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hpr_transcripts/hpr0776.txt

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+Episode: 776
+Title: HPR0776: Open Shorts ep 3
+Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0776/hpr0776.mp3
+Transcribed: 2025-10-08 02:16:28
+
+---
+
+.
+Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening. This is Mr. Catchett and I thought I would call in and I had actually several different topics that I have had in mind for a possible pi gas.
+I would like to make a comment here today on a recent trip that I made to a customer site.
+I would like to talk about travel, although business travel is indeed something that has been on my mind and something I have blogged and even talked about over the air.
+I have had a series of ideas and a series of forates and trying to do a pi gas at a regular basis and it really seems like this medium is the one that I do on a regular basis and it's because it's what I do.
+I call in to pi gas. I'm probably one of the most well-known people to call in to pi gas out there in the pi casting world and I discovered pi gas relatively early on.
+I guess in standard radio they say that for every call that means you have so many thousand listeners or whatever.
+So I'm a representation of the hundreds or thousands of listeners out there for individual pi gas.
+I have had a series of ideas, Mr. Catchett's technological Odyssey which could be delivered from my Honda Odyssey which is my rolling studio here where I recorded most of these things as I'm driving along.
+In the case of the rolling studio I always got that idea and thought that was a good idea not only from Dave Yates who is famous in the limits and hacker public radio world for driving along is his might even be Honda but whatever his vehicle is at a rapid pace and pi casting as he goes along.
+Or my good friend and I wife over there in Belgium as he drives from one end of Belgium to the other and records things as he is driving along in the car to make product me some time.
+But also way back when I first started listening to pod gas and this was before I actually had an iPod of any type.
+I kind of violently resisted the iPod item kind of thing for several years.
+But I had various secondary devices PDAs if you will.
+All the way back to the original PDA with John Scully yes I own an original Apple Newton and really really loved it.
+And I'll probably have some commentary on tablets and you know there's some things that Newton got right that the other tablet still haven't gotten right.
+But that's a subject for another story.
+So the PDAs that I had variously along the way would allow me to play music and then when pod gas came along I could of course put pod gas on to the cards that were involved there.
+And in fact when podcasting really came along I kind of made the transition away from the Sony had a really excellent Palm OS device but they gave up on those Palm OS devices.
+So I had moved on to various forms of Windows CE and Windows Mobile kinds of devices after that particular point.
+And I was actually using a Dell and it was a Dell Windows Mobile device that was the X50V I believe it was.
+I might not have the exact model number right on that but it's something close to that.
+And it was a lovely little device it had a compact flash card which was pretty much the common card of the time frame for mobile cards.
+And in fact I had one of the really cool list of the compact flash cards which was the IBM micro drive.
+It was actually a spinning hard drive in the size of a compact flash card and gave you unheard of capacity for the time.
+The first one I had was a 340 megabyte one I believe and later on in my series of things that I owned I had the one gig size and this was unbelievably large for a card capacity at the time.
+This is when the SD cards were still in the megabyte ranges and having a gigabyte in your small device was a marvelous thing.
+And I could carry a lot of my guests that there was a guy who did a card cast out in California.
+He eventually kind of concentrated and quit doing that.
+But he also used a micro drive and I believe he can have the same exact device the X50V and that's kind of how I found him out on the Internet and found his podcast.
+He worked for industrial light magic so he worked for the movie company doing all those magical things in movies and had a very interesting take on things and was well worth the listen at the time.
+And I was recording live to micro drive and in fact I did a few things but I never really got serious about it.
+Got hosting I was always trying to do some kind of free hosting or things like this was I really going to stick with it.
+I did do a few of those though and then oh gosh it's been a couple years ago now I was ahead of the curve I guess because I was interested in the open source hardware kind of things and I decided I was going to do open shorts.
+Open shorts I guess open shorts had episode one and episode two and open shorts what kind of a play onwards there right was the podcast that was going to be about open source and hackable hardware.
+So the idea was not only the open source hardware which at the time was an open source movement for a handset that was out there and that one has since failed and fallen by the wayside.
+There was also the open source kind of device that you can put together little modules and I forget the name of that but I talked about that.
+Also besides the open source kind of hardware things it was also going to be talking about putting things like WRT and other kinds of operating systems onto your routers and getting more out of your routers or using your slugs they were called the FLU something your others they were little network devices for network attached storage that you can buy from links this.
+And they had an ethernet connection and you have to be for a drive and you can actually install a little miniature version of devian Linux on those and have those be fully functioning little teeny tiny servers that you could use not the most powerful server in the world but still a little device and you could use the USBs to install the operating system and boot those up that way.
+So that was the idea behind that but as I say I'm going to see about two episodes of that before I just never keep up at it the production aspect of producing things and things like that.
+It's really obvious that this is the way I'm going to podcast if I'm going to podcast in a regular basis at least for the time being because I've done more of these successfully in a row than I have any other venture.
+Now related to this whole idea of hardware that's what I want to talk about and so call this open short episode three about open source hardware and this isn't necessarily well a lot of this is about open source hardware but it's really about hardware and hardware in general.
+I really think that the dirt of people building things is ultimately going to be a detriment to our society and I guess I mean our society in terms of the lesser world or maybe I really don't because even in the east where everything seems to be built it's not like everybody on the street is building things.
+People get jobs to build things in the factory but where do the ideas and where do the engineers who come up with those ideas come from okay when I was a youth when I was young and I was going to elementary school back in the 60s right graduated from high school in the early 70s I'm totally pre micro computers for my you know for my pre college years it was during my college years.
+That micro computers first came on to the scene so it's all about just green transistors and building things either from tubes or solids say that I was fascinated fascinated with electronics and I voraciously read every single book that I could get I voraciously read every single catalog I could get now there were several catalogs that were the source point for parts which you could use in these different circumstances.
+You could find in the books and magazine and several of those were available in Kansas City. One of those was of course the ubiquitous radio check store and radio check was a lot more about selling parts and components back then lots of speakers that you could use to build your own speaker systems and things like that.
+That one reminds me of a funny little aphorism of the guy who I worked for in general well who ran the recording studio at University of Missouri, Kansas City where I worked while I was going to the conservatory music and I was very interested in recording and in fact that's how we got in the computers and I'll tell that story in another episode.
+I was very interested in recording and as part of the musical experience and Jim used to say that this is back in the 1970s before he had computers to model and all that kind of stuff that people who built their own speaker systems didn't know what they wanted when they started and didn't know they didn't have it when they were finished.
+That was standing the idea of building your own home hi-fi speaker system to go with maybe even an amplifier that you built from a kit or from scratch and there were plenty of kits during this time.
+There was an e-trip store here in the Kansas City area all the way up until the early 80s because I remember buying some computer furniture at the e-trip store here in Kansas City and bringing that home and building it when I got married in the early 80s.
+So they were around for a lot longer than some of the other kinds of things but there were these electronic stores and there were catalogs from those stores.
+The Radio Shack Store catalog, there was a local store here in addition to the Radio Shack stores and the Heuket Store that was over on the campus side of the border.
+There was also a local radio TV kind of store that had outlets in the malls and so you would go to the mall and there was actually little stores within the store.
+You would go to one of the department stores on the campus which one it was that was called the Blue Ridge Mall which was the first mall here in the Kansas City area, at least from the Missouri side.
+And you went into this department store but on the second or third floor there was a counter that you would go up to and that was a bursty Applebee counter and you could buy parts there and then they had various stores around the Kansas City area.
+And a lot of this was centered around selling tunes for replacing them of tunes and TV sets and things like that.
+But there were all these other parts and that's all of the state parts. Radio Shack had an extensive set of kits that you built and the box that came in was actually the printed circuit that really left the printed circuit board.
+It was a board that was your bread board. It was a thing with lots of holes in it.
+And this was back in the day when you were hand wiring things, you were soldering together the wires and you had some kind of clip that would stick into the perforated board.
+But the perforated board was actually the top of the plastic box of all the parts.
+And these things were various all the way from simple things like crystal radios all the way up to a shortwave radio set.
+I built a regenerative shortwave radio set from a Radio Shack kit and he's kit had an extensive set of kits.
+There was also various other kits for stereo amplifiers and things like that that you could purchase and build yourself.
+The whole thing behind the kit kind of went by the wayside when eventually we got to the point where you weren't saving any money by building the kit as opposed to just buying the thing outright.
+And it became a point of diminishing returns from building yourself and eventually it was just people building it because they wanted the set of section of having built it from the kit and the learning process of that entire thing.
+But when it started out it was actually cheaper to have the person build it from the parts.
+Now here is an interesting part and it's worth a discussion here of he's kit instructions because I said this over and over to various people in regards to computer documentation.
+And everybody knows the old old adage about computers and computer engineering which is if mechanical engineering was like computer engineering then the first wood sector that came along would destroy civilization.
+And in terms of documentation especially so we are sorely lacking in documentation because documentation is not fun documentation is not something that anybody really wants to do.
+But we need better documentation now.
+He's kit the set of instructions for he's kit to build anything from the simplest kind of thing that they had the simplest radio that they had a crystal set things like that all the way up to eventually you could build your own color television.
+Solid state color television as a he's kit project they also have the only functioning robot that was ever placed into the home why don't we have robots in our home he's kit was doing it in this 70s and 80s with computers of the time frame why do we have somebody doing a robot kit that they serious robot kit not a little radio control car kind of things that can run around nothing against robot builders.
+But a serious commercial home robot why don't we have that in a kit form that I can build I buy it I build it I play with it okay.
+He's given instructions were such that now someone thought you know this lady had a father so she didn't have to be taught the father and left a secretary at he's kit who had no interest of all electronics and really didn't know anything about electronics it left a secretary could sit down with the instruction and build a functioning radio at the end of the process those instructions were not done.
+That is a level of detail that I have yet to see in any computer documentation that I've ever seen in over 30 years in this information revolution and that's what we should strive for.
+I always talk about you can have user friendly and then I hold up one hand to move it up and down and then you can have programmer friendly and I hold up and down the other one and I move back and forth like their scales right one go up one go down one go up one go down okay always choose user friendly and user friendly means good documentation and we should be striving for he's get we're never going to get there and we should be striving for that.
+Now building things we built things and we learned in the process physical thing nowadays the surface not technology and things like that you couldn't hold it and things are gotten so complex they started getting complex when computers started replacing all the logic that used to be industry transistors or industry I see.
+And initially that's a lot of what computers were doing was just replacing that.
+But we need to still be building things and the young people need to be building the young people need to be building things.
+The young people need to be excited about building things because that's the next generation of engineers that are going to build the world and the thing that excited me about this is two different things.
+We had a little mini maker fair here in the Kansas City area that I got to on one of the two days down at the union station in Kansas City and one of the things I found interesting was there was a big soldering station where kids were learning how to solder.
+Every kid should learn how to solder and then the next step they should learn to build themselves a little minty boost right those themselves a little power supply for their usb device so they can put in a couple of double a batteries and charge up their music player because that's going to get them excited about electronics going to show them something practical and they'll move on from there.
+They had lots of Arduino kits even radio shack who I have lamented less and less parts at radio shack and more and more about selling you phones and accessories nothing against accessories here but you know there's there's very few parts left anymore radio shack but they've got a set of kits and in fact the regional sales manager for radio shack had gathered up lots of kits from the different stories and had them there for sale at the mini maker fair.
+And that's what we need more people building those things and learning those things and a third percentage of them are going to get excited about electronics in that part through their process.
+I also when I was in Columbus went by the micro center store because I have this little door that I set for myself that's before my life is over I'm going to go to every prize in the United States of America.
+I've gone to all of them in California and so I'm working through and also get to every micro center store you know I mean whether it's a micro center store I have to go by and different micro center stores help they're stocking some more stuff but they have different layout so I find these things.
+This one was totally different I guess according to the guy I was talking to there they kind of tried some new things but appear their stores and this happens to be one of them.
+They're reworking their tech support area to have it be a much more interactive and user friendly kind of a situation and they have a little wall there that have essentially the kind of things you see in make magazine highly recommended.
+For making things right and that make magazine the kids the Arduino times the kids and other kinds of electronic kids there as well as some of the other branded things that you see in make magazine that have to do with the little Arduino controllers and other types of things related to the small controller world.
+And I was so excited that there was a place where someone to go and do that instead purchase buy that that impulse buy of an electronic kid take it home build it play with it program will micro controller get it to blink in the LED and then move on from there to getting it to do all kinds of other things and you need to go out there and make something.
+People need to have that experience if you never saw or something together get yourself a learn how to other kids and you know practice a little bit there get yourself a mentee boost kids and build it.
+It's hard to describe the feeling of satisfaction you get from making something in electronics with your own two hands.
+And it goes beyond the as the amateur radio average guys you know talk about appliance operators to talk about how nobody build you know there's a bunch of people that are amateur radio operators that will build their own equipment they just buy it and use it.
+And we need to try to go beyond just being appliance operators for everything in our life and get into actually making something electronic ourselves learn what happens when the magic smoke is released during the soldering process when you apply too much heat.
+Okay, once you release the magic smoke from the semiconductor device will no longer function.
+Okay, learn that have that feeling of the lack of touch in the ends of your fingers when you've been soldering too long.
+It's a wonderful experience.
+So this is Mr. Gadget and I guess you can call this open-church version episode three get out there and make something okay.
+And I've been rattling on long enough, rattling on long enough but as long as kin is willing to accept these phone submissions for me and put them on the air I'll keep on pretending that somebody is listening to them.
+And you can get a hold of me just mail me at you know Mr. Gadget.com just mail HPR Mr. Gadget.com give me some feedback tell me that I'm full of carp it's an acronym.
+Let me know if you like what I'm talking about or want me to talk about something different have a question about anything I've mentioned along the way.
+And I'm going to go ahead and sign off now here but the way that I always ended my two whole episodes of open shorts okay.
+Go out there and do something to make something do something I know.
+Thank you for listening to Hacker Public Radio for more information on the show and how to contribute your own shows visit hackerpublicradio.org.
+You