Initial commit: HPR Knowledge Base MCP Server

- MCP server with stdio transport for local use
- Search episodes, transcripts, hosts, and series
- 4,511 episodes with metadata and transcripts
- Data loader with in-memory JSON storage

🤖 Generated with [Claude Code](https://claude.com/claude-code)

Co-Authored-By: Claude <noreply@anthropic.com>

hpr_transcripts/hpr0068.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,157 @@
+Episode: 68
+Title: HPR0068: Shoulder Stretches!
+Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0068/hpr0068.mp3
+Transcribed: 2025-10-07 10:57:19
+
+---
+
+dilemma.
+Okay.
+And welcome back to Hacker Public Radio, this is Peter Nicolitis from The Fresh
+Ubuntu Podcast.
+Today, I'm going to be taking a bit of a different approach and covering something not overly
+technical, but something that all of us hackers we ought to be aware of.
+And that is basically a little bit of desktop ergonomics.
+The reason I'm talking about this today is that just yesterday I was diagnosed as having
+Bersitis, and that's a rather painful inflammation, in my case, in my shoulder.
+And it makes certain things like opening doors and sometimes moving the mouse quite painful.
+So that got me thinking about RSI's and other things that we get from sitting hunched
+over a PC all day, and if you're like me, you probably spend a good amount of time at
+your computer.
+And not enough time stretching to make up for this.
+Now it was, I think, over a year ago, I remember there was a woman that was interviewed.
+I don't remember her name, but she was on the Linux link tech show.
+And I remember her saying how like the worst possible thing for any human being was to
+sit at a computer for more than an hour a day, something to that effect.
+And I remember a link going off on her, and I thought it was one of the funniest episodes
+ever.
+I'm going to have to try to dig that one up.
+Anyway, I'm not quite as extreme as her, obviously not, otherwise I wouldn't be in
+the computer industry.
+But what I've done is just collected a few simple exercises that you can do to help ease
+the strain that you're putting on your body by sitting at your desk all day.
+Now there are tons of ergonomic resources out on the internet.
+I'm not going to go through a lot of them, but I'll link a couple here in the show notes.
+And the best thing you can do for starters is make sure that your desk and your chair
+are set up properly for you.
+And basically that usually involves you sitting at mostly right angles, making sure that all
+of your joints, whether your hips, your knees, your arms, etc., are at right angles when
+you are sitting at your desk.
+So if your chair is too high, and for instance maybe just barely your toes are touching the
+floor, then your chair needs to be lower.
+And if you feel like your desk is too high as a result, then you probably need a lower desk.
+So something, these are things that you need to pay attention to and need to adjust so
+that you have the right height.
+Otherwise you may develop an injury or pain like I did where your desk was too high.
+And as a result, you're constantly lifting your shoulder too much and that may have been
+a contributing factor to my injury.
+So that's one thing to do is make sure that your desk and your chair are set up properly.
+You also want to make sure that your monitor or flat panel display is set up at the right
+height.
+It should not be too low so that your neck is always hanging down or too high so that
+you're always straining up to look at it.
+There are some different schools of thought.
+I personally prefer to have the monitor just slightly below straight ahead so that I'm
+looking down slightly when I look at the monitor.
+But do a little digging to see what your own personal preference is on that.
+But if you feel any sort of strain when you're sitting at your desk, you want to look into
+that and adjust accordingly.
+Now one thing that I think I feel a lot when I'm sitting at the desk is I feel the strain
+in my shoulders.
+And my friend said the expression he used to describe it was the shoulders love the ears.
+Basically I was his way of describing how the shoulders would creep up over time.
+If you ever walk outside and a chill wind, like a gust of wind goes through and you all
+hunch up, that's exactly the same kind of thing that happens over time as you're sitting
+at the computer.
+Your shoulders will kind of like creep up.
+What you don't realize is that that's putting a lot of tension on your muscles and tendons
+and then the joints in the whole neck and shoulders area.
+One great way to work that out is to take, if you don't have an exercise band like an
+elastic band, that's great, but you don't need that.
+If you have like an old t-shirt or in this case I have a smart wool sock here, which is
+about a foot or so in length, what you can do is grab the sock or the t-shirt by the
+ends so that your arms are about, well in my case about a foot and a half apart and hold
+it out in front of you.
+So I'm going to try to demonstrate this.
+Of course you can't see it because it's not a video cast, but hey, hold it out standing
+up straight and then what you want to do is grab both ends of the sock and try to get
+your shoulder blades to come together.
+So you're basically opening up the chest portion of your body, opening up your chest and
+clenching your back.
+This is almost exact opposite of what happens when you normally sit at a computer.
+If you can envision yourself hunched over, that's the position that people normally end
+up getting into when they sit at their computer.
+You want to do the opposite.
+You want to unfold, open up your chest, open and then clench up the scapula or your shoulder
+blades.
+So do that and then hold the sock out in front of you and just hold that position pulling
+out on the sock and hold that position for about 15 seconds and you should feel the stretch
+pretty quickly in the shoulder and the scapula area.
+Now if the sound, the volume levels are changing a little bit because I'm moving back and
+away from the mic as I actually do these stretches.
+So once you've held that for about 15 seconds or more if you're comfortable with it, you
+can repeat the stretch this time straight up.
+So again, bring your shoulder blades together as much as you can while gripping the ends
+of the sock and this time hold your arms straight above your head.
+So you're doing the same stretch.
+You're like Superman flying straight up and again pulling that and you should feel that
+anywhere from your shoulders all the way down to the middle of your back and afterwards
+it feels really great.
+It may hurt while you're doing it.
+You don't want to do it so much that it really, really hurts but you should at least feel
+the stretch which is a good thing.
+Once you've held that for 15 seconds or so, hold your arms down behind your back straight
+behind.
+So just grab the sock and on both ends with the sock behind you and do the same stretch
+again, clenching your shoulder blades but this time with the sock down, so down at around
+hip level.
+So you're doing the same thing.
+Now you're like the human cannon ball or what not.
+You're flying forward but your arms are down behind you because the tendency when you're
+doing this stretch is to lean forward.
+That's not really going to help in the shoulder area.
+The point is to bring these finally what you can do is do the same stretch once again.
+Stand your shoulder blades together, but try to bring your arms up with both hands.
+This is probably the hardest part of those shoulder blades together.
+You want to bring your arms up behind your back, standing straight.
+So instead of raising the mouth, you get good at raising your arms up behind you, it's
+kind of tricky.
+Squat, for instance, with your back to your desk or to a table and actually get yourself
+more of a stretch but that's kind of advanced.
+I would not recommend that if you're new to this or if you're likely to fall over because
+then you could really wrench your arms out of their, you know, out of whack.
+So you may not want to start with that.
+But again, grab the sock, hold it behind you, clenching those shoulder blades tight, arms
+about a foot and a half apart, and just raise them up as high as you can hold them until
+you feel the stretch.
+You don't want to feel extreme pain, obviously.
+And then just hold it there for about 15 to 30 seconds.
+And again, when you're done, you let those go.
+If you've done all four of those stretches, you should feel an improvement in your shoulders
+all around.
+You should feel your muscles be a little more relaxed like they've gotten some exercise.
+And this will help you long-term.
+It will help you cope with hours a day of sitting at the keyboard.
+So do those, do these stretches, literally they take a minute, right?
+I gave you four positions and you know, each one takes about 15 seconds.
+So you can spend one minute a day and help undo a lot of the hunched up posture that we
+get from sitting at PC's all the time.
+There are a number of other stretches you can do.
+If you're interested in stuff like this, you know, things that you can do, sitting on
+the floor, sitting in your chair, all sorts of things.
+Right things for your lower back and your hips.
+I'm not going to cover those right now because again, I said, shoulders are the most, most
+common place where we need the work.
+So that's it.
+That's not really a super technical thing, but again, I think something that applies very
+much to the hacking community.
+So stand up straight, guys, you know, there's no excuse for poor posture.
+All right.
+Until next time, this is Peter from the Fresh Ubuntu podcast.
+You can follow us over there at freshobuntu.org.
+And my blog is over at pn72.com.
+And if you've got any questions about stretching or shoulders or the wonders of bursitis, just
+drop me a note.
+Take care, everybody.
+Bye.
+Thank you for listening to H.P.R. sponsored by caro.net, so head on over to C.A.R.O.N.C.