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hpr_transcripts/hpr1906.txt

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+Episode: 1906
+Title: HPR1906: Apt Spelunking 2: tvtime, phatch, and xstarfish
+Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1906/hpr1906.mp3
+Transcribed: 2025-10-18 11:01:44
+
+---
+
+This is HPR Episode 196 entitled Up to Pelunkin 2, TV Time, Fash and Next Halfish.
+It is hosted by Windigo and is about 18 minutes long.
+The summary is, Windigo digs through his software repositories and finds another couple of gems.
+This episode of HPR is brought to you by AnanasThost.com.
+Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HPR15, that's HPR15.
+Better web hosting that's honest and fair at AnanasThost.com.
+Why hello, this is Windigo and welcome to the second installment of Apped Splunking.
+And that's APT, not App, not an App Store.
+Anyhow, if you missed the first episode, I should probably explain what Apped Splunking
+is.
+Apped Splunking, which is a hard to pronounce title, I'm starting to regret that, is the
+act of aimlessly searching through your distributions software repositories and picking out the gems
+and the rarely used programs that you find that you find useful.
+I call it apt splunking because I use Debian and apt is the Debian package program.
+You use apt to search the package repositories for Debs.
+And I also call it apt splunking because no one uses the lesser known packaging systems
+like RPM and Pac-Man, right Lyle?
+I'm going to cover three more of my favorite discoveries in the app repository, ignoring
+Ken Phalan's protests that each should become their own show.
+Considering the Debian reposal loan contained 43,000 packages at last count.
+At three packages a show, that would still be over 39 years worth of shows for every single
+day of every year.
+Having HPR only publishes on weekdays, and there are other hosts who are queuing up to
+contribute fairly often, I'm certain that I could do as many episodes as I like before
+ever hitting well-known applications or libraries.
+Speaking of hosts queuing up, have you submitted your HPR episode this year?
+If you're listening to this, then you are part of the HPR community.
+You are a HPR community member, you're a listener.
+And that means we need your help.
+How about contributing your first show?
+There are several lovely topics to choose from, like what is in your daily carry?
+What do you keep around when you're going about your life?
+What brought you to Linux if you're a Linux user?
+Or what brought you to BSD if you're a BSD user?
+I would even enjoy hearing a quick description of the places people live.
+We have HPR contributors in France, in Belgium, in the UK, in America.
+We've probably got some in Antarctica right now.
+If you're a scientist in Antarctica working on a research lab, I want to hear an episode
+from you.
+I want to hear two episodes from you.
+So there is absolutely no excuse as to why you haven't submitted your episode yet.
+Come on.
+Help us fill out that queue.
+Anyways, that's enough of the introduction and the guilt trip.
+Let's just jump into the first package, which is TV time.
+The package TV time is a very simple one, but it does what it does very well.
+TV time is a front end or an interface for TV tuner hardware.
+And a TV tuner is specialized hardware that allows your computer to process analog
+television signals.
+So it'll accept a coaxial cable.
+That's the stereotypical cable, the one with the single core and the insulator around it.
+It will also take RCA video cables.
+So if you have seen these or have a device that supports these, these are the little
+yellow colored cables with a metal plug in the middle.
+These are RCA.
+They usually come with red and white, which are left and right or right and left.
+I'm not sure which order audio channels.
+If you have a TV tuner, which can be a PCI card or a USB peripheral, TV time allows you
+to use your computer as an analog television.
+It will display whatever signal is coming into that TV tuner.
+Every time binds to whatever tuner you have, it lets you switch between the different
+TV standards.
+So NTSC and PAL, I don't know the difference, to be honest.
+I don't know what any of those stands for.
+If I had to guess NTS sounds like national television and there might be a channel in
+there, it doesn't matter.
+NTSC is what I use because that's what's used in America.
+In anyways, once you've chosen all that stuff, TV time shows you a beautiful analog grainy
+video signal.
+It has filters that will smooth that out.
+You can jazz it up a little bit, make it look a little better, but it's analog video.
+What are you expecting?
+And speaking of video, TV time is video only.
+You need something else, whether it's software or hardware, to handle audio from whatever
+you're hooking up.
+If you have a hardware TV tuner and you're using a coaxial connection, my TV tuner particularly
+has a 3.5 millimeter jack that offloads the audio from the coaxial to something else.
+I plug it into my sound card, for instance.
+RCA cables are already split out, so you plug the yellow video signal into your TV tuner
+and red and white audio channels get plugged into something else.
+So I have that as well, and I use a special Y cable that takes the red and white RCA adapters
+or connectors, and it converts them to a 3.5 millimeter jack, and that goes in the same
+sound card.
+Personally, I use TV time to hook up old video game consoles like my GameCube, VCRs, which
+is a whole nother episode, I'm afraid.
+And older computers, I had a TRS-80 for a short period of time, and to make sure that it
+worked, I plugged it into my TV tuner.
+So there was a TRS-80 computer displayed on my modern, fancy, dancy Linux computer.
+TV tuner is a fantastic alternative to keeping an old analog TV box around.
+If you have something that still uses analog video connectors, and you want to be able
+to view it, I'd say go with TV time in a hardware tuner.
+It's so much nicer than keeping an analog set top box, or a whole analog TV, even.
+Okay, that brings me to the second package of this episode, which is patch.
+It's spelled P-H-A-T-C-H. So, patch, if it's pH-like, fat, which is cool, which this
+is, but I don't think that's what they were going for.
+Never mind.
+So the program is spelled P-H-A-T-C-H. Don't try and say it out loud, it doesn't matter.
+Anyhow, this absurdly spelled program is also very good at what it does.
+I guess that patch is some sort of unholy combination of the words photo and batch.
+So F-Fatch, yeah, Fatch, that's a terrible name.
+Anyhow, whatever it is, it is a gooey interface for assembling chains of actions to manipulate
+image files.
+Only I use this program for web development.
+This saves tons of time when I'm creating static photo galleries or optimizing images or
+whatever else I have to do on a whole directory of image files.
+To use this program, you assemble a set of operations, which the program refers to as actions,
+in an ordered list that's called an action list.
+So I'll use my static image gallery example to explain how this program works.
+I'm not going to say the name, it's so terrible.
+So there are two actions in this gallery list.
+This action list takes a directory full of images and creates thumbnails for them so
+that I can put those on a web page and not overload your internet connection.
+So there are really only two actions in this action list, fit and save.
+Now each action has a set of predefined parameters and options that let you tweak what happened
+to your files.
+The fit action, for instance, resizes an image without goofing up the aspect ratio.
+You give it a box to fit the image in, and it fits it fully into that box and trims
+off any extra edges.
+The most important parameters for this action are canvas width and canvas height, which
+tell the program how big the box is.
+The save action have parameters that let's you set which image format to use, which folder
+to save these images in, and even what name the file should have.
+So for instance, my thumbnails, I have them named their ordinary file name with an underscore
+T at the end, which also makes the image galleries very easy to put together.
+So once you have your action list together, you can tell Fetch to run on an entire directory
+and include or exclude different file types.
+There is much, much more to this program than just resizing images.
+You can do an entire litany of actions, including erasing metadata, cropping, moving,
+rendering.
+Again, this would be its own episode, so I might just do that sometime.
+Anyhow, let's move on to the final selection in today's episode.
+The last program I have picked for this, this second iteration of apt splunking, is called
+X Starfish.
+It's all one word, there's no spaces, well obviously there's no spaces, it's a package name,
+but there's no hyphens or underscores, it's just X Starfish, boom.
+So I left X Starfish until the end, because it is so, so much fun and so very, very weird.
+X Starfish generates a random, tie-able background that can be dumped to a file or just put straight
+onto the X display, or a X display of your choice, it doesn't even have to be your primary
+one.
+So the way it does this is it uses some sort of magic random sauce to pick a color palette,
+some patterns, and some other distortions or filters or effects to apply to this image
+so that you get a brand new unique background every time you run it.
+I'm actually looking at one right now.
+It can also be started in Daemon mode with a timer to automatically change your wallpaper
+periodically.
+So you could say, have this application or this utility, I suppose, run every five minutes
+or every hour or every ten seconds, it really doesn't matter, it's very variable.
+So now that I've explained what X Starfish does, I should explain that there are at least
+two problems with this application.
+First of all, let's start with the practical aspects.
+You can set the size of the image X Starfish generates by either using the G flag and
+manually setting the geometry with a pixel width and or height, or you can use the S flag
+and set a general size like small, large or full, full being the full display.
+So X Starfish will generate an image that will cover your entire X display.
+Kind of handy because I don't know how many people would want to look at a kind of cheesy
+tiled display.
+The full display makes a better image, I think.
+But anyhow, since X Starfish generates randomness, which is often CPU intensive, and uses
+that to generate random filters, which can be hard on your CPU to apply to an image,
+and it can be set to do this periodically, which depending on the frequency you choose,
+and eat up a lot of CPU, this utility can be a resource hog.
+I have dual monitors set up, each of them running 1280 by 124 pixels, and when I set it
+to generate a new background every 10 seconds, it didn't.
+Not really at least, it just maxed out one of my CPU cores, so I'm assuming this application
+is not multithreaded, and it's been a background image every once in a while.
+I'm not sure what else it was doing in the meantime, or how it ended up cannibalizing
+itself to finally output an image, but it took quite a while.
+Cutting it down to only a single monitor, so just 1280 by 1024 pixels, every minute or
+so, made it much more reasonable.
+So if you're okay with having a slight delay in your image, and you don't want to make
+an animated gift background or something, then you should be just fine.
+But if you have a bigger display, I'm assuming it will take much more CPU resources, because
+it has to calculate each pixel.
+The second more pertinent issue with X starfish is that it randomly picks colors and patterns.
+Sure, that's kind of the idea behind the utility, but it is exceptionally random about
+it.
+Imagine for a moment that you need to paint a room in your house, and you want to depict
+random colors and patterns for that room.
+You could begin by but blindfolding a friend and pushing them into the paint aisle at your
+nearest hardware store.
+Whatever three buckets of paint they bump into first, well, guess what, that's what color
+your room's going to be.
+What do you mean you don't like orange seafoom and gunmetal gray?
+Those are the colors that happened to be picked, that's what you get.
+There's no counting for taste in X starfish.
+Well, there might be, but they're very liberal about it.
+So now that you have your awful, awful color selection, how to paint your room.
+Well, you could tie one to your ceiling fan, one to your eight year old, and just swing
+the third can around your head at a 35 degree angle.
+Fairly quickly, you will have a room as designed by X starfish.
+It's really amazing some of the images that this program spits out.
+With all the potentially awful things that can happen, I do like X starfish.
+It's not something I use because it's really a ridiculous utility.
+But it's kind of fun to do every once in a while.
+A lot of the images you end up getting out remind me very much of hideous pants you've
+seen in the 90s and 80s.
+It looks like, well, it's really something to behold.
+My partner described it as a generator that makes those laser backgrounds for the 90s
+school photos where there's neon colors and random shapes, and that's a lot what these
+images look like.
+But then again, sometimes you get very nice images out of X starfish.
+You'll get some very nice patterns, and for the effort involved, you can't really beat
+it.
+It reminds me a lot of the old, infinite fish backgrounds from when I was developing
+websites in the 90s.
+I don't know if there's a practical use for this application, but there you have it.
+It's fun if not anything else.
+So this concludes the second installment of apt spelunking.
+Please, once again, don't let me take all the glory of this idea.
+Everybody's got a package manager that's using Linux, unless you're using Linux from
+scratch, I suppose.
+Take a look around your package manager.
+Take a look at your installed programs.
+If you've got it installed, odds are you might find it useful and maybe someone else will.
+So go make your own spelunking episode.
+It doesn't have to be apt spelunking, even though I called out Lyle just because I'm
+a jerk.
+You can make your own spelunking episode with whatever fun packages you have.
+This is also a very easy way to make that first HPR episode that I mentioned you need to
+make.
+So that's all from me.
+And don't forget, send in your episode today because we have server logs, and we can
+geolicate your IP address, and we will hunt you down.
+This has been Windigo, and I will see you soon.
+We are a community podcast network that releases shows every weekday Monday through Friday.
+Today's show, like all our shows, was contributed by an HPR listener like yourself.
+If you ever thought of recording a podcast, then click on our contributing to find out
+how easy it really is.
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+If you have comments on today's show, please email the host directly, leave a comment
+on the website, or record a follow-up episode yourself.
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