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Episode: 3969
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Title: HPR3969: Game Sales
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Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3969/hpr3969.mp3
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Transcribed: 2025-10-25 18:07:14
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---
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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3969 for Thursday the 19th of October 2023.
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Today's show is entitled, Game Sales.
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It is part of the series computer strategy games.
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It is hosted by Avokak and is about 14 minutes long.
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It carries a clean flag.
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The summary is I have recently found some bargains and wanted the share that with the community.
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You are listening to a show from the Reserve Q.
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We are airing it now because we had free slots that were not filled.
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This is a community project that needs listeners to contribute shows in order to survive.
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Please consider recording a show for Hacker Public Radio.
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Hello, this is Ahuka, welcoming you to Hacker Public Radio in another exciting episode.
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And this is going into the Q is an emergency episode.
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So if you're hearing this, it means the Q is running out of shows.
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And it also means you should be recording a show.
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It's not hard to do.
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In fact, there are many shows on HPR about how easy it is to record a show and give you
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some good advice on that topic.
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So if you're hearing this, please do a show.
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It doesn't take a lot to do.
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And I'm living proof of that because I do a lot of them.
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This is not going to be the longest one I've ever done either.
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But it's something I want to talk about here in terms of I've done some shows about
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computer games and the other day I happen to run across a really good deal.
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And it got me thinking about how you can build up your library of computer games pretty
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inexpensively if you learn how to shop the sales.
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That's always the trick to these things.
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So the first thing I want to talk about is steam.
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And now steam is a platform and it's one that I found to be very handy.
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The games are installed on your local hard drive.
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But if you change computers or want to put your games on more than one computer, all you
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have to do is install steam on that computer and then have steam install the individual
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games and it's really easy.
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And you can choose which games to install.
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So some games can run on Linux.
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So you can install them on a Linux computer.
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I'd have to say that unfortunately most of the games out there require windows.
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But the other option is if you have steam, you could decide for instance, if you had
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a laptop with a smaller hard drive just to install two or three of your favorites.
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And then if you had a desktop with terabytes of disk space, which is typically how I build
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my desktops these days, you can go ahead and install all of them.
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I've probably got a terabytes worth of games if you added everything up.
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Now steam is not the only platform I use.
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I'm going to talk about good old games or GOG and they have a platform called Galaxy
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that I also use and like a lot.
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But anyway, steam is something I find useful.
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Now both platforms let you update your games easily.
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A steam in particular makes it very easy to add what is called DLC and that stands for
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downloadable content.
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For instance, Civilization 6 has added lots of DLC to keep the game fresh.
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Now they sell this so it's a way of keeping the revenue coming as well.
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But the Civilization games are ones that I spend a lot of time on.
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So recently they did something called the leader pass.
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Now the way this works is that you purchase the leader pass in the beginning and then
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they commit to adding every couple of months or so some new leaders that you can play.
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And that just happens automatically in steam.
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You've purchased the pass.
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You will get them as soon as Forex releases them.
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And the way that works is you open up steam, you look in your library and it will tell
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you these are all the games that have updates that you can download and you can just go
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through them and download them.
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Now why am I talking about all of this stuff?
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It's because they have sales and that's the really neat thing.
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Both steam and good old games run sales.
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Now good old games seems to run sales like monthly or maybe even twice a month.
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Well steam does big sales four times a year, spring, summer, fall and winter.
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Now you are going to find super bargains on the latest games in these sales.
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That's not what this is about.
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This is about catching up on games that you may not have played when they first came out
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but might want to try when it doesn't cost much.
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And you can get some real bargains if you look.
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Now there is a YouTube channel that I like to follow.
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It's a guy from New Zealand.
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His handle is jumbo pixel and as always there's links in the show notes for everything we
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talk about.
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Now he does reviews of the games that are on sale on steam whenever there's a sale.
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And I find his reviews valuable because he likes the same kinds of games I like.
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And that's really the secret to reviews of anything.
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Movie reviews, book reviews, whatever.
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Find someone who likes the same things you like and if they recommend something pretty
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good chance you're going to enjoy it as well.
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So how did I run across jumbo pixel?
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Because he did a lot of videos about Civ 5 and then Civ 6.
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Then he covered human kind which is a game I've bought.
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I haven't played a lot of yet but I plan to get around to it at some point.
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So I always watch his review videos to see if there's anything I want.
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And in summer of 2023 I saw that steam had something awesome on sale.
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Now steam if you didn't know already is a platform put together by the game publisher
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Valve.
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But it has games from all publishers or all publishers that wish to offer their games
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there anyway.
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But because of the Valve connection that might be why they offered something called the Valve
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Complete Pack.
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Now this bundle of games included Counter Strike Condition Zero, Day of Defeat, Source,
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Team Fortress Classic, Day of Defeat, Deathmatch Classic, Opposing Force, Ricochet, Half
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Life, Half Life Blue Shift, Half Life 2, Counter Strike Source, Half Life 1 Source, Half
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Life 2 Episode 1, Portal, Half Life 2 Episode 2, Left for Dead, Left for Dead 2, Portal
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2, Counter Strike, Global Offensive, and the Lab.
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Now there were like three or four games that I mentioned had the word Source in the title
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and what that refers to is the Source 3D Game Engine.
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So those particular games will be 3D games.
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Now that's quite a bundle of games.
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You might not want to play all of these games, but there's some real classics in that,
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you know, Portal, Half Life, Counter Strike, I mean, you know, these are legendary games.
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You know, there's a lot of value here.
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And this bundle cost me with tax included $6.94 for all of them.
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Now for that price, if you only played one of these games for a couple of afternoons,
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you've got your money's worth, you know, it's just, you can't go wrong with a deal
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like that.
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Now are you going to find a deal like this every time you log in to steam?
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No, you got to kind of watch the sales to do this.
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Now, I was alerted to it by Jumbo Pixel, you know, I watched his video and he talked
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about this and pointed out, you know, this is like the deal of the century and I immediately
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logged into my steam account and there it was and, you know, click the buy button.
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Now over at Good Old Games, it's a little bit different.
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I watched the sales and, but, you know, even when there's not a sale going on, there's
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some good bargains.
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They have a little slider thing you can set to put in your price range of what you're willing
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to do.
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So, I selected games of no more than $5 and they came back with 50 pages.
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That's 50 pages of games, not 50 games because there's probably 15 or 20 games on each
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page and so 50 pages of them.
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Now, are all of them going to be gems?
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No, of course not.
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That would be ridiculous.
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But scanning through, I saw, for instance, they offer a combo, Master of Orion 1 and
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2 for $2.39.
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Baldur's Gate and Baldur's Gate 2, it's not a combo, but each of those is going for
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$4.99 a piece.
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Then there's Mist for $2.99.
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These are all classic games.
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Now once you establish an account at Good Old Games, you get regular emails from them
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with the latest games on sale, so you'll be able to keep up that way as well.
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I always go through and just look for the ones that happen to be things like, oh, I've
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thought about that one, but I never quite regret around getting it, and now I can get it
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for a few bucks.
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Now, the last thing I want to mention here is Humble Bundle, and again, link in the show
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notes for this.
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Now they will package up a group of games, and I've bought a few bundles from them.
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Generally it's a theme of some kind, and you decide how much you want to pay.
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Now the way the deal works is the more you pay, the more games you get.
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Now Humble Bundle doesn't just do games, they do books, and it works pretty much the
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same way.
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So for instance, I only want to pay $5, you know, for $5, we'll give you these
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four games, or these four books, or whatever.
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Okay, maybe what if I pay $10, all right, we'll give you a couple more, you know, and
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so on.
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And then, you know, somewhere around $15 or $20, you get the whole bundle, usually.
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So, and the other thing is that a portion of the proceeds from these goes to charity, and
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they'll tell you which charity it is, that they're supporting on any given bundle.
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And you can download the games, but for most of them, you can just add them to your Steam
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account, assuming you have a Steam account, and I do.
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Now right now, I just checked, as I write this, and record this, I see they have a bundle
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of 16 Train Simulator games.
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Now, that's a niche audience to be sure, but I finally remember many hours playing
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Sid Meier's Railroad Tycoon, so I get the attraction.
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And I've published bundles of indie games that run on Linux from them, and they run
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on Steam.
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You know, Steam is also available for Linux.
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The only issue there is that it can only run games that are written for Linux specifically,
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and there are some issues there.
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Now, I have run Civilization 5 on Steam on Linux quite successfully.
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I've had a few issues with Civilization 6, but that's also available on Linux.
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Well, it's just some things that happen to occur to me that I thought I would share,
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because I know there's other people in the community that are lovers of computer games.
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And it just, there's no excuse, in my view, if you're a game lover, not to be playing
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a ton of great games for not very much money, just by knowing how to shop the sales.
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So this is Ahuka for Hacker Public Radio, signing off and encouraging everyone as always
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to support FreeSoftware.
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Bye bye.
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You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio, and Hacker Public Radio does work.
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Today's show was contributed by a HBR listener like yourself.
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If you ever thought of recording podcasts, click on our contribute link to find out how
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easy it really is.
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The hosting for HBR has been kindly provided by www.monsthost.com, the Internet Archive
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and our Sync.net.
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On the Sadois status, today's show is released on our Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
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License.
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