point and they are earned independently
So you can easily accumulate points for several different types of great people at the same time
Now you can earn these points through specialists through wonders
And through social policies
While you can accumulate points towards any and all great people you should focus on once that fit your game strategy
If you're going for a domination victory you should focus on great generals and great adbrills and
Preference to great artists and great musicians
But if you're going for a cultural victory you might want to reverse that
Now that is not to say you won't gain a few random other great people along the way just that you should know what you're trying to achieve
And great generals and great adbrills are a little different in that you earn them by winning battles
Now as an example in the game we're going to look at after this episode
Where I was going for a diplomatic victory. I had a couple of great generals. I earned along the way. I had no use for them
I never fought a single battle against any other player in the game throughout the entire game
So I happen to you know
Get a couple of great generals, but you know, I just parked them somewhere and had them sleep throughout the game
Because I didn't need them
So what are the types of great people?
Great artist
A great artist can start a golden age or it can create great works
We've talked about golden ages
If you feel the need to start one, you know, that's a good use for a great artist
If you're going for a culture victory, I'm not sure that's the best way to go
I think that creating a great works would
Advance you a little more towards that goal particularly with ones you earn early in the game
Because you know, it can add up over time
Great musician
Can do a concert tour which adds to your tourism or can create a great work
In this case a great work of music a
Great writer can write a political treat us which gives you
a
lump sum of culture or it can create a great work of writing
That will add to your culture per turn
A great engineer can hurry production
Including wonders this is the only way you can rush build a wonder in this game is by using a great engineer
If you don't need to use the great engineer for that the other thing they can do is create something called a mania factory
That adds to your productive capacity capabilities
A great general you know if you're going to be fighting battles their handy because they give you a combat combat bonus to any unit within two tiles
Or you can use it to create a citadel and one of the interesting things a great general can do when creating a citadel
The steel land from one of your neighbors
Now they don't like it, but
There's nothing they can do about it other than go to war with you
Now
Angolia has a unique unit called the con that creates
It replaces the great general it moves faster and heels adjacent units and can also create a citadel
Now there's a great merchant
Great merchant can do a trade mission and what that means is you go to a
city state any city state that you want to
You go to and it would the trade mission will give you gold and it will add to your influence with that city state
So what you do is you move the great merchant to the city state territory and then trigger the trade mission
Now Venice has a unique unit called the merchant of Venice which creates which replaces the the great merchant
Now
An additional 100% gold
An additional 100% influence
Or it can even puppet a city state
And what puppeting means is that
You have control of the city state to the extent that you control all of its units and it's considered to be part of your territory
But you don't control the build queue of the city
Now you could also use the merchant of Venice to create a customs house just as you can with any great merchant
Great scientist
Can hurry research
If you want to get just a lump sum of
Research points where you've created an academy that gives you an additional per turn now
I probably early in the game would almost always go for creating an academy because it gives you a little extra every turn
That can add up over time
But if you're at the very end of the you know if you're in the modern era
Chance is are you never enough time to really benefit all that much from an academy and so getting a
Big lump of research is probably a better approach
Great admiral gives a combat bonus to naval units within two tiles and can repair adjacent naval and embarked units
And finally great profit
Can found or enhance a religion
Can spread religion or can create a holy site
Now every type except a great admiral can create something but that uses up the great person
And the main action for each also uses up the great person for instance if you do a concert tour
Hurry production
etc
So you need to consider which one works best for you
So
As I said before like with the great scientist early on academy
Great use in great scientist
You know by the time you're hitting the modern era
Probably just makes more sense to get a big bang
From the hurting the research
Now if there's a key wonder you need to make your strategy work having a great engineer on hand or hurry it up can pay off very nicely
You know it really sucks if you're
Really counting on getting a particular great wonder you've started building it and you're getting almost there and suddenly
Someone else finished it and
You know yeah, so I
Having great engineer on hand
It's just it's a useful thing to have for that
Now the next topic one to talk about is trade
So in civilization five the amount of gold you are in from terrain is much lower than in previous versions of silk
So the path to a full treasury requires that you set up trade routes
You have a limited number of trade slots available but that limit does grow over time
You can earn slots in two ways the first is through discovering text
For instance in the ancient era
Animal husbandry and sailing
Can do that in the classical era discovering engineering
In medieval era discovering the compass
In the Renaissance era discovering banking
In the industrial era discovery biology
In the modern era discovering the railroad and in the atomic era discovering penicillin
So just from keeping up your research you can get up to eight trade routes
In addition the wonders classes and Petra each provide an additional trade route
What does that tell you? Well
That tells you that if your strategy is based on getting a lot of gold
Those should be wonders that you would target because those additional trade routes
And you know you're talking about fairly early wonders here
So getting those means you're gonna get trade routes that are gonna be generating gold for you throughout the entire game
So for instance if your strategy is to go after
Well, let's say a diplomatic victory is is one that gold is really key for
You know you might want to take a look at doing that not doesn't mean that if you don't get those wonders
You can't win a diplomatic victory. There's you can do any number of things in this game if you're skillful with it
Now you can also establish a trade route with your own cities with city states and with other empires
Trade routes are always city to city and are limited by distance
So it can make sense sometimes to move your trade unit to a different city
The city that produce the unit will always be where it shows up first
But you can transfer it to another city on its first turn
Now if it's a cargo ship it can only be placed on a coastal city
But it can bring a desired destination city within range
Note that for land units
Caravans in the early game
You can increase the range by building roads which kind of makes sense
Now what about the effects of trade
You know your major reason for doing it is to get gold no question about that
But there can also be science, culture and religious effects so it's worth paying attention here
So even if gold is the main object you may have several options that provide equivalent amounts of gold
And a potential gain of science or culture might be the tiebreaker depending on what your strategy for victory is
If you establish a trade route with the city state you can receive gold
Provide religious pressure to convert them to your religion and gain influence with them
This can be very helpful if you're going for a diplomatic victory
But I would not accept a large difference in gold just for that minor influence game
You gain far more influence with gold in the long run
So I tend to start with get the maximum amount of gold and then if I've of two cities providing equivalent amounts of gold for the trade route
Then I look to well all right can I get a little science or a little culture in addition
Now setting up trade between your cities
Which is an option can be helpful in giving a boost to a city because you you're consent them food in production
Now in the earlier phases of the game that might be a good idea to get a city up to fold an element
The city where the route originates does not lose anything
But some added amount shows up in the destination city
However for food trade to happen you need to have a granary in each city and
For a production to be transferred you need to have a workshop in each city
Finally
Plundering trade routes can be plundered by empires you are at war with
more often by barbarians when that happens
The route disappears and you need to build another trade unit and set up another route
Now
Plundering a route
Simply means you lose the route it doesn't mean you lose the capacity the number of trade routes you have
That you're allowed to have doesn't change
Now the last thing we want to talk about is who are you gonna play as?
There are 43 possible civilizations in Civ 5 so I am not gonna discuss them all in depth here
I've got a link in the show notes to the Civ wiki for a chart that shows them all
What I want to do instead is discuss why they are different and how you should make choices
Depending on the victory type you're choosing
Of course if you let the game make the choice few randomly
Well knowing what each Civ is good for can help you determine what type of strategy to pursue for your best chance of victory
Now the first thing to know about each Civ is that they have a starting bias for where they will spawn at the beginning of the game
And this can be either positive or negative
Either you are more likely to spawn in certain terrain or less likely to spawn in certain terrain
England which is a naval power will be biased to spawn on the coast
Where as Egypt a famously desert country will have a negative bias to avoid jungler forest locations
Second all Civs have one or more unique abilities
For example the Carthaginians have two abilities that come from history
The first is Phoenician heritage which means that all coastal cities get a free harbor
And once they have earned a great general their military units can cross mountain tiles and they're the only ones that can do this
All right, obviously that's an echo of Hannibal crossing the Alps
The French have the city of light ability which grants double-theming bonuses for museums and wonders that are in the capital
Third each Civ has a unique unit
These units replace one of the regular units in the game but are enhanced in some way
Spain has two of these the first the Turcio replaces the musket man
But it has a plus 50% bonus against mounted units and an increased melee strength making it a combination of musket man and Pikeman
The other unit the conquistador replaces the night, but it has some interesting abilities
It can move after attacking if it still has movement points
Embarked units have double defense it can see two tiles further and has no penalty when attacking cities
Finally the conquistador unit can be used to establish a city although it uses up that unit
So it can function as a settler
Finally most but not all civs have unique building or improvement
As with units these tend to replace ordinary buildings and improvements but offer something better
A rabia for instance has the bizarre which replaces the marketplace
But it provides an additional two-gold to return more than the marketplace
It adds one additional copy of each improved luxury resource near the city
and provides plus two gold for each oasis and each source of well
Now what you need to consider is how all these unique
Attributes of a sieve will fit into your strategy
And timing matters the American sieve has a unique unit of the b7 team bomber
That's a nice unit, but it comes very late in the game
If you're going to go for a domination victory
That's not going to really help you probably have mostly conquered the world by the time that becomes available
But the Roman units of the balista and the legion are excellent for an early campaign of conquest
Now for a trade-oriented strategy
Portugal is excellent as all of its unique attributes help with generating trade and gold and gold is the key to
Many possible paths to victory
So keep these points in mind as you plan your strategy
And to illustrate all of things we have been discussing in the civilization five series
I will play a game where I aim for a diplomatic victory and I'll make a few mistakes along the way
But you know, it will still illustrate
How the game can be played and and I do end up winning
So that'll be coming up next so this is Huka for hacker public radio signing off and as always encouraging you to support free software. Bye. Bye. Bye
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording podcast, click on our upload link
to find out how easy it is.
Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by an AnHonestHost.com, the Internet Archive,
rsync.net, and our mirror network.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
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Episode: 4611
Title: HPR Community News for March 2026
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4611/hpr4611.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:15:09 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4611, for 2026-04-06
Today's show is entitled, "HPR Community News for March 2026"
The host is HPR Volunteers and the duration is 01:00:43
The flag is Explicit, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "HPR Volunteer Ken talks about shows released and comments posted in March 2026"
Hi everybody, my name is Ken Fallon and you're listening to another episode of Hacker Public Radio.
This is the HPR Community News for March 2026.
I'm on my ownio today due to scheduling issues that we couldn't work around, but bear with me and we will make it through.
If you would prefer not to hear just my dulcet tones on this podcast, you can always volunteer to be part of the HPR Community News.
If you are part of the HPR Community, so HPR is a community podcast where the shows are released every weekday, Monday through Friday.
They can be any topic that is of interest to hackers within reason and no restriction on the length or the content outside of that.
We'll be talking about that later.
So this show is put on by the HPR Community volunteers who help manage the project commonly known as the janitors.
And the reason for that is because we just implement decisions that are implemented by the mailing list, which is the overall governing body.
If you want more information on that, go to the above page and you'll get loads of information on how you're governed.
We do this show so that we can bring to you the news and some positive feedback in the show that has been released and we can bring to you any other information that we need to share with you as part of the community.
So it is left the honour of welcoming new hosts is left to me, but it's not much of an honour this month because we didn't have any new hosts this month.
It is a bit sad and depressing, really.
HPR is a community project where we can only continue if we continue to get new hosts in.
And the reason for that is that there is a cycle and life catches up with people in more ways than one.
And we need a continual inflow to manage the outflow of people who are no longer active on the project for whatever reason.
And that's fine.
So if you haven't recorded a show for HPR and you do listen to it, please go pick the first free slot, record your show first, and then tell us a little bit about yourself, how you got into tech.
Don't forget to introduce yourself and how you got into tech and how you got to be listening to the HPR podcast.
Awesome to hear.
We will then be able to give you an entire list of other shows that you could do for HPR.
Let's go through each of the shows.
And the first one was, oddly enough, HPR Community News for February 2026.
And we try and do the Community News on the first Monday of the month.
It's not always the first.
It's somewhere between one and six by definition.
Two comments.
The first was from CandyK and Egy.
4140, thanks for the best wishes.
Things got much worse.
Ooh.
WhiskeyJack says,
HPR Community News discussion on audio.
In HPR 4586, Community News for February at around the 50-minute mark, you talked about automating the audio process for HPR.
I have a four-part series ready to go, which may be relevant to some of this.
Episode two, covering the basics of filtering, de-essing, normalizing, using FFMPEG in a shell script.
I was planning to release this as soon as my present series on nuclear reactor technology was done.
There's one more episode in that schedule.
I'm definitely not an audio expert, but I am only started learning about this in order to fix audio problems that were in the first few HPR episodes that I did.
I listened to the Linux Matters podcast that you referred to with respect to the automation processing software, so I have some of an idea of what they're talking about.
I do have some concerns about the practical problems that may arise when dealing with episodes sent in by just anybody using all sorts of hardware, however.
I had assumed that you were already doing some sort of normalizing for HPR, as the volume levels are fairly consistent.
In fact, I emphasize to listeners in the series to send a non-normalized copy to HPR, so as not to conflict with whatever processing you're doing.
Perhaps someone at HPR could do an episode to talk about it in the community news, explaining what HPR actually does in terms of audio processing, as that may help in generating some discussion as well as interest on its own right.
So, end of comment, end of comment, end of comments for that episode.
First of all, I think in one of the New Year episodes, I went through what we do with audio processing, so that is coming up.
So, it's one of the later ones, because it was the morning after, the night before.
So, you might have a listen to that.
I do intend to do that sort of thing, but I'm still checking to see if what Martin has produced is going to be useful for us.
It's a tricky balance here on what we do with audio processing.
Some people, the audiophiles among us, will have done an awful lot of work, and we don't want to do too much.
On the other hand, if it's all over the shop, we will tend to do something to try and fix the audio a little.
And I basically make that decision looking at the waveform and looking at the frequency diagram.
So, that was the first episode.
Moving on.
Unix Curio number one, Shell Archives.
This was from Vance.
Brilliant little series.
I am loving it.
I have to say I'm going ahead.
But I follow the future feed.
As soon as shows are posted, by the way, they get released into the future feed.
There are some dangers with that if you're listening.
As your only feed, I subscribe to both.
But it is nice if you could do that for us, because you might be able to pick up issues with the audio.
Like, yeah, I don't know, 10 minutes of silence or something in there.
Or at the left, it's only in your left ear of blood or something like that.
Always very useful.
And then you can give feedback to us here as the janitors before it goes out en masse.
So, I have been listening to all these shows already.
This was a great one.
And there was several comments.
Archer72 says, continuing series.
Hi, Vance.
I have kept this series.
I've kept this series, the future feed, so I can hear it sooner.
Same here.
Oh, I have just now looked at your great show notes.
Cheers.
Archer72.
And the show notes are absolutely excellent.
It is a joy to see them.
Everything works exactly as you expect.
There's even uppercase.
Everything is, they're just gorgeous.
X-Man Monk says, UU encode and UU decode on Solaris.
I worked with the infamous Inference Corporation years ago when they still existed.
And the corporate servers ran Solaris.
I can't recall which version they were running when I was there.
That server had UU encode and UU decode on it.
It's, I may not have been installed by the OS, but it was there.
Someone put it there.
So I know it at least ran on Solaris, which wouldn't require much more than compilation
of the sources.
Anyway, great show.
Thank you very much.
Vance replies, thanks, and Solaris.
I appreciate the positive comments.
Regarding Solaris and SunOx and OS and AIX, I don't recall exactly how it determined
that UU encode wasn't included with base OS.
Probably a set of man pages online somewhere.
Of course, you could be easy to compile and install UU encode from source, and I'm sure
it happened frequently.
Similarly, it was common for GNU versions of some utilities to be installed by people
using commercial Unix systems because they often had additional capability.
More episodes are coming.
Hope you enjoy them.
And the last comment was from Jim DeVore, who says, thanks for the trip down memory lane.
Great episode.
I especially enjoyed Char and remember all the issues I once had with attachment.
I still have them at times, but that is generally due to security forbidding executable file types.
Uh-huh, Jim.
Uh-huh, I know what you're doing there.
Okay.
Good shows.
Good shows.
Moving on.
Uh-huh, Belgian Scottish Ale.
There were no comments on this one, but this was about, um, the continuing series of the
HBR Beer Garden, where Kevi and Dave discuss, in this case, Belgian Scotch Ales.
And I have to admit that I got one of these for purposes, uh, for scientific research.
And I must say, I wasn't, that, it was the experience, the, the, the joy of drinking along.
Uh, that was nice.
Great history lessons.
Loved the references to the World War II and, uh, uh, sorry, World War I, obviously.
And, uh, Scottish troops in Flanders.
However, um, how would that become a thing?
So, great episode there.
Loving the series.
Um, so, moving on.
And the following day, we had a gap in the, in the schedule.
So, we popped in one of these episodes.
And with the hookah's permission, I removed the, his reserve cue warning, uh, that he had embedded in the audio.
We'll be talking more about that later.
And I think this was the last in this series, actually, um, quite a nice mix of historical episodes, cruises, and scientific and history.
So, um, as ever, a very good idea.
And I really enjoy that.
And there are a few channels that I've managed to subscribe to more or less at each of these.
Thank you very much.
The following day, we had, uh, a hookah again.
And the rule, this was a scheduled show, whereas the reserve cue one was inserted.
So, obviously, the rule about not having 14 days in between, uh, or, sorry, 10 shows in between.
Doesn't apply in this case.
This is about, uh, playing Civilization V and Part IX and looking at the game mechanics.
In this case, various different types of city-states, um, managing the relations between city-states, uh, and that you can be neutral or not.
So, this is a, uh, this is a nice one.
Uh, I'm getting to understand the game.
Don't really have the free time in order to be doing it, but, uh, there you go.
The following day, we had Lee with a bit of Git, where he relates a Git adventure that occurred while working on, uh, a work logging project and doing rebases and dangers of.
So, this is, um, an extension to the Git, um, series that Tlatoo started.
And walks through the various different commands.
And basically, this shows, uh, describes the caveats that you might run into.
Candy Kane-Eater says,
Anecdotal teaching is the best kind.
I think that the way you explained all these features using a real story and going through your thought process,
while weaving explanations for each command is an interesting way to teach the program.
I found the story interesting and learned a lot about Git that I didn't know about.
There you go.
Thank you very much, Candy Kane-Eater, for doing that, uh, for posting the comments.
Comments are indeed currency by which we pay our hosts.
Um, the next day we had Antoine with, uh, Happy by Shower 2, which was the second part of the mini-series.
And Candy Kane-Eater here said,
Interesting.
I think that hearing about what other people do in their day-to-day life is extremely interesting.
And wouldn't mind a third episode.
In particular, the idea of learning how to share things I sometimes struggle with.
Since outside of sharing drawings and stuff I've made, it's difficult.
Best of luck to you.
Antoine replies,
Happy that this was in some measure good for you.
Sharing is difficult, especially what is relevant to us.
Which is irrelevant to others who make us shameful for having difficult priorities, needs, and tastes.
Or simply because we're afraid not only of being mocked, but worse, not being understood, ignored.
My vision only, my fears, barriers, block me to others and others to me.
But it's good to remember or to learn the lessons that we are different.
Sharing, drawing feels interesting.
Might see in some of your work, actually.
Moving back on to hardcore science here.
Nuclear reactor technology, part 8.
Generating generation 4 reactors.
Future reactor technologies, particularly that are referred to as generation 4 by, of course, Whiskey Jack.
There were two comments to this episode.
Jim DeVore says,
As an engineer and an insatiable curiosity about too many topics, I love the series overview that I doubt I can find anywhere else.
And Whiskey Jack replies,
Thank you for the encouragement.
Always helps to know that people are actually listening to this episode.
A number of listeners have posted questions about topics covered in the series,
and I've promised to answer them with a follow-up episode.
I have the script written for the follow-up and will record it early April and currently has about 20 minutes of content.
Currently have a couple of episodes uploaded for slots in April,
and non-related series will post follow-up episodes after the second one in the new series.
That means it should be out in late April.
If anyone has any questions that they would like me to address,
please post them in the comments to any of the episodes in the series.
And then we had the New Year's episode part two.
And as always, the show notes are fantastic.
I even had to download, there's no comments to this episode, but, you know, go to it yourself.
I downloaded a cool browser tag called Open All Links for this one,
which got me banned from Wikipedia because there's so many links from Wikipedia.
You know, a four or nine, it'll clear us up after.
But great episode and great work to the team there for putting those show notes together.
Operator talks about water, water everywhere, talks about various water-related things,
generally water measures and where they're located and how they're protected.
It's kind of interesting, actually.
I wouldn't have minded show notes, but I would have liked to see a few photographs of those, actually, Operator,
because, again, as we say, not all the listening audience are familiar with the things that you're talking about.
It became clear as you were going through it in the ground and stuff.
But here we have the water meters that are either inside the house or they're, in our case,
the old style was that they would be in a concrete sort of basin that is outside in your garden.
So maybe I need to do a show about that.
There were no comments on that one.
And the next show was me adding voiceover audio tracks, creating, using, created, using text-to-speech movie subtitles.
Three comments.
First one was from Fokie.
Interesting solution, but annoying.
Thank you for the interesting show.
I can say, Fokie, how encouraging it was to find that as the first comment.
But I know, Fokie, you've been on here on the show, so I know it's coming from a good place.
Anyway, interesting solution, but annoying.
Thank you for your interesting show.
Great how you solved all the issues, but I won't use it.
I remember seeing these films, TV sets in Poland, while buying things.
I always thought, how can they stand with this annoying voice distracting them?
Luckily, it often were done so proper, so I didn't even understand the original voices.
And you're right, it's worse when the original language is the language you understand.
Which case is the example you used?
I used a Swedish example, and Fokie's from Sweden, or speak Swedish at least.
Which, in this case, was the example used?
Especially because the male voice in Swedish is mumbling a bit.
Karsten says, an amazing project.
I love projects like this.
I might be doing it for K-dramas, but just a whole one can recycle elements of your scripts for other projects.
Great stuff, thanks.
Yep, absolutely feel free to cut and paste.
It's a proof of concept.
I much prefer if this was a built-in switch into FFMPEG, and it's only a matter of time.
It will be.
But, yeah, it was just basically a proof of concept.
10DK and Eater said, interesting.
I wouldn't personally use this, but I find it extremely crafty and cool the way you modify movies to your own enjoyment.
I also often forget that MPV supports multi-audio tracks, smiley face.
As an additional tip to improve the watching experience on MPV, you can define a global subtitle folder with subfile path and name the SRT file with the same audio file, or use audio sub dash sub dash audio equals fuzzy to make the subtitles matching more lenient.
It should be loaded by default along with your original file.
Yeah, I think I even mentioned that in the show, but good tip.
MPV is awesome.
And, yeah, I really enjoyed that show.
Took me a long while to do it.
Following day, we had Unix Curial Part 2, FGREP.
And this one was one that I was not aware of.
And it basically FGREP, EGREP, and FGREP, and explains the use cases.
And I posted the first comment.
And the comment title is Time to Active Use.
And the answer is Length of My Commute.
I immediately put it into a script and did exactly what I wanted to do.
Dan Drew says, nice job explaining asterisk CREP terms.
Done a great job of explaining when to use each type of CREP.
I thought in-house class and regular expressions and your explanations would have helped the crew know why there are different versions.
Anyway, thanks for keeping Unix alive.
Candy K. Neesha says, informative.
I've always brushed off EGREP and FGREP as niche tools, but this episode inspired me to use it more often.
Thanks for providing another tool in my tool.
As a general CREP tip, you can use the dot to avoid escaping certain patterns in the shell, i.e. if your pattern has a space.
The dot might be a period in some countries.
Vance says, expressions.
Thanks for the encouragement, everyone.
It is indeed weird that there are two types of regular expressions.
I guess three, if you count Perl-compatible rejects.
On top of that, the shell pattern matching glob notation does the same type of job in a different way.
I guess that is the result of tools being developed by different people at different times.
The following day, we had Shane with recording good audio using open source tools and has basically a lot of tips and tricks.
Very well worth listening to if you're starting out.
And also makes it clear that while HPR will accept any audio, we do prefer good audio.
But on the other hand, as I've always said, and I have not always said, I like bad audio.
I do not like bad audio.
Of all the people here, I don't like bad audio.
If we can hear it, that's good enough.
That's the barrier for people starting out.
We will encourage people to do better.
I love good audio.
But what I don't like is somebody procrastinating for 19 months over an episode rather than just sending it in.
That's perfect.
Get in the way of practical.
Yeah.
So Archer72 says, great tips.
Hi, Shane.
Great tips on recording and how environment plays into recording quality.
I never knew the Blue Yeti was not worth it because it's been touted as professional podcaster.
Ken, I think this episode should be listed on the recording page.
Yes, Archer.
And you can edit the About page to include it.
The next comment was from Ol Almot, which says, GarageJam601.
I wrote a GNOME music studio recording software, GarageJam.
It records the USB audio class devices and built-in microphones instantly and can annotate metadata about them.
See, there's a link to the norm discourse as well as the project homepage for source code and the homepage is garagejam.org.
That is vagrant, blatant spamming of the network and the only way all that you can redeem yourself is coming on and recording a show about GarageJam.
And I'm saying winking.
So thank you for the feedback.
And good to know that there are other tools out there.
And yes, you should be promoting your stuff.
Although technically it was spam.
But I'm letting you away with it on the grounds that it's free Libre opens for a software.
Is it free Libre opens for a software?
Yes, it is.
I had already checked.
It's GNU GPL V3.
Excellent.
Well done.
So we'll leave it in there.
Next, we had a nice little episode by Dave about women in digital and game events, raising awareness of forthcoming events to encourage more women into digital and games.
Links in the show notes.
We're happy to share that sort of stuff here.
Other stuff we're happy to share is the first Doctor Part 5, continuing lock into Doctor Who.
And also this month, apparently, another episode has been found and the BBC are currently updating it.
So this one covers the Celestial Toymaker, the Gunfighters, Savages, the War Machines, the Smugglers, the Ten Planet.
And Kelly says, great series.
Hi, Ahuka.
That was a fascinating look at the first Doctor.
Looking forward to hearing the rest of the series.
I also went back and watched every episode.
There are some good constructions out there so that the story can be followed for the missing episode.
I hope that you change your mind and continue the series right up to the present Doctor.
Kevin says, I think I will.
Kevin O'Brien is a hooker.
Oh, no, I don't.
I think I will.
I'm now thinking I might just cover all the classic Doctor Who's and then stop.
I don't think there's any need to cover the revised series that began in 2005.
But then, but when did that become 20 years ago?
Can anyone stop this train?
Oh, I feel your pain.
Archer 72.
Great series and second continuation.
Hi, Ahuka and Kevi.
I seconded the request to keep the series going to the end.
Although I have not seen many episodes, this is an interesting series.
The next day, we had How to Be a Better Writer by Enestello.
And by taking apart a large language model style, we can learn how to be a better writer.
And some of the tips in there was make mistakes, edit yourself, and avoid ticks that are dangerously
close to becoming the norm.
And there were no responses as yet on that one.
We're approaching the end of the month.
So, obviously, it takes time for the comments to come in.
And then we had New Year's episode part three.
And there were no comments on that.
Although they were talking about a lot of stuff that I'm massively into.
Ham Radio, Echolink, ISS, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
So, the next episode, or possibly rant, was by Hopper MCS.
And it was entitled, On the Erosion of Freedom in Open Source Software.
Page Restrictions and what System76 did.
And Microsoft putting some code behind the firewall.
And yeah, there are quite some valid points in this episode.
So much so that I think it inspired another collaboration, which we shall hear soon.
No comments on that.
We then had quick tips for January 2026 by Operator.
And I did the show notes Operator so you didn't have to.
Using baking soda and superglue to get emery epoxy type seals.
I mean, there are lots of classic stuff.
How to blow out a candle.
Request for most shows in nursing.
Foam machine.
I just love these episodes.
They're just stuff.
The only downside is, without the show notes, I don't know what's in there.
So, I forget which episode they were in.
And then, the next day, we had one of the nicest episodes I've ever heard.
And that is Lee Lockstone's wifey poo.
Lee and Elisabeth get hitched.
This was something I knew they were engaged when we were over here in the Netherlands.
And I'm absolutely thrilled that they managed to tie the knot.
I hope everything goes well.
I give them my congratulations.
Elizabeth says, we appreciate your felicitations.
Trollocoster said, congrats.
And now, we want all the fun puns.
First off, congratulations.
Now, we're expecting follow-up episodes with all the nerdy jokes and puns that your friends
made about your nerdy wedding.
Antoine, smiley face.
Wow, what a show.
So, just coming by to give congratulations.
Dear couple, Lee and Al.
Claudia says, congratulations to you both.
Wow, congratulations to you both.
Wishing you all the best in your new journey together.
Paul Jay also says, congratulations.
Lee and Elisabeth, congratulations.
And thank you for sharing your joyous occasion with us.
Could you please share the reference to the poem Elisabeth read out?
I looked in the transcript, but it doesn't come through too clearly.
Best wishes for your life together in the future.
Paul.
So, from now on, when I'm promoting HPR, I'm going to be saying, yeah, you know, I'm not
saying, I'm not claiming all the credit for this.
But, you know, let's face it.
Two HPR hosts.
Get married on HPR.
What can we say?
What can we say?
Yeah.
If that's not unique enough for you, Wikipedia.
Anyway, congratulations to them both.
Couldn't happen to two nicer people there.
Absolutely a joy.
Couldn't have much.
Moving forward.
Next episode.
My nerdy childhood from floppy disk to dial-up dreams.
Throttle-coaster.
And this is about how he grew up.
I just loved the piece of this where he's talking about going into a computer shop.
They said, can you spend some time here?
And they thought, like, it was just going to be picking a computer for one day, but then
ended up spending it every Wednesday afternoon or something.
Fantastic.
Fantastic episode.
Trey says, trip down memory lane.
Thank you for this trip down memory lane.
Very much reminds me of my own experience during the time.
I believe that we had a certain set of skills for troubleshooting, for experimenting, and for
learning because we did not have the internet to look everything up.
This is what makes us happier.
We're hackers, not in the criminal sense, but like MIT and Hack 1 have defined it.
Hacker.
One who enjoys the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming limitations.
Hacker 1.
That's what's in the name.
Revealed from Hacker 1, and the link is there.
X-Man Monk says, great episode.
Ah, memories.
I'm a bit older, but I wanted to say that the sound effects in this episode brought back
all kind of memories.
Thanks for a great show.
Troller Coaster replies.
Back to you.
Hey, Trey.
Why don't you flip out the PDP 11 and show off your skills?
If you're into old school definition of hackers and you're frustrated that youngsters are spoiled,
make sure you pick up next week's episode on age verification.
If it will be the best thing ever.
X-Man Monk.
Glad you like the sound effects.
I had to edit out the occasional fart.
At a certain age, bowel movements are a thing.
But then again, luckily, podcasts don't also send this.
Troller Coaster says, note to janitors.
Hey, janitors.
I realize that you have to read my previous comment out loud.
May I suggest not to add sound effects to the comment?
Couldn't possibly.
I wasn't able to find a free Libra open source fart sound that I would approve of.
M says, nerdy nostalgia.
Great episode, Troller Coaster.
Really enjoyed this one.
Had me all nostalgic for the early days of computing.
I recorded HPR 1541 back in 2014.
Ding!
For a shameless plug, lol.
Where I covered my early days from computing and how it all led up to me coming to Linux.
I think that I made mention of BST as well.
And this reminds me of that.
Thanks for sharing.
The next day was Linux Curios Part 3.
Base names and der names.
Oh, these are vital, vital, my friend.
Yes, another Linux kernel article that he's picking on, but he's not ready.
Show notes are, as always, excellent.
And X-Man Monk says, great episode.
Love the Unix Curio series.
Thanks so much for always good to bash things as well as commands that are useful.
And that, I believe, was that for this month's shows.
So we did have a lot of comments on other episodes.
The first one was all the way back in 2022 by Zen Floater 2 Cars.
And Modessin says, additional details on cars.
I enjoyed your episode and appreciate you discussing cars on a HBR episode.
I want to point out that your facts on electric cars are inaccurate, as well as some of the details about charging infrastructure.
I have never encountered evidence of laws forcing you to replace an electric battery before selling cars.
The battery chemistry you cited was nickel-cadmium, but that is not what they're using.
They're using various lithium chemistries.
Also, most people are not depleting their battery capacity on a daily basis.
And 244 charging plug is more than adequate for most uses.
Thanks again for making the show.
Would be good to have some episodes on charging electric cars, cars in general and stuff.
We have a surprising lack of that, considering who we are.
This one was for a show released in March of last year.
A radically transparent computer without complex BLSI by Mark Abel.
And Mark himself says, a new online home for Doug 36 and Doug 18.
Many links in this episode that he did back then broke due to the location of the Doug House, new US-based non-profit.
Doug 36 is alive and well and lives at htbsdoug.org.
And Doug House has also broken ground on Doug 18, an 18-bit transparency functioning host card-sized processor for applications where a full CPU will be overkill.
As with the Doug 36, Doug 18 does not employ any complex VLSI, no microtrocessor, FPGA, PLD, AISC, or DRAM architecture.
And I've asked Mark to send me an updated show notes where he did.
So that's been updated in the meantime.
And the following comment is on how I use Newsboat for podcasts and Reddit by Archer72.
And there was an ongoing discussion there about the podcast download format that was.
And Ahmed says that it is not fixed, alas, the cast.
Hello, Ken.
I'm sorry for the late reply.
I just listened to Jan and December's news a few days ago.
No, the problem did not get fixed.
I don't think that it would be fixed on the HPR website since I use WGET to download the episodes.
It does get properly named to HPR MP.
Yeah, I've been looking into that one.
It's a bit of a complex one, all right.
And we'd love to hear your introduction to tech episode.
And the next comment was on a show from November 2025, HPR Beer Garden 5, Hefenweizen.
And Khan Amann said that the word Hefeweizen does not exist in German.
The correct compound noun is Hefeweizen from Hefe, yeast and Weizen, wheat.
However, there are words Hefeweizen, oats and Weizen, some synonyms like wise men, manners to indicate, that do not have any relationship with beer.
The word Hefeweizen does not exist in German.
It does exist in English.
It's a female cow.
A female calf.
Kevin says, thanks, Dan.
Thank you for pointing this out.
I have noticed the Speerlinger and I shall attempt to get it sorted out.
He did indeed.
And we got it sorted.
So, the next one we had was on the episode from January, Nutri-Reactors episode 4, Less Common Reactor Types.
First comment was from Antoine.
I said, we are, where are the designs patented?
Hi, Whiskeyjack.
Nice episode.
You said AGR based on Magonyx was a Nutri-Reactor type that does sell well outside of the UK.
I started thinking, if it were, is possible for another country to develop it by themselves based on that project,
or if it had, has a commercial restriction for exploration of the technology.
I've yet to listen to the following episodes of Doing So Little by Little.
I may learn better on the choices, but I felt free to present the question to you now.
Thanks.
Whiskeyjack says in reply to Antoine.
One, yes, there are a number of patents on commercial nuclear technology.
However, most of the basic principles were discovered early on, and any early patents had expired by the term nuclear power had been exploded commercially and on a widespread scale.
I'm currently in the process of recording a follow-up episode to this series.
I will add your questions to the script, as I think it offers an opportunity to address specific topics.
So listen to that episode for more details.
Antoine says, thanks, Whiskeyjack, for the information.
I will do my best to catch up on the question and answers.
So the next one was on HBR Beer Garden 9, Barley Wine, and Al Ailman says,
I've had HBR in my feed for a long time.
Always hopeful something will spark.
Then you two come up with Big Garden, and you like what I like.
I'm writing from Oklahoma, where the state legislator funded her Senate campaign with money from the liquor distributors in exchange for monopoly control over what we drink.
But I think before the law changed, I actually had some scotch silly.
Anyway, really enjoy your shows.
On data processing retrospective with Lee, Archer72 has a comment, previous generation.
Hi, Lee.
I wish more people would record thoughts on the previous generations, not only about tech, but about life outside the subject.
Then on thorium reactors, we had four comments.
First, Archer72, interesting series.
Hi, Whiskeyjack.
Thanks for the series.
I've been listening with interest to each one.
And Whiskeyjack replies, thank you for the feedback.
The last episode is coming up on the 11th of March, episode 4593.
If anyone has any questions related to the topics, contact me, and I'll do a follow-up episode.
I have another series on a completely unrelated topic that I'll start posting after this one is done.
But I will delay if anyone wants to follow up on this series.
Clinton says, modern situation.
I would like some commentary on the current situation.
Why has Hingley gone off the rails, the new American approach, the odd things done after Fusima, the new reaction rules in the States?
Whiskeyjack replies, I will do a follow-up episode on nuclear power technology and try to cover your questions and others.
I have four-part series audio recording ready to go, but I will slot nuclear power follow-up after that and start working on it.
Anyone else would like me to address those or any other points is welcome to ask their questions.
So, Unix Curio 0 introduction.
Murph says, great show.
Looking forward to some more.
Glad to see that you picked up the call and submitted.
Well done.
Looking forward to hearing us.
On making first contact, my episode where I met contact, Archer72, great to hear your 7.3s.
Hello, Ken.
I have gotten behind on my comments, but did listen.
Did you get the idea of using the Bofang UVF5 or Mini from the New Year show?
Just curious.
Not directly, but yes, because you were discussing us in the HPR Matrix channel,
and it is just literally two radios for 25, I think, 35 euros or something.
It's just, you know, a good deal.
And also, now that our governments are mandating that you have a, advising strongly, that you have a disaster relief kit in your home, which is something that they're doing.
Maybe I should do a show on that.
And the next day, we had Candy Caneater commenting on Operator Show's response to Lee and Elsbeth episode.
A relatable episode.
I haven't been lucky enough to get a job in the IT space, but what you talked about with struggling with people resonated with me.
I am extremely bad with, like, talking to people if it is not a topic I'm super familiar with and kind of fall into generic responses or making dad jokes during conversations.
Yeah, it's a tough one.
And we do have some episodes on that.
For example, Tattoo's Making Friends one is a good episode, and we could do with people expanding and expounding on that here.
It's something quite a lot of us have trouble with.
So, here's to be our Beer Garden 10, Scotch, Ales, and a wee heavy.
Upcoming beers, Kevi tells us, that episode 11 will be Belgian Scotch Ale.
You want to get your purchases in now.
And episode 12 will be Baltic Porter, Baltic Porter, and Belgian Scotch Ale.
You have no excuse now.
Small modulary actors come up, and Brian in Ohio says, good show.
Loving the series.
Maybe Whiskey Jack could give some close comparisons between large and small actors.
He could also give us a realistic look at nuclear plants' safety and accidents compared to conventional power production.
Looking forward to an episode on fourth generation reactors.
Yes, Brian.
Thank you.
In response, Whiskey Jack says, I can do a follow-up episode on small modular actors, comparing the pros and cons of SMRs versus large reactors, and what factors may favor either.
I will also cover any other questions that may come up.
For safety, you could possibly be a controversial subject.
So, probably not a good fit for HPR.
There will be people who have strong political-based opinions either way.
I would like to stick with just explaining how the technology works, and other people on the forums address non-tech issues.
I think it would, personally speaking, I think it would make a good topic for HPR, particularly if it's balanced and you've got citations.
Respectful debate.
That's what we're all about here.
The next comment is on recording a show and crappy audio by Archer72.
There were four comments in here.
The love bug, Dave Lee, starts with,
Anyone who knows me knows my opinion on audio quality, in particular as it relates to HPR.
Listening to the results of your three microphones, the Zoom H1 sounded utterly beautiful.
Did I agree?
But those earbuds were moderately awful.
And the Soundcore earbuds were quite decent, but your voice sounded a bit robotic.
You'll never experience decent audio quality from devices that were going to be attended for that purpose.
Earbuds are notoriously bad for quality due to audio processing needed to handle the distance between the bud and your mouth.
I always recommend an audio recorder with decent quality microphone first, a mobile phone recording app, and a laptop built-in third.
Anything else is last resort.
Sounds a bit snobby, and I grant you that I know conflicts with Ken's stance on quality doesn't matter.
I'll come back to that.
But you really do need to consider the audience.
Is it also worth mentioning that any difficulties experienced through bad audio get compounded by listening to higher, at higher playback speed?
Okay, I agree with all of that, but I want to please, again, stress, I do not like bad audio.
I do not think that audio quality does not matter.
It does.
Okay, let's be clear on this.
Audio quality does matter.
However, if there's no recording of a thing, then we've lost that.
Even if it's poor audio, start with the best you can get, yeah.
If you can afford a H1 mic, that is, yes, brilliant.
I happen to have a Zoom H2, but they're expensive.
Not everybody has them.
Not everybody is able to go out and shoo out the equivalent to 300 euros for even crappy earbud things.
A lot of the people that I've been working with recently do not have headsets.
They have what comes in their laptop.
They don't get headsets.
So we cannot impose these first world assumptions on people who are listening to the podcast.
This podcast is for everybody.
If you're somewhere and the best microphone that you have is a headphone, an old headphone that you're using,
and it comes in left here, we will do our best here on HPR to get it to an audio quality that will work.
And in fact, we will do and we will sponsor microphones for you if we can get them to you.
Yeah.
So I never said that audio quality doesn't matter.
What I've said is any audio is better than no audio.
But I've also said black is the best.
We accept the rest.
72 comments.
Bad mic.
Hi, Dave.
I wouldn't record it with either the earbud on a regular basis, but it works in a pinch.
My preference is always for a proper mic, is to use the XS audio recorder, which mysteriously disappeared from F-Droid app.
Actually, this is not so mysterious considering the state of Google's current relationship against floss apps.
I have also heard the results from the audio Android recorder with a lapel mic in previous episodes, which shows semi-decent quality.
Deser said, false advertising.
So far this morning, I have listened to the episode three times in an attempt to hear some crappy audio.
What I'm hearing is various levels of not perfect audio, but nothing crappy.
This is probably the first time I have heard audio recorded from an earpiece.
And this is one of my favorite genres of HBR shows, the hardware used to record a show.
Thank you.
Thank you, Jezre.
So moving on, and the last comment was on MPV util scripts, which was a show from February by Kandikean Eater.
And Windigo says, MPV Flank Hub.
I've been using MPV as my primary media player for years, but I've only used bash scripting to extend its functionality.
Approach that seems rough and uncivilized compared to your Lua examples.
Thanks for the informative and inspiring episode.
I'm excited to give this a try.
Windigo also says, if you do want to hook up into MPV with external bash scripts,
you can set up a socket with the dash dash input dash IPC dash server and pipe command line input output through that.
Unfortunately, it doesn't really work well on multiple MPV windows,
but it's great if you only plan to have one window open at once.
That would make a good show, Windigo.
Thank you.
I'd like to hear it.
Archer72 says, hi, Windigo.
My skills are lacking in this area, but with only one improvement made for MPV.
MPV, I pretty much forgot about it because I get copied to a new system in the form of dash dash aliases.
And the alias is MPlayer equals MPlayer space dash AF space scale tempo,
which I borrowed from Ken and linked to my episode or blog post on that.
Candy Canator puts in a updated script into the comments.
Yes, probably need to update the script.
Somebody can remind me to do that.
That would be great.
Oh, where's Dave when you need him?
And then we have the comments on this month's show.
Let's mosey on to the thread.
And for those of you who don't know, the mailing list is the discussion forum where we discuss changes that's going to be happening to HPR.
We have some comments there from Jason Dodd, who says this is in relation to last month's stock posting on X on Twitter, or continue to use it.
Indeed, when that conferral happened with FreeNode, I switched to Libra and noticed Podcast Planet wasn't there.
So I started it and figured that the admins from FreeNode would come over and take it over.
That has not happened, but it's not too late.
Need a proper admin.
I was never admin of Podcast Planet, but I have joined us on an IRSSI session.
So I am in there.
It's quite enough, but a nice, chill place to be.
Then we have proposed bridge from IRC to Matrix.
And Ken was asking about an IRC to Matrix bridge from IRC.libra.chat to the HPR Matrix.
It seems to be involved, but might be worth looking at.
There are two ways to go about it, bi-directional or one way, most likely from Libra, chat, and Matrix.
Taj replied saying,
My understanding, my understanding, given that it's been a while since this happened, and I'm not in a position to look up the details at the moment, is that there was a Matrix to Libra bridge that was developed by the Matrix team.
IRC, Libra, kindly asked them to knock it off because the bridge was causing serious issues on their side.
And I think Libra went as far as to ban it.
It's honestly a shame, since when that bridge stopped working, I essentially abandoned IRC.
And I think that's the general status with that.
There was an invite to today's Community News, which I am going to read out.
Community News will be recorded each week during the last week of the month.
Volunteers are encouraged to participate during the HPR Community News.
Hosts will discuss shows, community feedback, address concerns related to the project.
Particular participants are encouraged to listen to all the shows aired during their respective months.
If you're interested in participating or have concerns related to the project, I don't know why we have so many concerns related to the project, please contact admin at hackerpublicradio.org.
Thank you for choosing Hacker Public Radio.
So what we've noticed is that the schedule is very difficult to stick to, that it is at this time or particular time of recording,
and that it makes it inflexible for the people who have volunteered their time to change it.
So in this case, I needed to go and help.
I was over this week in England with helping my nephew with something or other.
And by the time I got back, Kevi was already going on vacation.
So our timetables didn't work out.
This is why I'm recording it myself.
And having it at a particular slot means that we can't really adjust it normally.
What we would do is, Kevi would say, look, I'm heading off.
We recorded a day earlier.
Couldn't in this case, but then we would have just listened to the Friday shows beforehand and do the recording from there on.
That's actually fine.
So if you do want to contribute to this beyond the community news, you're absolutely welcome.
But it sends us an email, and then if you're living somewhere else, you might be able to pick a time in the morning or the afternoon that suits you,
and you don't have to stay up in the middle of the night for the recording.
So that's more or less the attention to make it more flexible.
It's still over to everybody.
It's just there's no need to be specific that it must be at this time.
It should be at a time that is convenient for the people who are giving up their personal time to it, is all I'm saying.
We also took out the bits about the Mumble in there because we have had people join, and Mumble hasn't been working that fantastically lately for some reason.
I'm not sure why.
Sometimes it does.
Sometimes it doesn't.
So we might just switch to using Jitsi or something else.
That works fine.
So just like with the scheduling, we'll pick whatever suits the people who have volunteered.
Okay.
Do need some Moolik over.
Okay, and that was that.
Then I did want to read out a comment that I sent out, and it's in the April 26 archive, but because of the way the month is a bit late this time.
And it is in response to the community news.
So I'll just read it out.
Hi, all.
I'd like to bring up the following items here so that they're also included in the community news show.
Changes to the approach recording the community news show.
Anyone that's interested in recording the community news show, please get in touch one-to-one prior to the recording.
Having people drop in at the last moment is not ideal technically or helped with the scheduling deadline some of the hosts may have.
By arranging it beforehand, we can pick a suitable time for everybody and agree on a common platform for recording.
It would be great if you could listen to all the shows and are prepared to read out the comments provided.
Any other business topic number two, how we are expected to behave.
Following some questions on Matrix about the use of the explicit flag, I give the following clarification.
As it reflects the current state of things as I understand it.
Correct me if I'm wrong.
We begin.
We place trust in the people of the community to do the right thing.
It is always, first and foremost, the responsibility of the hosts themselves to think how their words would impact on others in the community.
If you are ever asking if you should put an explicit flag on an episode, it means, by definition, you should put it in.
While swearing is allowed, remember that JWP's granny is listening.
Don't go out of your way to be belligerent.
We follow the principle that inside shows, free speech applies.
As with shouting fire in a crowded theatre, there are exceptions.
We do not post hate speech, copyrighted material, spam, etc.
If you think it's going to be excessive, then please put a warning at the beginning of your show.
Something like, sorry, I went off on a bit of rant in this one.
If you're listening to this in the public place, it might be best to put on headphones or listen later.
Episode 1309 is how I personally did it.
If there are any complaints about technical or otherwise, we have policies to deal with it.
I'll link in the show notes.
Outside of the podcast audio, for example, show notes, tags, feeds, etc., we still expect the host to do the right thing.
In the case they don't, the janitors can and do intervene.
We follow the parental advisory approach akin to the covers on CDs in shops.
Listen to HBR 22010 on freedom of speech and censorship for more information.
There is no point having a warning in the intro of the show if the show notes and title and text-to-speech intro already contain the offending phrase.
And this, of course, extends to anywhere we have an official HBR presence.
That means Matrix, Telegram, Mastodon, IRC, etc.
But it also extends to boots and anywhere you are representing the HBR project, for example, presentations.
Okay, that was item number two.
Item number three.
HBR Wikipedia has gone again.
Frankly, this is annoying.
We did have a page, but now it's gone without trace.
And we have very much exceeded the bar to have a page.
And I would help, as it would help in communicating with third-party organization and policy makers.
If there are any Wikipedians out there who have not already contributed to the show, please help us here.
It's just like to know why our page was removed.
Any other business part?
Four, recent policies.
Four dot one.
We will no longer be actively posting on Twitter slash X on a daily basis.
We'll continue to monitor.
That is a nice one for me because I no longer have to jump through hoops to fit into their 100 character limit.
Four dot two.
Changes to the reserve queue has been made as per our discussion in January.
You will by now have noticed the change to the tone of the announcement.
It's okay to mention the show that it's a reserve show, even to ask for contributions.
But hosts should please not place any warnings in their reserve episodes.
These will be added automatically using the following script.
Link to the GitT instance, HPR prepare reserve.back, which is a skeleton script.
Three, sorry, four dot three.
Clarification on discussions on policy changes, changes to scheduling guidelines.
You should read the rules as a if-then statement, as in, one, you must have your audio ready for recording before you pick a slot.
Two, new hosts and interviews and other time critical shows should use the first free slot.
Rule three, if not two, then always fill any free slots that are available in the upcoming queue.
Rule four, if not two and three, then when the queue is filling up, leave some slots free for new contributors.
Post non-urgent shows into the first empty week.
And six, as I jumped over.
Five, if you're uploading multiple shows, please leave at least two weeks between your chosen slots.
And seven, if you have non-urgent shows that are timeless, add them to the reserve queue, but don't include a dire warning.
Because if a dire warning is required, it'll be added.
And any other business.
If there is any other business, people would like to mention, reply here or send it directly.
Because that goes for all the shows now.
If you have stuff that you want to announce or something, here is a fine place to do it.
We'll do it at the end of the community news show.
And D&T responded about the Wikipedia thing.
It doesn't, blog doesn't dispute the notability, but it says the sources are not good enough.
To which I reply, well, that's right, given we're the reliable source for many articles.
We also keep public articles on there.
But if anybody else has cases where HBR is mentioned in print, magazines, talk schedules, etc.
In the real world, please pass them on.
Okay, that's it.
Thanks for listening.
If you want to be part of this show, please listen to all the shows.
Have a read of the comments.
And ping us on when will be a suitable time to be recorded sometime in the last week of the month.
And you're more than welcome to join.
And with that, I'll say thank you for listening.
And tune in tomorrow for another exciting episode of Hacker Public Radio.
You have been listening to the Hacker Public Radio podcast, at hackerpublicradio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording a podcast, then visit the HPR site to find out how easy it really is.
Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by anhonesthost.com, the Internet Archive, rsync.net, and the HPR Community Content Delivery Network.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
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Episode: 4613
Title: Adding functionality to an Odoo installation
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4613/hpr4613.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:15:10 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4613, for 2026-04-08
Today's show is entitled, "Adding functionality to an Odoo installation"
The host is Jeroen Baten and the duration is 00:19:50
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "Learn how to download and install extra Odoo apps not yet available on your system"
Hello, this is Jerome Betten again with a podcast and this time it is a podcast number
four in my series on Odo. So in the prior episodes we talked about the functionality
that's available, we talked about how to install it and we talked a little about configuring
Odo from the web from that and if we look at for instance Odo community edition CEE,
there's a lot of functionality there but it's got its shortcomings sure and wouldn't it be nice
if you could expand on that functionality and you guessed it you can. So that's what we're going to
discuss today in detail. So hang on to you see what I tried to explain how this works.
So for one if you if you install Odo you usually get a bunch of software in the directory
slash usual slash ellipse slash python three slash disk dash packages slash Odo and you find
both a number of python files in there but also an add on some directory. Now the python files
make a total of about 18,000 lines of code and that's sort of the core of the application you know
the web's in the build in web server the over mlayer object relational developer layer
et cetera and if you look at the add-ons directory you find a huge number of subdirectories
things like website or sales or I don't know that I'll handle something and they all coincide
with an application in the Odo app store. So it's a one-on-one relation if you have the right subdirector
in add-ons that translates a one-on-one to an application in the Odo build in app store
within the application right okay and can you expand on those add-ons.
Sure you can I'll tell you a bit about sources later but yeah you can add add-ons directory.
Another thing is you could add new add-ons into the add-ons directory where the package is installed
but that makes a huge bunch of mess to to maintain so you don't want to do that what you want to
do is create a separate directory for your own add-ons that you have added to a standard system.
Well if you look at the Linux file hierarchy standard it talks about use a local directory.
So for instance use a local lib by the three Odo add-ons could be a directory for your own add-ons
and some people use opt slash ops slash Odo because it's shorter and maybe they are more lazy.
I don't know but it may come up your mind select one I don't care but you have to take note
of that subdirector in ink so for this spotcast I will use user slash local slash lib slash
python three slash Odo slash add-ons and I need to tell Odo that there is another Odo's add-ons
the answer I need to tell Odo there's another add-ons directory involved so I need to do that by changing
editing the slash eat etc slash Odo slash Odo dot conf file and there is a setting that's called
add-ons underscore path and on underscore path as I have been taught so far first start with the current
add-ons directory so if it's not there he will use the add-ons directory after package
if it is there you have I guess you have to add it I'm not half a century if that's mandatory but
let's not take any risk it doesn't hurt if we do it so the add-ons underscore path setting starts with
slash user slash lib slash python three slash disk dash packages slash your do slash add-ons
then I come up and then our own path so that would be slash user slash local slash lip
slash python three slash Odo slash add-ons I notice this is boring stuff but it's okay hang on
um so you add that setting do the Odo dot conf file you'll restart Odo and you're good to go
um now first let's install an additional app so for this example there are several Odo shops online
hey Odo dot com has his own shop but the OCA the Odo community association and I can't tell you
enough that you should become a member if you use Odo for your business simply because you get
huge value for money anyway um go to their website at apps dot Odo dash community.org slash
shop and you'll find a list of add-ons there and the first one you are going to install for this
example is the one that's called web responsive what does web responsive do it changes the main menu
of the system now it's this little square thing at the top on top left and we're going to change
that into a very nice looking menu um add a simply done by enabling this add-ons so
if you go to the shop you can select the app you can press the download watch that you download
the correct version of the app so it has to be the same version as the Odo version
or you go to get up because it's on getup dot com slash OCA slash web
and with the subdirective web on the score responsive okay download the directory download the
the getery positive i don't care but download you have to do anyway um now we're after downloading
you will place the web on the score responsive directory with all its subdirectries and names
into your own uh Odo uh custom add-ons or Odo slash add-ons directory right so in our case
that will be slash uses slash local slash lip slash python three slash Odo slash add-ons
slash web on the score responsive right that's the subdirectory with a bunch of files
now if you now go to Odo you won't see any difference because yeah the files are there but you
have not notified the application of the existence of these new files to do that you do the following
you go to your menu then to the settings in the settings you go all the way down there's the
enable developer mode enable that no assets needed just enable the developer mode that's it
if you now switch to the apps application so in the menu go to the apps store um you will see
the top menu has changed and there are a few more options and one of them is called update list of apps
always to that effect click on that he will say do you want to scan yes you want to scan
and he will scan the subdirectries and after that the web responsive app it has become part of the
app store in your own Odo instance so you can activate install it so you install it it will take a few
seconds for it to install and voila your main menu has changed dramatically but I think for the better
and well that's basically it you download an app you put it in your add-ons directory you
scan from Odo the list of apps and then you activate install the app and start using it
I once made a calculation of how many apps there are out there in total for Odo and I think it was
past 50,000 so there is a lot to choose from and that's also the challenge um and Odo consultant
is similar to a Linux consultant and a Linux consultant you know he knows his ray around the
command line he knows the commands LSD maker he can compile from source a kernel if if you want to
you know that's Linux stuff and Odo consultant is similar to that but he knows what add-ons exist how to
customize them how to configure them for the the functionality wishes that an organization has
okay I promised you also a couple of other examples so for instance there is the web no bubble
add-on also an OCA app so you can go to get up slash OCA slash web because it's in the
report the web repository and there is a subject directory name web underscore no underscore bubble
and what it does is it disables from you user this router annoying bubble that follows you on the
screen and it's sort of a clippy but you know if you want to disable it this is the way to do it
the other thing is and this is where it becomes pretty interesting I think so at least that's what I think
that is that the community edition has a lot of options where you click on it and it will redirect
your browser to the Odo dot com site and telling you hey buy our stuff and that's funny one time
but it becomes annoying after a couple of times um so there is an add-on from the OCA called
remove Odo dot com bindings nah that's nice um it's part of the oh get up a repository at OCA
called server dash brand with a sub directory name disable underscore Odo underscore online
again download it put it in your add-ons directory we scan the add-ons activated and suddenly
those links don't appear anymore in you know do the other thing is and this is this is pretty major
um it is it's both very important but it also is a huge bunch of functionality so um well the next
example that is um you see Odo community edition has disabled a lot of important account and see
features now you might think they are not there but they are they're just hidden and the
reason for that is that Odo enterprise edition is built on top of the community edition which means that
the community edition is sort of an uh assistant with an account that's he kernel as you might say uh
embed it in it and they've just hidden those features because well why would you otherwise buy
not by uh enterprise edition because you you've got pretty much what you need at a basic level
and the funny thing is there is an app again from the OCA remember what I said about adding value
for the money um and it's uh it's uh it's a kid of dot com slash OCA slash account dash financial dash
tools and there is a separate called account underscore usability download that add-on install it
rescan and enable and suddenly you can do account to see again yeah you can see the invoices you
send and uh well isn't that nice um well there is a lot more that you need to install to become a full
fleshed company and it's not that I don't want to tell you but the thing is that from here on
every company has different these functionality desires functionality wishes uh for one because they're
in different countries so tax laws are different um maybe um yeah they use different banks and
you could use um uh a software as a service that connects Odo to your bank account to download
transactions automatically periodically um or maybe you want to download a transaction file and
import it but then again you have several formats um if you like to play around with those they're
all in the OCA repository because they've got a lot of add-ons there um and if you become a member
they will even explain a lot of this stuff uh in in the webinars that they have recorded um still
they don't become country specific um I have configured an installed Odo for the netizens
and for France so those are the countries that I know uh how to configure and install add-ons for
and well since I'm uh I've got my own uh small company I'm happy and glad to help just give me a um
beat me up ping me whatever um email in the show notes um um and to finish this I would like
to well there are so many apps that I could talk about that are available but that's one that
I think everybody in IT uh can relate to and that's a health desk system and the thing is
there is no health desk app in the community edition there is however a health desk app in the
enterprise edition the paid version but there's not in the community edition and well you guessed it
the OCA has also made a health desk app well several apps um uh to um to add health desk functionality
and uh that's called health desk desk management so if you go to the OCA you go to the shop there
so that's uh apps dot Odo desk community door lock slash shop and you search for health desk you
get a useless list of add-ons one of them is called health desk management and that's the base
module that you need to start adding health desk functionality to your own instances that you can
play around with um speaking of playing around you remember back in one of the earlier episodes
that we talked about the database manager use that thing um separate your production database from one
that you use for trying things out um because in the production database that's high value data
the testing database is a low value data and you don't want to mix those two um so create a new
database if you like install all the apps that you have in your production database to to what
you don't have to install you can even double-cate the database that's easy um and then uh play around
with that database and add apps into that database to um to learn if that's functionality that you
need or want um if you need extra guidance and tips just uh ping me like I said email in the show notes
and well I'm I'm proud to find online um have been for years so um well now that's basically
the end of the series on Odo at this time I don't know of any more subjects that I could discuss
if you do however just put a comment in this the show notes for this show you know um and I
released it and if it makes sense I'll record another episode and I'll try to explain uh how I
how your question can be answered if I know the answer if I don't I'm not a bullshit artist I won't tell you
um so I hope you found this helpful I hope you learned a little bit and I hope you have
an awesome rest of your day and till we meet again I'm signing off this episode's
too wrong baton talking about Odo adding addons bye bye
You have been listening to the Hacker Public Radio podcast, at hackerpublicradio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording a podcast, then visit the HPR site to find out how easy it really is.
Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by anhonesthost.com, the Internet Archive, rsync.net, and the HPR Community Content Delivery Network.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
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Episode: 4614
Title: Dauug|18: Faster Than a '286, but Inspectable Like a Soroban
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4614/hpr4614.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:15:11 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4614, for 2026-04-09
Today's show is entitled, "Dauug|18: Faster Than a ’286, but Inspectable Like a Soroban"
The host is Marc W. Abel and the duration is 00:37:06
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY
The summary is "What would MacGyver build when he can't trust complex VLSI? I don't know, so here's what I'd build."
Welcome back, Hacker Public Radio listeners!
My name is Marc Abel, and I'm online at dauug.org, spelled D A U U G dot O R G.
Today we'll take a first look at an 18-bit controller being designed by The Dauug House
that doesn't use any complex VLSI.
It doesn't have a microprocessor or anything like one—no FPGA, PLD, ASIC, or even DRAM.
Now why would someone want a controller that doesn't use complex VLSI today?
Because complex VLSI has a long history of containing defects that hacking and malware
can exploit.
Even dynamic RAM has been shown to not work as designed when adversaries are present.
And even if we open-source our microprocessors and whatnot, we have no tools as makers that
can audit delivered chips against their open-source specs.
So from the standpoint of maybe someone who needs to automate some aspect of critical
infrastructure, or maybe someone who lives under an authoritarian regime, it can be valuable
to have modern electronics that operate transparently,
don't use any black-box components, and can be inspected by their owners clear down to
the logic-gate level.
I've thought about this need for about 20 years in hope of finding a way forward.
I was encouraged by modern surface mount techniques.
Individual transistors can be packaged so small that 25,000 can fit in a teaspoon.
Robots that can place and solder them require skill to set up and use, but they
aren't expensive.
And because a 32-bit microprocessor already existed that only had 25,000 transistors
(it was the original ARM CPU), I was sure right off that maker-constructable computers that
remain inspectable at the logic-gate level even after delivery could be made practical.
So I kept thinking.
My discrete transistor idea had several weaknesses, but I think it was looking at recently-built
relay computers—
there are hobbyists that like to build these—that exposed the most serious drawback, and
that's primary storage.
If a computer has even a million bits of random-access memory, it would take on the order
of a million components to build that memory.
Now a million transistors is way more than 25 thousand, and we'd need about six transistors
per bit to build a reliable memory.
So I could probably build a processor from discrete components, but the memory supporting
it would have to be VLSI, probably in the form of static random access memory, or SRAM.
But what about the security consequences of using VLSI SRAM?
Could SRAM introduce concealed security defects that hacking and malware could exploit?
Whether or not to trust SRAM is a judgment call.
We need to consider whether SRAM supply chain attacks are viable enough for someone to mount
one, what transparently functioning alternatives to SRAM could be, and how far we're willing
to go to have transparently functioning computers in the first place.
Exploring these questions is outside the scope of this episode, but I'll say a few
words in SRAM's favor.
As circuits, static random-access memory components are not proprietary.
In fact they're the exact opposite of proprietary in that their behavior and pinouts are standardized.
And although the chips are very large scale integration, this largeness is in cell count
rather than complexity.
An SRAM is the same 6 transistor flip-flop over and over again, millions of them, and
they're all isolated from each other.
In fact, if you read the datasheet for an SRAM IC alongside a datasheet for an AND gate,
you'll find they're not much different in length.
Even if a sophisticated adversary is warned that I plan to build a computer out of static
RAM, it will be hard to attack the machine by manipulating the SRAM supply chain.
The attacker would need to know what I was building, where in the circuit each RAM they
supply would go, when and where I would obtain the components, and how to know whether their
chip went into my computer or someone else's.
An attacker would also typically need access to the tainted components at their point of
use.
I can't tell you that an attacker this sophisticated won't come around, but I suggest that until
transparently functioning SRAM computers are in such widespread use that the number of
targets is large, attacks through the SRAM supply chain will be too expensive compared
to simpler offensives that cost less.
In light of SRAM's characteristics, I decided I would still be interested in building a
transparently functioning computer even if it uses VLSI for primary storage—as long
as it isn't complex VLSI that could easily conceal exploitable defects.
But with SRAM chips now permitted in the bill of materials, a question arises as to whether
SRAM is permissible for storage only, or if it could be used for computing as well.
I estimate that more likely than not, SRAM is actually safer for use in computing logic
than it is for storage.
If SRAM could be used as a logic gate, data passing through that part isn't at rest, it's
just a few bits at a time, not enough bits to identify structure and meaning in.
When I use SRAM to implement CPU logic thus far, no SRAM ever sees more than 6 bits
of data at a time.
That's not even a byte.
Also, consider where an attacker might buffer data for exfiltration.
When an SRAM is used for primary storage, there's lots of room to store and aggregate
information.
But SRAM used as a logic gate doesn't store data—
it only holds firmware.
So let's consider how SRAM can be used to design transparently functioning computers.
In Hacker Public Radio episode 4333, I described a minicomputer with preemptive multitasking,
paged virtual memory, no complex VLSI, and a refreshingly capable instruction set,
and I named this architecture Dauug|36 after its 36-bit word size.
Here again, the spelling is D A U U G.
The CPU, memory subsystem, firmware, and real-time operating system kernel work in
simulation today, but the architecture still needs I/O and initialization that call for
significant logic outside the CPU.
So after a couple false starts designing the missing logic from basic gates and flip-flops,
I decided the way forward is to build in a very small controller that has no complex
VLSI.
I named this smaller architecture Dauug|18 because it can't do as much as Dauug|36, and happens
to use 18-bit words.
Like Dauug|36, Dauug|18 is built principally from two kinds of components.
The simpler kind is basic glue logic from the Advanced Ultra-Low Voltage CMOS family
from Texas Instruments.
These are a modern take on the 7400 series of basic gates—AND, NAND, OR, NOR, XOR,
buffer, inverter, and D flip-flop, and they're insanely fast.
These ICs come in a variety of packages, but to simplify soldering I only use the packages
that have leads.
Most of these chips only operate on a single bit at a time, but the buffers and flip-flops
are available in widths up to 16 bits, which let us direct the flow of data within the
CPU.
There are places in Dauug|18 where buffers need to be installed facing both directions because
data sometimes flows either way.
Conveniently TI sells buffers with an extra pin to specify their direction.
You'd think these are called something natural like "bidirectional buffers," but they're actually
called "bus transceivers."
The name sounds like they do something complex, but instead they're just buffers that pass
bits in either direction.
The other kind of component in Dauug|18 is synchronous static RAM.
The word "synchronous" here means that the SRAMs' input is clocked through D flip-flops.
For read operations, the outputs will be ready five and a half nanoseconds after the clock rises.
I'm going to share specifics about the CPU's bill of materials and topology here because
they directly impact Dauug|18's capabilities and how it's programmed.
This being a radio program, I'll do my best to not lose you in these details.
But if you'd like a visual aid, I've uploaded a PDF with this show, and if you can't find it there,
you can visit 18.dauug.org (that's 1 8 dot D A U U G dot O R G), and you'll find a
PDF link near the bottom of the page.
The Dauug|18 processor contains just six SRAMs.
Each SRAM is 18 bits wide and has 262,144 words of storage,
so their address space is also 18 bits.
It's noteworthy that this capacity is more or less the smallest synchronous RAM on the
market, and we want to use the smallest chips we can because of their lower cost
and smaller firmware size.
Of these six SRAMs, one is data memory.
You more or less know what that does, and one of the architecture's limitations is that
it doesn't support any more data memory than the 256 kibiwords that it comes with.
Fortunately, code goes in a separate SRAM, which means code and data live in separate
18-bit address spaces.
Code is inefficiently stored because Dauug|18 doesn't have a control decoder and doesn't
have any concept of opcodes.
Dauug|36 has both, but Dauug|18 has neither because it's a simpler processor.
Instead, Dauug|18's control signals for each instruction are written directly into words
of the code memory.
Of the code SRAM's 18-bit width, six bits are used to tell the arithmetic logic unit
what it's doing, and the remaining 12 bits are all that are left to control the rest
of the CPU.
So that's two SRAMs out of six: the data memory and the code memory.
The third RAM is called "literal memory" and is wired in parallel lockstep with the
code memory.
This third RAM stores 18 bits of information for every instruction that needs literal data
attached.
So if you need to read from data memory location 1000, the code memory has the control signals
to produce the read, and the literal memory has the address to read from, which in this
case is 1000.
So in effect, Dauug|18 instructions are 36 bits wide, with 18 of those bits being optional
literal data, 12 bits being control signals, and 6 bits telling the arithmetic logic unit
what its function is.
The code and literal data are stored on different chips because the literal output sometimes
has to be turned off to accommodate other signals, while the control output must never
be turned off.
We've knocked out three SRAMs: data memory, code memory control signals, and literal data
attached to these control signals.
There are only three SRAMs left, and they implement the arithmetic logic unit's lowest
six bits, middle six bits, and highest six bits.
So how exactly do we use SRAM to compute?
The answer is we don't actually use SRAM to compute.
Instead, we use SRAM to look up answers we computed previously.
Here's how this works.
Recall that the smallest synchronous SRAMs on the market have 18 address bits, and consider
a sample problem like C = A + B. Since A is on the left side of the expression A
+ B, we call A the left operand, and B the right operand.
If we limit the left operand to 6 bits, it can be an integer between 0 and 63 inclusive,
and we can do the same with the right operand so that it's also an integer between 0 and
63.
And for the moment, let's say that our result of adding A + B wraps around so that C
will fall between 0 and 63.
So to make SRAM into a gate that can compute any 6-bit sum, we'll need a truth table with
a 12-bit address space (that's 4096 rows) where each row is 6 bits wide.
So it's easy for an SRAM to behave like it's adding 6-bit numbers for us; we just have
to store all the sums in advance.
So how do we get the other operations we need, like subtraction, bitwise AND, exclusive OR,
short multiplication, and so on?
Well, our SRAM has 18 address bits, and two 6-bit operands only come to 12 bits, so we
have 6 bits left.
These 6 are our room to say what we want done,
so we can put 64 operations on our menu so to speak.
Maybe operation 0 is addition, operation 1 is subtraction, operation 2 is bitwise AND,
and so on.
We're constrained to limit the number of operations we support to 64 at most, but that's
plenty for our purpose.
You've probably figured out that what I'm describing is something called a bit-sliced
ALU.
Rather than try to compute on 18-bit operands directly, which would take almost 70 billion
words of memory per operation, we split the processor's 18-bit words into 6-bit chunks,
where we only need about 4 thousand words of memory per operation.
If you're having trouble confirming the numbers here, remember that both the left and right
operands need address space, so the difference is between needing 2**36 rows
and 2**12 rows for each operation.
A constraint with bit-sliced arithmetic logic units is that each slice is isolated during
processing.
During addition, carries from bit 5 into bit 6 and bit 11 into bit 12 are lost.
We don't have this problem for bitwise logic such as NOT, NAND, and exclusive NOR, but
tasks such as addition, subtraction, shifts, and rotates need to look across entire words
to obtain their final answer.
How can this constraint be overcome with Dauug|18?
The answer involves three architectural features.
All three are simple, but this is a radio show, so let's try together to build a picture
in our minds.
The first architectural feature for overcoming isolation between bit slices is that each
Dauug|18 ALU operation produces two results instead of one result.
I'll explain in more detail in a moment, but for right now take it on faith that when
an SRAM looks up the 6-bit sum of A and B, it produces two different answers.
The second architectural feature is that wiring exists to scramble the order of the bits in
an 18-bit word.
I use this term wiring very literally.
It's not logic,
it's really just copper.
The third architectural feature is that, unsurprisingly, you can pass any given problem through the
arithmetic logic unit more than once, meaning you can compute the answer for a hard problem
using more than one step.
So let's consider how these three features work together to solve multi-step problems.
Dauug|18 takes a question like C = A + B, looks up small hints about the answer for
each slice separately, shuffles those hints between the slices in some magic way to produce
a new problem that is closer to the final answer, and then feeds the new problem through
the same arithmetic logic unit.
That's the big picture.
Let's go through these features a second time and explain what they mean more fully.
The first feature was that ALU computations produce two results instead of one.
We actually get that for free.
Each SRAM, remember it's the smallest size we can buy, has 18 address bits we use for
input, and 18 data bits we use for results.
But the result computed by each SRAM is only 6 bits, meaning we have 12 bits left over
in every row to use however we need for supplementary results.
So when we compute the 6-bit sum of 10 + 10, the answer is 20 and won't carry into
a 7th bit.
So that SRAM's main output, I actually call it the left output, is 20.
But that SRAM also has a 6-bit right output, and one of those bits is whether or not a
carry occurred, and that bit is zero.
Now suppose we compute the 6-bit sum of 60 + 3.
The answer is 63, which is six ones that go to that SRAM's left output.
Does a carry occur?
Not immediately,
so the carry in the right output is zero.
But there might need to be a carry if the SRAM with the next-lower place value outputs
a carry.
If there's no carry from the right, 63 just stays 63,
but if there's a carry coming in, that 63 wraps around to 0.
That's called carry propagation.
To handle propagation, the SRAM's right output has a bit named propagate alongside its companion
bit named carry.
The propagate bit will be 1 if and only if the local sum is exactly 63, while the carry
bit will be 1 if and only if the local sum is more than 63.
So each 6-bit addition on an SRAM produces two results.
The left result is the 6-bit sum, and the right result has a carry bit and a propagate bit.
We just need to get the carry and propagate bits over to any SRAMs that have greater place
value, and then account for them during a future instruction.
This is where our second architectural feature comes in, specifically, wires that move bits
of an 18-bit word outside of their immediate 6-bit slices.
Recall that each of the three SRAMs in the arithmetic logic unit have a left and right operand.
When given the appropriate control signal within a CPU instruction, a bus transceiver
will feed the ALU's left output (that's the sum) to become the left operand of the next
instruction.
Simultaneously, the ALU's right output (that's the carry and propagate information) are fed
through buffers to become the right operand of the next instruction.
The right operand is actually fed by two buffers, with only one of the buffers active at a time.
One buffer copies the right result straight back to become the next right operand with
no changes.
The other buffer transposes the order of the bits so the 6-bit result from each slice is
distributed two bits at a time into the three SRAMs for the next operation.
The upshot is that after the clock cycle where each 6-bit subword is added separately, on
the next clock every SRAM in the ALU sees the 6-bit sum it just generated as its left
operand, and carry and propagation information for all three subwords as the right operand.
The ALU SRAMs use this information to add any carries that are needed within each subword.
This second pass through the ALU is the third and final architecture feature Dauug|18 uses
to overcome subword isolation.
You may pick up that when an SRAM generates a carry bit in its right output, it has to
supply three copies of the carry bit,
so it can be distributed to all three SRAMs on the
next clock cycle.
For the same reason, it outputs three copies of its propagate bit, so all six bits in the
right result of addition operations have a purposeful use.
As I mentioned, addition is not the only operation to benefit from allowing the ALU to shuffle
a few bits between subwords.
You've probably guessed that subtraction uses the same mechanism, and it also turns out
that shifts and rotates of any number of bits can likewise be done in constant time.
Another operation this bit shuffling enables is population count, sometimes called just
popcount, or sometimes more formally Hamming weight.
Popcount computes the number of 1 bits in a given 18-bit word, and the result can be
as small as 0, when the input word is all zeros, and as large as 18, when the input word is
all ones.
It only takes three clock cycles for Dauug|18's ALU to compute a popcount, although the surrounding
CPU will use a few more clocks to fetch the operand from memory and store the result back.
Another operation that uses few clock cycles in this ALU design is computing hash values
for associative arrays.
This operation is closely related to another task this ALU does in a few clocks, which
is generate pseudorandom numbers that have good statistical properties.
Yet another is arbitrary permutations of the bits in an 18-bit word.
These three operations are efficient because the ALU effectively forms a substitution-permutation
network.
In the substitution step, the three SRAMs replace 6-bit subwords of the left operand
controlled by 6-bit keys in the right operand.
This substitution takes one clock cycle.
In the permutation step, which takes no clock cycle, each subword's output is split three
ways among the subwords of a future right operand.
If you're interested in the general theory of SRAM arithmetic logic units, including
how multiplication and division work without additional hardware, the Dauug|36 documentation
at 36.dauug.org goes into much detail.
Be sure to check out the download section.
That's 3 6 dot D A U U G dot O R G.
And if there's something you can't find or need explained better, I hope you'll drop
me a line.
Since the Dauug|18 virtual machine is pre-alpha and hasn't released any files as of March
2026, I'm probably the only person who's tried to write code for the architecture.
I'm happy to share it's not an easy CPU to write assembly code for.
You might think well, assembly code isn't easy in general, or maybe I'm not good at
writing assembly code.
You're probably right both times, but this is different.
I've written thousands of lines of Dauug|36 assembly code, and I've found Dauug|36 a joy to write
code for.
But Dauug|18 is more contorted to code due to its economy of components and bottlenecks
in data handling.
Here are some of the issues one faces coding for Dauug|18.
First off, the instruction pointer doesn't count linearly.
There's no end-user benefit to ordering the code addresses 0, 1, 2, and so on, and implementing
a linear order would require a counter that doesn't exist as an off-the-shelf component
with the speed and transparency of operation we need.
Dauug|36 manages to count linearly, but it uses a 27-bit incrementer comprising 70 gates that
only work because Dauug|36 can absorb two clock cycles of latency while counting.
In contrast, Dauug|18 has no extra clock cycles for incrementing a counter between instructions.
Both CPUs have a 40 MHz clock, but Dauug|18 pulls 40 MIPS while Dauug|36 only gets 10 MIPS.
Fortunately, there's no technical problem if an instruction pointer counts in a nonlinear
order, as long as it's deterministic and has a long enough period.
The only hardware needed, other than 18 flip-flops that hold the current address, is one XOR gate.
The circuit is called a Galois linear feedback shift register, abbreviated LFSR, and LFSRs
have been used for more than 50 years as a lightweight alternative to linear instruction
counters.
Another issue coding for Dauug|18 is it has no return address stack.
What you ideally want to do is write your program so no subroutines are reentrant.
Then each subroutine can allocate one word of data memory for its return address, and
a caller can save the return address before branching to the subroutine.
When it's time to return, the subroutine can fetch the return address and branch directly
to it.
For subroutines that must be reentrant, you'll need to brute force some kind of return address
stack in software.
Likewise there is no hardware-based stack pointer, so reentrant code (if there is any)
has to do extra work spilling local variables.
This brings up the further limitation that Dauug|18 really has only one address mode for
data memory;
specifically, the memory location being read or written is whatever address happens to
be at node 1 of the circuit board.
Node 1 can be driven by literal data in an instruction, or the most recent data memory
read, or the most recent ALU output, but no further adjustments are made to the address.
If you need an offset from a base pointer, for example, you're going to need to use the
ALU to compute that offset, and I'll point out that this can spill whatever ALU result
you were looking to store in the first place.
If you're familiar with the riddle where a farmer needs to move a wolf, goat, and cabbage
across a river one at a time, that's what Dauug|18 memory handling is like in practice.
It would be different if Dauug|18 had any registers other than the clocked outputs that are inherently
part of the SRAMs that comprise the CPU.
Unfortunately, no. Dauug|18 doesn't have any registers,
that's another limitation that the programmer is called on to overcome.
Another issue is that although most ALU operations are binary in the sense that they combine
two operands, as opposed to unary where only one operand is used, there is no direct access
to supply the ALU with its right operand.
The only place where the right operand electrically reaches the ALU comes from the ALU's own right
output.
This isn't the end of the world, but it adds clock cycles and consumes code memory.
For instance, if you want to add two numbers, you have to first pass the right operand through
the ALU from the left side to the right side, which adds a clock cycle to an already-tricky
addition sequence.
Another issue with Dauug|18 is that it has no freestanding controller for input or output,
nor is it designed to have I/O ports that are wider than perhaps a couple of bits.
On top of all that, all I/O would have to be polled because Dauug|18 has no interrupts
to facilitate transfers.
Another limitation in programming and using Dauug|18 is lack of any mechanism that can programmatically
change code memory.
You can't just launch a program from a command prompt, not unless the program you want already
resides in memory.
The reason this can't work is Dauug|18 doesn't have any microcoding or control decoder, so
the code memory is needed during every clock to control the CPU.
No cycles are left when the code memory is free and can be updated.
One challenge Dauug|18 assembly language programmers will face, and right now there are no other
languages implemented, is the architecture doesn't have any opcodes.
Instead, the language describes a collection of control signals that operate the processor.
The present assembler has rudimental macro support that can somewhat approximate opcodes,
but the strange flows that result from not having any registers make for complex instructions
and an appreciable learning curve.
Dauug|18 is certainly Turing complete and can overcome the aforementioned limitations
if given enough attention and clock cycles, but only within the umbrella of the architecture's
18-bit address space.
Once you're out of code or data memory, neither will expand, and although you could dive into
the tarpit of swapped external pages, the architecture's near-total lack of I/O support
make swapping even less realistic than it was on historic architectures.
The problem is even more acute for code memory, which stores programs inefficiently and can't
be changed at all by the CPU.
So with all these constraints imposed on programming and use, is Dauug|18 a lost cause?
I certainly don't think so.
In fact, Dauug|18 is on track to be the world's most advanced transparently functioning computer
when its first prototype is built.
Here is a machine that's entire operation is determined by open-source firmware and
a builder's soldering.
No "black box" parts at all, yet a footprint the size of a postcard.
Its 18-bit address space might sound small if you're very young, but I was once an MS-DOS
power user, and 256K is more than most people realize, especially when an architecture has
18-bit bytes instead of 8-bit bytes.
And remember that code for your programs doesn't count against the 256K limit for data.
And in terms of my need—a coprocessor to load firmware and handle I/O for Dauug|36, Dauug|18
checks my boxes about perfectly.
It's also hard for me to ignore Dauug|18's potential as an educational tool that implements an
entire architecture succinctly, transparently, and uniquely.
I've stressed on this show that Dauug|18 is missing a lot in terms of functionality, but it's
also missing a lot of headaches.
There's no dynamic RAM at all, so there are no RowHammer-like vulnerabilities.
There's no VLSI complex logic except in peripherals you choose to attach
that could hide exploitable defects.
There's no writable CPU persistent state;
the only state that survives a power cycle is its open-source firmware.
There's no electrical path for the CPU to modify its code memory, strongly reducing
an attacker's options for injecting code.
There's no CPU microcode to poison, and the CPU's only firmware is a completely disconnected
set of one-clock-cycle ALU operations that occur only in the order specified by a running
program.
Even this firmware can't be modified without physical access to the machine.
Dauug|18's clock is generated by a crystal oscillator directly, not a micro-electromechanical system
with a programmable frequency synthesizer.
MEMS oscillators are very popular now, but they create opportunities for age-selected
and frequency-selected attacks that simple crystal oscillators aren't vulnerable to.
Because the Dauug|18 firmware uses a substitution-permutation network to produce pseudorandom
numbers and associative array hashes, there are S-boxes in the firmware, but unlike some
of history's notorious ciphers where S-boxes were manipulated, Dauug|18's S-boxes have no
unexplained constants.
Instead, they're extracted from the square root of two using 29 lines of Python, and no
imported modules whatsoever. Even from the Python standard library.
No one has any unfair or unlevel knowledge of how Dauug|18's S-boxes work.
All Dauug|18 components are hand-solderable and can be probed after assembly to confirm that
all connections match the open-source netlist.
There is no secret functionality, no vendor lock-in, no encrypted or closed-source firmware,
no license fees to build, use or modify the machine, no purpose-of-use limitations,
no proprietary components to be discontinued without substitutes, no planned obsolescence,
and no right-to-repair infringements.
You can learn more about Dauug|18 and Dauug|36, including how to support both projects, at
dauug.org, spelled D A U U G dot O R G.
My name is Marc Abel, spelled MARC : ABEL.
Thank you for listening.
You have been listening to the Hacker Public Radio podcast, at hackerpublicradio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording a podcast, then visit the HPR site to find out how easy it really is.
Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by anhonesthost.com, the Internet Archive, rsync.net, and the HPR Community Content Delivery Network.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
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Episode: 4615
Title: Clicking through an audit
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4615/hpr4615.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:15:11 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4615, for 2026-04-10
Today's show is entitled, "Clicking through an audit"
The host is Lee and the duration is 00:57:58
The flag is Explicit, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "Lee complies with a company audit by clicking 'next' a lot"
hello this is Lee today going to kind of walk through the stages of the administration around
complying with a security order as an individual employee whose company has been audited and
the standard that they're using is ISO 27,000 and one. So you know they've been given what is
turned an information security management system and that's a specific term that has been
established and now what every employee has been given a checklist effectively or a set of
training to go through and you know just see what their compliance is because right firstly I
don't think it's sort of expected to be perfect from day one you know goodly it's a process
it's not like you tick you tick the box once and then it's done and also it's like it's
a responsibility of everyone in the company it's like from the directors to every employee
turn them up a computer and I've looked onto the internet and I go to my training dashboard
and there's 12 outstanding items that I have to go through and these are ISMS portal access
information security management system and actually they're they're actually a company
who have taken that on it's their name quite cleverly and policy pack and knowledgeman
change management and secure configuration secure software dev security basics access control
and lease privilege data classification and handling passwords multifactor authentication
security security incident reporting and response phishing and social engineering awareness
secure remote working in mobile device security they protection and privacy GDPR awareness and
sure no it doesn't know GDPR is the general data protection regulation which this came into
force prior to the UK leaving the year and it was you know when Brexit happened then it became
in this country the data protection act 2018 but GDPR was the big push that came around
the towards the end of the last decade to really take seriously how people's data was being used
and it while it was kind of European ladies had global impact anyway so the other training
item acceptable use of system and information security awareness and apparently that's an annual
thing because it's got in quotes annual so going to the first item in the outstanding list the
portal access and policy pack and knowledgeman so it's as login to that I did before but
let's just do it again to make sure so it goes to the website of and this and I'll go to login
except some cookies the click login except as some cookies then what right after login again
go to last pass try and find what my password was and of course it says unsuccessful because
always is facing the email address it's in my password again from last pass remember they see
my address I guess login no so what can I do all right it gets us if your organization is using
our EU dense date center please sign in here they could have led with that and I still sign
in unsuccessful need help looking in and to your email address okay it's the company in my address
so email mail link to reset my password it says if this is good if the email was registered
then we've emailed your link yeah if it wasn't registered you're just elistinating or you
some bad hacker person trying to login such is a good team out choose the thing and it says
we've locked your that's lovely I mean this is beautiful isn't it we've locked your account
and it's in reset your password I mean it's not like I like swearing and it's not like I like
using for little words but I have just internally uttered one describing the people who's out
the system he is the same email that's registered you know it's spelling of your email address
no email link in a second time of asking that so even Gmail thinks this is spam so
had I tell you it's not other show images okay for some reason that show me an image of their
logo like that was important enough to cause me to have to go through the show images thing
that they had to include an image right I've got a link in trainee password well
I don't know intranue password paste in the same password that change password yeah
great it worked okay this miss um so I'm looking at my my first one is 9 shape sent in the
way for a it's called development and of course the truth is I just when you're doing
that something like this the truth is if someone if someone gives you a list of 10 things to do
you will do those 10 things someone gives you a list of 100 things to do you will just click
through them you know I'm sorry this is human nature and you know they should know this
very very well you're just click click click click click click click click click you know I can't
actually see what's going on because my dark mode is interfering but actually these are ticks I've
got ticks against everything but why is it saying there's number 92 isn't done so it was social
social media guidelines so I mustn't bring the company into disrepair by criticising
our argument of customers, colleagues or rivals making the famigy comments about individuals
organisations or groups or posting inappropriate images or links to inappropriate content okay
well they got fully breached that already just by recording this policy pack overview
it's not letting me get out the last policy and I think I had this it was like an empty
it was a boiler plate one your policy packs and our value was an app that you can install in your
device it's not going to like increase the risk of my device to install their thing on my device
did I close that right let's actually go through what these policies are so introduction
policies and controls policies for information security information security roles and responsibilities
segregation of duties management responsibilities content with authorities content with special
interest groups threat intelligence information security and project management in the trip I mean
you know this but living in another universe yeah fine if I mean if I can think of how to do better
I would do how would I do this better or not give someone 100 things to click for a
literally a hundred well 91 92 if you count the one that's broken looking for those is there any
that is actually hyper relevant that's something I don't already know I mean yeah this is fine
but it's boiler plate you know I should not be I'm not talking about means particular but
and employee should not be given stuff that's actually outside their control like access rights
and it's like a broad policy about access rights it's like you know denied by default need to
know need to use least privilege privacy by design privacy by default access provision
access modification access removal privilege access management roles and responsibilities
and actually they've got some specific information about who's has different roles which is useful
but apart from that it's a boiler plate and it's a completely outside of the person clicking
for it this and I'm assuming everyone in the company has to click for it this is outside of their
control it's like saying I don't know account provisioning is automated for integration with
the HR onboarding presence and it's like okay that's fine I'm happy with that but why am I
having to click for it because it's completely outside of my control what the HR onboarding
process it's I mean fine this is this is in one place but I should not be the person clicking
through something that I have no control over and then you know and somehow that it means that the
company is compliant because someone who has no control over something clicked through something
telling them stuff they have no control over and I'm not criticizing the terrific company
I'm not even maybe criticizing the this particular provider of the security policy I'm just saying
that it's a bit ludicrous for an information security management system to be presented in this way
to people it needs to be a lot more relevant it needs to be like 10 bullet points of what is actually
relevant specifically to you not this is the entire policy read it through and yes it's here as a
reference and that's good that it's as a reference but anyway I can't complete this because it's
and I actually told my supervisor he got stuck at this point so is there anything else
I'm like again this website it's got no navigation so I don't know how to get back to where
was it here we go is the dashboard so it's a two list I mean that's useful let's give me a two to do
list information asset inventory is interesting this is quite good actually it's got like
some third party systems listed like accounting systems it has things like you know the card
that would get you in the office it talks about the code repository and for each of these it says
whether confidential or sensitive and like customer data and database is what do they mean by digital
certificates it's a I'm unclear that specifically what digital certificates it's referring to
if it doesn't mean writing encryption keys and see what I'm actually looking for is my
private keys that access the server because that's actually something I have a reasonable level of
concern over office keys physical yeah so all right so I'm sorry I'm rambling but for each of
these information assets we have like the name like backup data we have it a status or it's
to do or live a financial value and that seems to be left blank and then the type of thing
that it is is it staff as a physical security as an infrastructure as a person of data
is it software application and services and then as a classification as it is sensitive or confidential
or public and then we have its primary location like third party data sent to or in person
and then you have the owner of the lead so is it the CEO or the chief technology officer
and then it has an RTO it's going to tell me what RTO means it has an RPO have to look nice up
have recovery point objective all right how long right so if this asset get got lost how much
data which you lose which you lose a day a week a month or everything yeah I don't know
and what's it was RPO so it's RTO there's the downtime so how long until it's back online
so like if you lost it how long will it take you not not just how much it
RPO is how much you lost and RTO is the recovery time objective which is how long will it take
to actually get it back working and then it has the lead wire no like who I'm this thing is
of the companies that supplier or I guess is it the customer or someone else and then it has
an assignment so it's a scientific and a member of staff some particular person is on the list of
what they're responsible for so okay and back here seems like it's in that's at 99% and I'm sorry
the the asset inventory doesn't have percentage on it so the policies and controls that's at
90% have I don't remember actually looking at that okay it's popped up around and pop up
that you just get rid of because I can't even figure out what the pop up is trying to tell you
it's just in not that it's not in English it's just the English the English does not
process as to anything that I know what it's talking about so it has requirements and it has the
number 4.1 to 10.2 organizational controls people controls physical controls technological controls
addition so control is basically what we're doing to make sure that things are secure and that
and this is what I learned when I was doing the post-graduate course in information security what is
a control and most of these are showing us being complete I wonder if that's truly the case that's
what it's showing or like most of them I like that could be that 99% of 99% of them are actually
trivial and just require a tick by someone and then like the other 1% require masses of time and
effort to do so whether this percentage truly represents the security of the organization I don't
know all right I mean I've done everything on this I can so I'm going back the inter
closed all these tabs you know people get annoyed when I close their tabs and I can't work
with with more than one tab you know once I've once I've done with the tab it gets closed
so I've done the policy pad read the policies mark the policy pads read I'm not sure I did this
try to and then it says start the course it confirms that you can access it oh no they're not
going to ask me to give them a screenshot to prove that I accessed it please no it's not all right
so I can successfully access it yeah acknowledgement I've read an understood yeah kind of yes
evidence optional yeah they they want a screenshot and it says optional but I you know I'm going
out by the screenshot so I've got I've got my nice little dashboard here from the compliance website
what screenshot you've got I've got spectacle so let me just grab the active window so click on the
active window and it's just grabbed it I had a one second did I have a one second delay I
give me a chance to like move my mouse out the way or whatever although when you grab I think
when you grab the active window it doesn't capture your mouse it's a save as shove on the desktop
because it's screenshot do you what does it call it so it has the day in as in the four
digit year the two digit month and the two digit date and then it has a number it's maybe the number
of seconds zero nine three three one zero because 86 something thousand seconds in the day so
now looking through looking up while a little clock here using the time system or friend Ben I
invented and it's three sevens of the way through the day so how many seconds it's going to be like
out by six thousand we thirty thousand seconds so I don't think this is the number of seconds
Ben I's given it a number zero nine three three one zero in the screenshot you'll be
interesting to know how those screenshots are derived a screenshot font names right so save that
saved go back to there I should drag the image on here and then was the okay
bum that it's safe comments okay so let's just say it seemed the last policy could not be
access I can down like this course material so it's open it in a new browser window and then
I click on the download link I think I've got a security folder so I'm just dropping it into
there I've got my own copy of it and click and complete and that's completed I said it would take
five to ten minutes so you look at it longer so once done now I've only got 11 outstanding out of
12 so now the next one is change management and secure configuration right so you know learning
objectives modules why change control matters yeah avoid unsafe shortcuts document changes
appropriately prioritize secure configuration so it's good so when subversion I don't know
that way so when subversion can be fucks up everything I mean right this is my my human
experience of version control systems like get and subversion they work fine until you just
accidentally click or type the wrong thing then you're in the world of pain and you're then
spending hours or whatever trying to undo the thing that you've done like I accidentally on subversion
I was gonna use a change list so I was only gonna commit the few changes that I wanted to
and leave out the files that didn't want it to because I was working on two three different
projects at once then one of lumped them all into one commit and I accidentally committed everything
and then you go to like google you go to um large language model and you say like right how
do I undo this and it says oh to undo this just type this and it's a type here and oh look it's
screwed up even more and then I'm not like saying tell it well now this is what the situation is
I'll now just do this and so I can't do that and now it's completely fucked up beyond the
recognition and in the end you end up you just I think I'm just gonna
nuke from all the I just completely abandoned the repository that was on and create a new repository
a new development branch and just reclaim the development branch from the
source and then just copy my files that I've got you know on my own like machine
copy the files that you've been working to back on and of course you know because I've just
just because of because I've now got the latest code running you know there's configuration issues
because I've failed to coordinate with other people in the team who have updated the data by schema
and so the you know the entire my entire development platform is now not working it's now down
because it's falling over something and the schema is different and not in line with the code
so I mean that's that's the reality of third of I guess they call it change control version
chart I mean the lucky thing is I just have not been given access to anything where I could
damage a production system I could damage my own system and to some extent I could
insert unhelpful data you know by mistake into the shared the shared where we keep the
database not the database schema not the level I level one but the customer level database schema
and the you know the different templates and forms and how they're managed how their
data is synchronized between different instances of the server there's a central location for that
and yeah I could in some way insert things into there then there would then you know need to
kind of undo that and restore that because then it makes it unusable for other people if they
wanted to sink from it but you know I'd have to be willfully and willfully stupid if I was
doing that so all right so I'm just looking at the learning objectives for this yeah I mean yeah
back in the 90s I worked a company that had proper change control and it was as in you know
in in in in some ways it kept you safe in other ways it's and as annoying as hell if you make a
tiny little error and it means you're having to walk through the entire change control
processes taking two or three days you have to get customer approval again just because you
made a typo that you didn't spot and it didn't get spied until later in the change control process
and you know probably reasons like that that you have this is why they invented DevOps
is to reduce the amount of friction for developers while keeping things reasonably safe for the
ops team that things are going to kind of flow and not be complete headache and then I like
this is like if there's an emergency change you still you have to like because you know there are
times when a production system actually needs an intervention there and then and you can't go
through the whole change control but when that happens that the same that needs to be documented
and followed up you know that's a nice happy wish I would say change management school not
to check all right here's a quiz right why do we change the control I love this to slow down work
I mean honestly yes yeah we're still to reduce attitudes yeah and security risks and improve
accountability right misconfiguration is a common course of incidents yes all right some bit you
know can do this quiz all right I'm spacing right secure configuration practising include
default deny and release privilege I guess yeah disabled unused services yes public by default
for convenience now avoid public access unless and quiet and approved yes after deploying a change
what should you do I think we want to invalidate emergency changes should be documented
good rollback plan is and now not wait to refer on where to go quickly okay so I've got to take from
that month that is complete cause it's completed to significantly less than 23 minutes I don't know
what my past month was didn't tell me what my month was they said the past month was 80% cool that
once that's off the list so secure software dev security basics protects secrets and credentials
never encode tickets or chat by secure coding hygiene validation or frozen what is off said me
no okay don't know offset what is off said in information security which means authorization okay
I've got feeling in English in the English language authorization has got an S I think often
not try and use the American version cause when you're coding you try and use the American English
like color no color right when it's dependent since supply chain that's yeah okay
understand what that means I use code review and continuous integration controls to reduce
vulnerabilities code review yes C I controls I don't know if that's kind of a happy wish at this point
avoid risky logging and sorry I'm using the word happy wish I just wish the original
then even know where I got that from what is the origin of the term happy wish and how does this
seem to be keep coming to mind as I fail in the information security or the compliance
question it tell me it's a psychological reaction to inherent tension of compliance work
is a gap between policy and reality aspirational compliance you may be looking at question
like are all administrative actions logged and reviewed weekly and thinking I wish they were
or in a perfect world they would be the checkbox track the term captures the feeling of providing
a happy answer yes we're doing this well internally now it's more of a wish than the consistent
enforced control it's a mental shorthand for wishful thinking masquerading as a security control
I mean I've been doing this for like a half and 25 minutes I've already got ordered with
he so I can well let's start the course I mean ideally it should be prompting you to
actually do something not just think I'll idea so here we go knowledge check I mean it was telling
me stuff I just give that go straight to the knowledge check right authentication is
who you are authorization is what you're allowed to do if you're an authenticated they can access
any object of the name where should secrets not be stored when a QR code on your front door
that source code repository is tickets chat see I've got all of the above
and except for the approved secrets manager you accidentally committed the API key
I revoke and rotate as I find side validation is sufficient yeah no it's not it's not
best protection against SQL injection yeah prepared statements I don't see that a lot in the code
place supply chain risks include what is type I squatting all right okay you give you the
main like google dot com you go to google dot com you type in some secure information
come for myest maintainer accounts code reviews in the risk it's negative
pinning and reviewing dependency changes can reduce risk yeah pinning is where you fix it
certain version you don't just automatically update to the next version until you've decided that it's
safe to do so yeah they're talking about pull requests here that that may exist on
may exist in other parts of the universe it I've never seen it in this context so why
while do we disable CI checks ask for justification yeah least privilege for service account
remains I give any permissions needed right production access should be limited in the trial
to guess yes good logging practice include for that thing yeah deadlock for personal data
payloads control access to logs yeah using production data and development is yeah with approval
controls temporary secrets in code all right I mean I might disagree with this it depends what
codes but okay yeah not acceptable anyway I can download that PDF save it I think that one's done
that click on complete or I'll neatly the deadline is the first of April but I'm down to nine
outstanding things so access controls in this privilege right it's a completely skip everything
I just click start course completely skip everything down to acceptable use of systems
that owned by the organization personally use maybe committed a bit of different ways in the
level well I use chat GPT to write a book then I have that's reasonable okay which statements
about monitoring privacy is most accurate personal information accompanied devices is private
I'll be going to ease confidentiality of personal information accompanied may want to
use the school Jamaicans to not assume privacy I think getting stressed about protecting
your privacy just come to accept no just never ever assume privacy ever never assume it
selectable good password practices keep passwords and authentication in face secure
and then I guess I share your account now is MFI yes yeah doubt approval once you didn't
initiate doubt share the codes good right when should you lock your screen I heavily disagree with this
if there are other controls in place because there are situations you do not want to be
unlocking your screen every fucking five minutes you know because for the sake of the little
sanity that one has left right only at the end of the day whenever you step away from your
office your device yeah all right I mean yeah if I'm sharing this if I'm physically sharing the
space with other human beings yes I will want to look my screen I guess if I'm not sharing
you know well one my mom may be a secret hacker for the Russian government you know
I'm pap she isn't right do you want to instill a new tool on your laptop
what should you do yeah get permission I don't I don't have a laptop or I do but I don't use it
okay right select elections that reduce risk yeah why about touchments and verify unusual
requests yeah I mean this was I was not I don't know if I was not thinking I actually just
like I was working an unusual location I did not have my public key for my device I was working
instilled on my dev server so I just emailed my colleague and said I can you shove this
public key on the dev server and you know he did it but he was like they he came it's actually my
self fuzzy he came to me it later and he said actually that seemed a bit like a fishing attempt
and I just only realized oh yeah my ver well it was convenient because it allowed me to get some
work done that that it didn't actually much big I didn't actually do much that day so it wasn't
necessarily all that useful and I think next time I think I might just say well if it's not on this
device I just not not work at the moment I just leave the work for a time that I'm actually at
my my own device so I think part of fishing is not just don't be fished yourself but don't ask
other people to do things that they that they themselves will find a comfortable I don't know
and I've got an email just seeing if this okay just confirmation that something will be passed
on to the relevant person but we're talking about why I shouldn't have reduced my risk
don't forward customer files to personal email well I mean I use I'm sorry but
if it's not on my personal email don't see it and well these are not customer files these are
these things like API specs or and I just general discussion it's not sensitive information right
checks and address carefully yeah okay is acceptable to let a family member use you work can't
probably not which is prohibited reports using malicious introducing malicious problems it's
systems I mean I can't imagine what would be wrong with that I mean I think wished in in still
the virus and that every system you have access to it's just a matter of course
port scanning or security scanning a lad with prior authorization
but I'm gonna click this one but I'm sorry I'm never ever gonna use any computer system
that I have not scanned the ports of I mean I'm sorry that's just it's in my blood you know
I will always scan the port right you receive an unexpected invoice attachment from an unknown
send a reporting of I don't mean you should I need you should only access systems and that
you're offers to use yeah making fraudulent offers I guess prohibited select or
prepped installing part of software things in your definition but yeah sharing passwords
the nav service attacks keeping your device updated and accepting network traffic not intended for you
I I question whether intersection network traffic not intended for you is really prohibited
I mean if it's not intended for you it should be encrypted not that I've ever done this but
don't put it on me to to be accountable if someone is not if I'm having to use some system
and this is not a specific example of something that's actually happened but if I'm using some
system and someone is not encrypting their network traffic it's almost my duty you know it's
oh yeah I should downwell intercept it and downwell tell them by the way your traffic is not encrypted
yeah I don't know you know I tell you this I take it seriously but if someone's telling me
something that has right I'll have to chat get my thoughts clarified on this right right I am
told in an info set or it never to intercept network traffic not intended for me I have
crimes this will be negligent on my part not to be aware of potential hunting
cryptid traffic on the network I am connected connecting to as if a security risk affects
someone just on the network it then well affects me also so I say there's a
monitoring for safety versus another threat's intersection I mean they're saying right I'm
getting private data passwords emails are personal browsing of colleagues but I'm not because it
is it should be a secured HTTP you know secured DNS oh yeah trigger an ideas an
intrusion detection system I forbid sniffing traffic so it's not it's not necessarily because
there should be encryption at the app level and endpoint prediction well this is how it puts it says
the order isn't asking you to be negligent it's asking you to respect the boundaries of
authorization think of it like a hotel you should lock your own door and report fire in the hallway
that you aren't allowed to put a glass to the wall to listen to what's happening in the next
room just in case there's a thief in there yeah okay like I don't want to sneak on anything
and I inherently would not would not but if network traffic is passing through
my system such that it can be sniffed it is inherently no longer private it is part of the network
traffic I would not on principle try to sneak but I need to be aware of what is going on
the network because it also affects me so this depends on putting your network card into
promiscuous mode yeah all right so I'm not putting my network card in promiscuous mode
what prevent someone else doing so I mean all right it's their risk and it's not my responsibility
so yeah you can use ARP watch your neighbor discovery egress monitoring to see what I'm sending
out through to call auditing so yeah I can it's a user scanner don't sniff but
so say the professional approach is too yeah and what do they mean by intercepting network traffic
that's not intended for you as as difference between intercepting and I mean I'm stuck at this point
because I think there's there's something important there's not being expressed or discussed
but the idea that capturing traffic going through my network the interface on my hardware the traffic
is reaching the interface on my hardware that I should not be allowed to
register that data if it comes to my hardware I find hard because you know if I'm working for someone
it doesn't matter what it is I am not going to even look even if I have to process something
there's I'm going to look at anything that's private to that person or to that company or whatever
I'm just not going to do that okay the next section is data classification handling and this
has questions why do we classify information and that's like is it public as a confidential whatever
incentive what sort of information should be restricted like passwords API keys
should be confidential files in personal cloud storage now
had to share a customer report internally but on some approved storage somewhere
so good practices for confidential data at least access need to now
remove access for no longer needed large exports of personal data or confidential
screenshots can expose data what's the best rule for export so I export the minimum
so what common lead points so screenshots log status ports so if you accidentally shared something
a link should provide kit and restrict access and report to what happens
personal data should be confidential yes restricting information should be shared
should be shared and you've all fried people and type with type controls
it's fairly straightforward so passwords and multifactual authentication
if things like the biggest risk of reusing password is the one breach can compromise
more than one account so they use this even a strong password they use it everywhere
best way to create passwords password manager generator
for your password manager use a strong password and they say lock screen and multi-factor
I think biometrics nowadays is probably what you should be using so multi-factor
have protect accounts even if password is less stolen yeah so if you receive a multi-factor prompt
it's reported you know that you didn't initiate your report here and check the account security
you know what is the past phrase you know is is a predictable pattern a good password
well in principle no but sometimes sometimes there might be the best solution sometimes
there might be a more human solution but it actually works better so who had enough accounts
been compromised you get password reset and they didn't request looking alert or
you're forwarding rules created and that you didn't do if you accidentally put the credentials
in a suspicious page you should report it and change your passwords they have a share passwords yeah
I mean the kind of repeating themselves a bit but the next section is security
instant reporting in response so apparently as well security instant is any event that could
affect confidentiality integrity or availability if you're not sure they'll just wait until you are
sure right which of the following is an instant a last laptop and expected them a fake prompt
I extend the mainly customer report suspected malware warning okay that some of this is just
repeating themselves so don't don't destroy evidence unless instructed so evidence could be screen
shops email headers or message IDs time and date of the event so the device is done what's your
first action report it using an instant process the instant process is that one
extended data sent to the wrong person can be a personal data pressure
been how many how many times as everyone received a CC of people's email addresses which was meant to be a
CC I mean literally how many times that happened and then one person replies to it and right
sends out a 2350 emails to everyone else in that CC list I mean you would almost think they should
build it into the email client no one in their right mind wants to see see more than like two people
you know it's never efficient social engineering awareness so
efficient what is efficient trying to do is trying to trick you into a really information
take unsafe actions commission reflects could urgency and pressure are requesting passwords or
MFA codes look like the mains to good to be true offers so see how usually I see to buy gift cards
which should do verify if I'll independent channel yeah now my sport worker he got
fine cool telling him he owed some tax you know they said try your credit card and then he gave them
their credit card number and then they said oh that didn't work we'll have to find another way
you feed send us the tax that you are us I tell you what why don't you just buy Amazon vouchers
and they got him to buy 4,000 pounds worth of Amazon vouchers and send them and it's only like
when he went to the supermarket the third or fourth time and was buying a stack of Amazon vouchers
they were like someone said a why do you want these Amazon vouchers and he said oh I have to
repay some tax and the person said no perhaps you're being scammed and he's like oh oh yeah
I guess I could be cure codes can be used in fishing attempts yeah it's quite a good one actually
supply says the bank details changed say what she's doing verify by non-channel
the best general mindset for fishing prevention is slow down verify unusual requests
secure in my working she perhaps relevant to me I don't generally go around with my laptop all
over the place it's working from a home PC mean some of these I just click for it because it's
not really relevant that all of them I click for it so data protection this is back on the GDPR again
personal data is information relating to my identified or identified person
data minimization means click only what you need for the purpose so what counts as a person
date breach sending personal date the wrong person losing a laptop that might contain personal
data posting use it in final public forum and all price access to the account I don't think
I know price access to the account is a personal date breach or is that I guess it is
storage limitation delete or I'll call for another required what's a DSAR it's when someone says
what tell me what date you have about me it's a data it's a data subject access request
so which of these roles align with the principles of data protection is data for intended perhaps
I need to keep the data secure don't keep data longer than needed yes and an acceptable use of
system occasional personal use of company systems may be permitted if it's reasonable
so let's go to good password practices keep passwords and authentication if I secure use
multiple authentication do not share multi-factor authentication code select actions there
are just email risk be careful with unexpected detachment verify unusual requests with a trusted
channel check the send address carefully port scanning is allowed with prior authorization only
you should only add to systems and date your offer as to use yes if you lose your work laptop
what should you do I think you report it okay information secure some of that seems to be
paying itself information security awareness this annual out of C I I what best describes
confidentiality they choose any accessible to CIA so CIA stands for confidentiality integrity
and authorization not a failability so I there are the three pinnacles of information security
are confidentiality integrity and the failability just in my experience of
availability is the big one because you're much much much more likely so again to travel just
not backing up then you are from someone deliberately trying to harm you or still your data
or just deleting stuff yourself by anything or thinking that you have backups that you don't
and this is kind of high level stuff like data minimization means and and you collect
new data necessary purpose the safest way to share sensitive customer information is approved
secure company systems with all price access fair enough I mean this I don't really see much
actual customer data message been filled for whatever anonymization or anyway I got the
stiff cuts go all the stiff cuts those who have a stiff cut like the or valid until
it's got the date on it yeah I mean a lot of this comes down to I know the principle
the reason for the audit is it's about protecting company and protecting customers information
even protecting your own information and being secure about how you're doing things which is
over reasonable but it touches on a few areas of it's something that is kind of incidental to it
but it's something that highlights for me is something about if you're a developer or a hacker
or whatever you know how do you act ethically and there's an episode HPR 3779 that
try recorded which is just because you can do a thing and that kind of says things quite well
and then there's HPR ego all the way back to 2009 HPR number 61 and 32 records a
conversation about computing which is kind of about Ted Queen dependence and moral autonomy
and it's sort of freedom demands responsibility and then even even the fair you go all the way
about HPR number 2 you have deep geek talking about customization the loss reason and it's like
questioning you know why why do you want to think of everything customized everything and you know
access all the units and internals of things and it's not really because just because you can do
it is because doing so teaches you why systems work as they do
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