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

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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.