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hpr_transcripts/hpr4315.txt

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+Episode: 4315
+Title: HPR4315: How I got into the wonderful world of hackery
+Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4315/hpr4315.mp3
+Transcribed: 2025-10-25 22:51:42
+
+---
+
+This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4,315, for Friday the 14th of February 2025.
+Today's show is entitled, How I Got Into the Wonderful World of Hackerie.
+It is part of the series How I Got Into Tech.
+It is the first show by Newhost Chain aka Stranded Output, and is about 25 minutes long.
+It carries a clean flag.
+The summary is…
+I'm Shane and I am a host on the Linux Lads Podcast.
+This is my introduction to HBR.
+Hello, my name is Shane.
+I'm also known as Stranded Output.
+Some of you may know me as the host on the Linux Lads Podcast.
+If you haven't heard of that before, I'll leave a link in the show notes.
+I'm very excited to be doing my introductory podcast for HBR.
+I was a badgered into this by Kevin Keevey of Tuxjam, who is also a host here on HBR,
+and approached by Ken himself at OutCAM 2024, so I decided it's now or never.
+I've been putting it off for far too long.
+As I said, I'm a host on the Linux Lads Podcast, and I'm also an organizer for several years
+for the Dublin Linux community, which you might also know as a Dublin Log Linux user group.
+I also used publish videos on YouTube under my username, Stranded Output.
+There's a bit of a meaning to the username, so I can explain a bit about that later.
+So, I didn't know what to post on HBR, so I just thought I would start out with
+the standard introductory episode, how I got into all of this stuff.
+So, here goes nothing.
+When I was young, I was always obsessed with putting things together.
+I was the kind of kid who would play with Lego sitting in the corner, silently playing with Lego
+for hours and hours and hours.
+Anything that just snapped together, and I could build stuff out of, I was obsessed with it.
+I would play with Lego Technics, where you could put motors in it and build it at a car
+or build something with a motor.
+I loved all that kind of stuff.
+I always wanted a mechanoset with the metal screws and everything, but unfortunately,
+that was too expensive back in the 90s.
+Honestly, when it comes to Linux, I don't remember the first time I used it.
+It's actually lost in the ether to me.
+I do remember, though, I started using computers quite early in somewhere in the mid to late
+90s.
+I was an 80s kid.
+I was using the family computer, and I do remember the first two or three family computers
+that we had.
+I was so obsessed with the configuration in Windows that I would create batch files and
+startup files for Windows at like nine, ten years old, and I would completely bork the
+system and break the computer or re-form at the hard drive or do something really silly.
+My parents would have to bring it back to the computer shop, get it fixed or replaced.
+One thing I do remember, though, is that they were never ever angry about it.
+They would just calmly bring it back, get it fixed, and I always found it really odd
+because they would have to pay money for a new computer or pay to get it fixed.
+In the 90s in Ireland, it wasn't a lot of money gone around.
+For our family anyway, I was a bit surprised that they were never more annoyed about this.
+They would just calmly bring it back and get it fixed.
+I asked them years later, it was like, why were you never annoyed when I broke all these
+computers when I was a kid?
+They just said, we were just glad you were interested in something.
+We found it great that you were curious about this, and obviously, computers being as
+important as they are these days, it was quite a good attitude to have, I suppose.
+That was my first introduction to messing around with computers.
+Fast forward a little bit to the 2000s when I had saved up enough money from my evening
+job of picking up glasses in a pub to buy my own laptop.
+I bought my own laptop absolutely over the moon, it had windows on it of course.
+After a couple of years, I remember spying, and this is very hazy, this is all memory
+really, and it's very unreliable, because I'm older now, so very unreliable.
+I remember spying, and I think it was not an episode, an issue of, I believe it was Linux
+magazine or Linux format, I'm going to say Linux format, I spied that on the shelf in
+Easton's, a new like a magazine bookstore in Ireland, and I remember thinking, oh, that's
+interesting, and it had a disk on the front with maybe a Ubuntu or Mandrake or something
+like that, and I remember thinking, oh wow, so you can get something that's different
+to Linux, that's quite interesting, I had never come across this concept before, found
+that fascinating, so somewhere in the late 2000s that I took this cover disk from a Linux
+magazine, I read a few of the articles, I blondeered my way through it, and you know, I had
+internet, I could look up tutorials and stuff, but it was not, the information wasn't as
+easy to find as it is nowadays, so I blondeered my way through this, managed to get Linux
+on my laptop, dual booted with windows, and I was fascinated, I was hooked, and this
+is I think going on 17, 18 years ago by now, just remember being so dumbfounded that you
+could just take the computer and put a different the computer on the computer, because I had
+no concept of an operating system really, I more or less knew what it was, I knew there
+was something that had to be on the disk to make the computer work, but I hadn't really
+thought about it that deeply, so I put my Linux on my computer, and I was hooked from
+day one, dived into all the menus, learned everything I could about it, absolutely fascinated,
+Linux being what it was back in those days, not as polished as it is nowadays, but I
+didn't care, it was just fantastic, I loved it every minute of it, and I remember battling
+with things like Endis Rapper to get my Wi-Fi working, because if you had a certain Wi-Fi
+chipset on the laptop, your Wi-Fi just straight up wouldn't work, or you know trying to get
+some display drivers working, because you had a funky display card in your computer or
+graphics card, I should say, all these little niggles that you go through when you first
+start using Linux, that was my introduction to all this, so I got really into the weeds,
+I really loved it, a lot of frustration, a lot of, we've all been there, a lot of, you
+know, wanting to bounce the laptop off of all, why isn't this working, it's just all,
+but it's all like a learning process, and it was always fueled by curiosity, I was just
+fascinated by the fact that you could do this in the first place, it was just amazing,
+I believe I started out with a Bond 2, that was probably the first one I used, very quickly
+I believe I moved on to, I'm going to say it's a Bond 2 for a little bit, and then I quickly
+discovered Linux Mint, because I just preferred the more windows like layout, and if you're
+not like a big Linux person, you know, I'm sorry if I'm saying a lot of things that you
+don't really understand, but I'm pretty sure a lot of the listeners of HBR would be
+quite familiar with Linux, so that was sort of my general introduction to Linux, and then
+it kind of escalated from there, I suppose, then I started getting into a bit more stuff
+like coding, and I thought to myself, you know, this is just fascinating, I wasn't doing
+it for my day job, I was just working, you know, in pubs or in shops and supermarkets,
+I wasn't really working in anything fancy at the time, mainly service jobs, like I did
+Journalism in college, and dropped out because I just enjoyed partying too much, so I didn't
+really have a direction in life, so to speak, so like most Irish people in the 2000s,
+bugged off to Australia for two years, and went over there to get a new experience,
+living abroad, used Linux quite heavily on my laptop when it was over there, the thing
+started to show, it's age after a few years, and the fan would go absolutely 90 and sound
+like a jet engine, so at some point I upgraded to an ACES EPC, and I say EEE because I think
+it had three E's, and that thing was just absolutely beautiful, it was sort of a netbook
+form factor, quite small, I believe it was only something like 11, 12 inches, very, very
+tiny little laptop, and it worked really nicely with Linux, and I do remember using various
+distros, I'm not even going to try and remember which distros I was using at the time, so it
+was around this time that I decided that I wanted to do this for my career, and what I did,
+well I think it was 2011 or 10, I just come back from Australia, and again I was, you know,
+and this was in the midst of the financial crisis in Ireland, so I was unemployed when I came
+back from Australia, no jobs to be had anywhere, absolutely dire, so I decided, you know what,
+I'm going to go back to college, and I went to Dublin Institute of Technology to study
+information technology and information systems, essentially it was just computer science,
+and just did it because I wanted to do it, I just was curious about it, I had no inkling
+of getting a job, I didn't care about any of that, I just found it fascinating, I wanted to learn
+more, and that was really the making of me, you know, second year I believe I got my first
+proper tech job like doing like support for like a credit card processing company in Ireland,
+and I was absolutely over the moon, I was like I get paid to talk to people about computers all day,
+this is fantastic, so as the years went by I started getting better jobs, started getting more
+money, I would, you know, buy my own desktop PC, and that's when it really kicked into fifth gear,
+and started experimenting with tons of different distros, just doing everything I could to break
+the computer, and yeah just it really moved on from there, it was about I would say 2015, 2016
+that I started really getting into YouTube videos about technology, and Raspberry Pi's and
+electronics and all that sort of stuff, so I was quite obsessed with Raspberry Pi's right from
+the beginning, and even to this day, I'm proud to say I have one Raspberry Pi from every single
+generation, so all the way from one until five, I have one of each generation, and those are
+don't really use them for anything, to be honest like most people, I just keep them as collectors,
+items, their historical curiosities more than anything, but I just keep those about, just I don't
+know, I feel like in 10, 20 years time they're going to be really interesting to somebody, I can put
+them in a display case perhaps, I don't know, so I was, I was dabbling in all sorts of things,
+and then I was getting very into YouTube videos, and I thought I want to do this as well, so I started
+making some YouTube videos about technology and fast and Raspberry Pi's and blah blah blah and
+open source stuff, so that's kind of where my username, stranded output, kind of was born,
+and there's a nice little story behind the username, so I was thinking, you know, it's a clever
+play on words with standard output, you know, the standard output stream on a computer,
+what you might think, what you might see on a terminal, I'm sure you know what that is,
+and I just thought, I'm the kind of person that is interested in so many different things,
+I'm interested in a wide variety of things in terms of technology and not even technology,
+all sorts of curiosities, all sorts of things that I grabbed my attention, I was always just the
+most curious person ever, I wanted to know how everything worked, I wanted to know all the facts
+about everything, so I thought, you know, it's not standard output, it's stranded output,
+because all the output is stranded in different places, so I was, that's how stranded output
+was born, so that was the kind of the focus of my YouTube channel was basically a person who
+doesn't have any sort of specialization, just wants to know, but absolutely everything,
+and wants to try everything, and wants to know everything works, so I didn't keep up with
+regular schedule or anything like that, some of my videos got a few hundred views here and there,
+I uploaded very infrequently an average of maybe one or two videos per year, it really didn't
+go far, I am planning on starting that up again this year though, because I have signed up for
+an account on a peer tube instance, and I'm going to start posting on YouTube and peer tube again,
+so I have a couple of ideas in the works, I will put links to that channel in the show notes as well,
+if you would like to watch it, so don't judge me too harshly, because I was very
+unsure of myself, I think when I was younger, and I didn't know how to speak on camera,
+so I know it would mumble a lot, so you know, that's it, it was also around about 2015 that I
+started getting involved with the Linux user group in Dublin, and that's where I met a few
+chaps that I still know to this day, so originally it was hosted by a chap named Regel,
+and he was the main organizer, and then at some point I met Connor and Mike, so if you listen to
+Linux Lads, you might know them, they're the co-hosts on that show, so I jumped into that group,
+and I really, really was like mad curious about this, and I loved this, because I tried to start
+my own one a couple of years before, and it didn't take off, so I was really eager, I messaged
+Regel, and I said, hey, I'm on hand to help out, if you want me to organize events, if you need a
+hand, I'm here, and then I noticed that Connor and Mike were showing up as well, and this is really
+early days, like we were just sitting at a table in the Longstone or IP, Longstone, very hallowed
+Pope and Dublin, which was unfortunately knocked down, and two for a bloody office block, but anyway,
+sorry, I'm going to stop it here, because, oh, okay, I'm still recording, great,
+so my login screen just appeared, and I thought my recording was toast, but no, it's okay,
+so yeah, it was around about that time that I was introduced to Connor and Mike, we were,
+we hit it off, and then after a few, I want to say about a year, a few months maybe,
+the main organizer of the group had to move to a different country for a job opportunity,
+and he basically left us the keys to the group and said, there you go, guys, it's in good hands,
+it's yours now, so we were over the moon, so that's since 2015, 2016, we were involved in that,
+just hosting janky little meet-ups and cost of coffee, and you know, really not, you know,
+we bounced around a few different venues, surprisingly hard to find venues in Dublin for
+things like that, where you can take a laptop out, and you can actually, you can actually like
+do stuff, you know, it was mostly either had to go to a pub or a cafe where there wasn't much room,
+and you looked a bit strange if you just about 10 nerd sitting around the table with laptops,
+so it always looked a bit odd, and then that continued for several years, and then I'd say about
+two years in to that, about 2017, Connor and Mike approached me and said, oh, you've some editing
+experience, and I said, yes, video editing, and they said, well, why don't we make a podcast,
+because we were big fans of stuff like Tok's radar, and at the time, Linux outlaws, stuff like
+that, and we were just like, well, we could do that, that could be fun, you know, because we're
+at our Dublin Linux, Dublin Linux meetups, and we would be thinking like these conversations
+are very interesting, so why don't we record them, and that's kind of how it went from there,
+we just first episode was incredibly, incredibly low quality, we went to Connor's house with
+a single blue Yeti microphone, planted on a table on some towels to dampen the sound,
+and we got our laptops out, and typed very loudly for the entire episode, banged our hands on the
+table, all spoke into the same microphone, and we sounded absolutely awful, but it sounded like
+three guys who really liked Linux, and really liked open source software, and were really
+enthusiastic about it, and that's kind of what saved us, so that podcast has been going on for
+seven or seven going on eight years now, which is kind of astounding, if you ask me,
+there were times when we were getting a bit fed up, and then we'd get our second wind,
+and then we'd go hard for a few months, and then we'd get a bit fed up maybe, we'd let the
+scheduling slip a little bit, and then, you know, we'd just gone through those,
+we've just gone through those kind of cycles over the years, but now it's a well old machine,
+it's brilliant, I may do a future episode on kind of the mechanics of
+publishing a podcast with just entirely open source software, because I think it's a fascinating
+topic, and I think different people have different ways of doing it,
+and I do prefer kind of a more professional sounding audio, professional editing,
+I do like a bit of spit and polish, so you know, I've got a good microphone, a good setup,
+and all that kind of thing, but anyway, I'll save that for a future episode,
+so where do you think Stan nowadays? Well, that's kind of a big question, because there's a lot
+of history behind me now, so it's seven, eight years Linux Lads has been going, as I said,
+and as I said, we have a workflow that really works for us, it really functions quite well,
+we picked up a new host along the way, I took a bit of a break after the coronavirus pandemic,
+not a shame to say I wasn't going through a great period of mental health wise,
+so I had to take a little break and work on myself for a bit, so one of our biggest fans,
+Abeleth stepped in and became a host, and he did such a great job, very knowledgeable fellow,
+and when I came back, when I was feeling well enough to come back, he stayed on, and he's
+our fourth host now for quite a few years, and the Linux group is going from strength to strength,
+we have three meetups a month, so if you're from Dublin, we would really encourage you to come
+along, I myself am a member of the Dublin Hacker Space, known as Tog, and yeah, I host one of the
+meetups there, monthly, and in more personal news, I do have a child on the way, so
+the future of that meetup may be in question, unless I can find someone to kind of take over for me,
+but it's really great, it's great to be able to have a venue where we can, we have a projector,
+we have Wi-Fi, we have a dedicated space to sit down at tables with laptops, and we can
+nerd out to our hearts content, so really great, so in terms of the podcast that Dublin Linux group,
+everything's going so well, and I couldn't be happier, obviously I said that my YouTube channel,
+I'm going to resurrect that at some point this year, just to get away from Linux and technology,
+I suppose, my other interests are music, primarily, I'm big musician, took up guitar a few years back,
+and really loved my really loved playing guitar, I just want to give a shout out to all my
+metalheads out there, I'm a big heavy music fan, so if you're into your loud angry music, I'm your
+guy, I will definitely talk to you about that any time of any time of day, and yeah, I am also a big
+politics and history nerd, and I would actually like to do an episode in future on
+you know, the politics and the history of open source, and even how current day politics
+relates to all of this, that's something I talk about quite a lot on the next slide, so
+I used to be quite an avid reader, but unfortunately the internet has completely obliterated my
+attention span, however, the one thing that I will always read is science fiction, hard science
+fiction is my kind of thing, I will read many other things, nonfiction, drama, you know, etc,
+you know, anything really, but hard sci-fi is where my where my heart is,
+big fan of Arthur C. Clark and Ian M. Banks, particularly, and I'm a super fan of the
+expanse series by James S.I. Corey, I think it's probably one of my favorite science fiction
+series in recent years, so if you'd like to talk to me about sci-fi, hit me up on mastodon,
+or wherever, I'm happy to have a chat, because I really need more hard sci-fi fans in my life.
+So yeah, that's all there is to say about me, I hope this was interesting, I hope I didn't
+ramble too much, I will post all my links in the show notes, and I hope to do future episodes on
+HPR, and I will leave my mastodon handle and all my details in the show notes if you'd like to
+get in touch or leave a comment or feedback, etc, etc. So yeah, thank you very much for listening,
+I've been Shane, bye bye.
+Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by an honesthost.com,
+the internet archive, and our sings.net. On the Sadois stages, today's show is released
+on their creative commons, attribution 4.0 international license.