Episode: 2830
Title: HPR2830: 2018-2019 New Years Eve show part 1
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2830/hpr2830.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 17:40:43

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This is HBR Episode 2830 entitled HBRNY Show 2018 PASH 2019 Part 1.
It is hosted by Honki Magu and is about 203 minutes long and Karim and exquisite flag.
The summer is.
The HBR community comes together to say happy new year and chat.
This episode of HBR is brought to you by archive.org.
Support universal access to all knowledge by heading over to archive.org forward slash donate.
T-minus 11 minutes ladies and gentlemen boys and girls in exactly one minute.
The island of Samoa and Christmas islands will be celebrating.
The 2019 New Year celebration.
And you have joined us for the 7th annual HBR New Year Show at 24 to 26 hour extravaganza
because of time zones.
Organize this year again by Honki Magu and Keiwisher.
So let's do the first countdown.
Join me folks 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Happy 2019 for some people.
And the next one to go is the Chapman Islands in New Zealand.
So for those of us, those of you who are new to HBR, HBR's community podcast NETWORK where
the shows are contributed by listeners like you.
The HBR New Year show was post, well actually a little bit of history has not been so official
about it.
Because majority of podcasters who are in free and open source podcasting are also hosts
on HPR.
It seems like a natural place where HPR will get together and have a mumble chat and
basically talk about the year and wish one time of the year where everybody can come
on and say hello and if you don't hear it on the day then your greetings will be passed
on on to the HPR feed which people listen to.
It started off as a 7 years ago as an evening show and then pretty much we decided to make
it a 24 hour show and then we discovered that actually there are 26 time zones in a particular
day due to the weirdness of time zones.
Don't get me started on that one.
For example, the Chapman Islands in New Zealand has a 15 minute offset so in 30 minutes they
will be celebrating their New Year.
Well, anyway, K-Wisher and Honki Mugu from the Linux lookcast, those guys have streaming
livestreams every month so they were kind enough to offer their assistance and eat the
pad and stuff to basically put on the show so that's pretty much it.
Because it's a Monday last year there was quite a lot of people on at this time because
people had it the day free but because it's Monday and not a bank holiday as such and
tell tomorrow I don't expect it to be too busy today so I will be here pottering about
in the lab, no soldering this year I'm afraid, and my bill, he will be thankful of that
because my soldering efforts last year ended up costing him a few thousand in the purchase
of a microscope.
However, this year I intend to do some scanning and archiving of my father-in-law's photos
so we can enjoy that experience as we go along.
So if you're listening to this, it's after the fact that we're not rushing out the
shows either Honki is going to edit them out of the leaf and you'll probably hear this
around March.
So, all the best.
So basically I'll just stay here pottering around and due to the wonders of truncate silence,
this will be all the empty spaces will be truncated now for your listening pleasure.
Top of the morning T-50.
I'm going to have to hand back my Irish street cred for saying that statement.
I guess nope, so I turned the headphones on, so I assume this is going on the stream.
51.50, I usually try to drop in for the first few minutes, saw Ken in the room but I don't
think he was listening and he just dropped out.
The mic should be working, I'm not sure receiving is working but since nobody's talking I've
figured it is.
Well, I'll probably just switch over to, you know, I just got up a little early to check
the stuff out and I'll probably monitor while I have breakfast and stuff on the speakers
and but I'll be back in later today when there are folks here so just happy New Year's
everybody and welcome to the Hacker Public Radio New Year celebration.
I'm sure probably, you know, Ken said something like that when he first came on and now
Ken's back in.
Do you hear me?
Yes, I do.
Can you hold on one second?
Can you hold suppressed record please?
I'm not recording.
Do you have an ability to set up a recording?
Oh, yeah.
That's it.
Yeah, because this thing just crashed, I can hear you fine.
I switched to Bluetooth headset so I can walk around.
Okay.
I see you recording.
Well, I clicked start, I didn't see no start anything just a second.
Yeah, it says you were so yeah, the counter is going so I guess I did honky's eithepad has
just crashed.
So we keep track of the show notes on eithepad instance, which is just soon to crash now.
Can you get to it?
Let me learn.
And then 30 seconds the Chapman Islands and New Zealand will be heading off leaving this
world and going to the next and happy New Year to the Chapman Islands and New Zealand.
Gee, where's claw two?
This should be his time to come on.
Yes, exactly.
Oh, he has a life.
So that's a good thing.
Yeah, at least one of us has one.
So the next one that's coming up will be New Zealand again with the exceptions and more
all kind of island.
Actually, no, he won't be up for another hour that's going to be fun discussions about
counting down time zones again.
Oh, well, it's a tradition now.
Do you not have to work today?
Well, I'm self-employed.
I'm going to be in and out all day.
I've got errands I have to do in town into the year stuff.
And I should have taken care of and didn't.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, another story.
We got company days off for today and Wednesday, which was excellent news.
I didn't realize it.
So I got that pleasant surprise last week.
Well, glad to hear it.
Yeah, so I've got a box of photos to archive for my father and not.
So I'm going to go see if I can sort that out and see if you want to be here in the
back room.
Anyway.
Well, that sounds like a good activity.
I've got one friend who's off from his two jobs that he's been assigned to for two
years.
In other words, he's manager of two offices getting paid for for being one and he works
for the U.S. government.
So he's off completely right now.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Bit of a bummer, though.
I'm about 24 hours in.
There's a little more than that with a new ISP.
Yeah.
How does that?
What sorts DSL or cable or?
No.
It's actually over the cell network and I'm lacking the high speed for it is.
Cool.
What's interesting to that?
It's not as fast.
It's faster than what I had a little bit.
It's not an and more consistent, the old one.
I was always having to, you know, sometimes as often as every 24 hours.
I'm plugged up playing can plug it back in to get anywhere near the bandwidth.
And this is this is consistently faster, you know, and stable.
But it's not getting the, the advertised speed was supposed to be 23 megabits down,
which seems really fast for a cell network.
But I did, you know, I did see it running on a friend's rural system.
I don't know.
They showed me on the phone.
Maybe they gave him an app that lied to him.
But the other thing my friend did was they, you know, they, they too at first didn't have the speeds that were advertised.
And they'd go back to Amazon and buy extra antennas to plug into the, to the cellular modem.
And that seemed to fix it.
I was hoping not, you know, I was hoping to get away without it because I'm, you know, the, the side that I have,
that, you know, where I have windows, I'm in a burm house for those people didn't know.
What's a burm house for those of you who haven't followed your very tragic events?
Well, I know very tragic, but I've got cement and dirt on two sides.
In other words, it's built into the hillside now.
It's not completely covered up, which is one of the things I, I had been thinking.
And then I had to talk to a friend of my dad said, no, we had a house like that.
And we couldn't, you know, they, they pulled dirt in over the top of the roof and they said they couldn't keep it from leaking.
Oh, yeah, good advice.
So how was that working out for you?
Very well, I enjoyed it.
Well, I like the house.
You know, I like the location.
Everybody, you know, it's on the side of a lake.
So the first thing anybody says when they visit me is that much they look like the view.
Sorry, carry on, I interrupt the jettler.
So there's a cell emitter on top of the grain elevator.
Less than a mile I saw.
And I thought maybe I'd get a five out of the booster antennas, but looks, looks like I have to have them.
Well, you know, we'll see when I, I will do an HPR on it sometime when, you know, once I get everything worked out,
because there was another provider using a cellular modem.
And their high speed, their, well, their high speed is actually a little faster than what I'm getting right now.
So, you know, if this, if this is a total bust, I will probably drop these people and go to them because I don't.
One nice thing about the contractor is no, you know, initial period that you have to stick with them.
Stuck with the equipment, probably, could you, you know, get a SIM card and reuse the modem.
Yeah, good stuff.
I looked and the moment they sent me, you know, they charged me 150, that would be with the SIM card set up all that.
And the modem retails on Amazon, that model for 110.
So I didn't think I get hurt, got hurt too bad.
The set up fee is 150, but that includes $100 for the first month.
So really, I don't, you know, unless they're just taking my credit card and, you know, ripping me off or something, you know, I think it's pretty good.
Pretty good deal so far.
I mean, if it doesn't work, I can go with the other, easily go with the other provider.
So, now it's going to be next year.
The $100 a month is an initial thing. They get you the next year. It's like $139.
But like I said, the next highest I could get was like six down. If I can actually get 23 or any significant part of that, it's worth the extra money.
Because the, you know, the one other place I was looking at, they were going to be 80.
So not that much difference.
Still rather expensive. I suppose if you are living out of the country, you don't have that much in the way of choice.
Well, that's what I was going to broadcast, you know, like I said.
He wants to look into it. And once, once I see if I can, you know, where, where it maxes out, I'll do, I'll do an episode because I do do know there's people on the network.
I'm thinking I lost in Bronx in particular. No, he doesn't have a whole lot of extra resources, but, you know, this could be the solution people are looking for.
The theoretical download speeds their advertise is about what I was getting when I was on cable living in town.
Yeah, but it all depends on how many other people are on at any given time as well.
It's a shared place.
Right. So we'll see how it goes. I see honky's joined us.
Top of the more and empty.
Whatever gets old.
Yeah, the one thing I've been telling people.
Never mentioned the name of the hosting company. It's blazinghog.com.
If you look that up, you know, if you look at blazing hog on the internet, you're on Google, you're going to get a bunch of barbecue places.
So just go to blazinghog.com.
And like I said, I'm not vouching for him yet because I'm not getting the speed I'm supposed to.
So maybe wait till you hear me do a do an HP or on another venue.
Say I've got it fixed.
One of them to a problem here. Now my push to talk key is all caps.
And now I'm locked in all caps.
Right, not good. Okay, honky's recording as well. That's excellent.
Honky, if you're listening, I think I may have crashed the etherpad.
No, I'm on the etherpad.
Oh, good.
Yeah, I know you sent me out to check that.
And then I got lost in my own story and forgot to tell you. No, it works for me.
I'm just going to nip to the front room to get some film holders to find them.
Any idea how to uncap when you're capped?
That's a good question. I usually use one control keys as push to talk.
So it doesn't really affect anything in combination with anything else.
I mean, I know there are people who go in and just disable caps lock as you know,
having anything to do with the keyboard in the first place figure.
And they just hold down shift if they need caps locked.
It's an ecrodism to type riders.
Yeah, I do the same thing myself.
What the problem is now that my cap lock is.
I'm running Alex Qt and there's no easy way to do that.
So you have to use X set keyboard map settings and it doesn't completely disable it
because it's still acting as a control key for scrolling.
Okay, yeah, I'm using that Alex Qt myself right now.
So relevant.
Never had to solve that particular issue.
Yeah, I just wanted to disable this.
It's all going to the arch with you, of course.
Yep, there's very few things that you can, doesn't, doesn't matter.
Well, we're just discussing that on the last Linux loadcast,
but doesn't matter what distribution you run.
There's very few things that aren't there in Archwiki.
Yeah, yeah, found it.
Well, you get to work.
You need to share off the class then.
Yeah, how well.
Okay, that's disabled it now just to begin when it's lowercase.
And I was able to get that Archwiki keyboard layout config,
which I'll paste into the show notes.
You can see them now then.
Yeah, okay, yeah.
That's one thing I'm working on right now is trying to change my time display
to UTC so that for the rest of the day I can coordinate with the show notes.
I think you can add an extra clock down and then just take on the extra clock
in your taskbar and just set it to be what I tend to do.
Yeah, I'm in world clock settings right now and I've added UTC,
but I don't see, I haven't seen yet how to change it.
Oh, I mean, on the taskbar at the bottom, on an executee.
Yes.
So if you go configure days in time.
Okay, that's probably it.
It says use UTC third option to show seconds 12-hour style or use.
And of course, the day format you can select as ISO 8601.
The only same day format.
All right, I have to what you do, but I usually use military,
which is a date month year,
instead of leading with the year, just because that's what people are used to.
Over here, if you start, start now.
But if I label file, I do a year month date.
Writing a date on a check or something like that.
Yeah, I don't have to conform.
Much thought pains me. Yes, you do have to conform.
Okay, cool, back in a bit.
All right, I'm back.
Welcome back.
So what time is it there?
4.39 a.m.
Is this normal?
That you're feeding the codes or what?
Oh, sometimes I get weird and out of whack.
This is one of those days.
And you know, I usually do like to drop in on at least the first hour
of the New Year's Eve broadcast.
I am.
I'm past the point where I can sit here and do 26 hours in a road.
Stay up.
That's really important.
I said, my plan was to hang on for a while and then probably,
you know, fix a little breakfast.
Go back to bed for a couple of hours.
Get back up. Get some of my stuff done.
So I'll be I'll be monitoring throughout the day.
I know the tilts guys had talked about jumping in,
noon their time, which would be eastern standard time.
So I figured I would jump in with them for a while.
But then I got to go to town and get my stuff done in town.
And now after that, I should be able to hang out the rest of the evening.
Cool.
I intend to just be offering here all day.
And then just as you're kind of coming online,
I'll be just having some fun with time.
And then at the New Year, I'll drop in to say hi.
And then I'll pick it up again in the morning.
Yeah, that's probably the plan.
It's just, you know, probably stay up kind of late,
get a few hours sleep, get back up before the end.
Did finally figure out my trouble setting UTC.
And I'm actually looking at two clocks.
I'm running Nexus OS, which is a version of Ubuntu.
And finally, you know, maybe it was hanging up my Firefox.
I don't think that was it, but I installed LXQT.
I already find an LXQT.
I enjoy. Welcome, Fokey.
Hello, Fokey.
Hi.
I will only be caught.
I'm on the train to Stockholm.
That's what that sound is. Happy New Year.
Happy New Year.
Use them plumb below, imagine?
Yes, yes.
HPR New Year's full.
My wife is giving me a strange look.
She doesn't know what I'm doing here.
I have heard seven years of those strange looks.
I must say.
I leave them off. It's one day.
Okay.
So what's in Stockholm?
We will be on the ship, which is not a youth hostel.
Its name is Af Chapman.
So we will have a good time, three days with family.
Going to all museums we can.
So where are you living in Germany, I think?
Where do you live?
I'm from Germany, but we live in Sweden.
Ah, the pin drops.
Whereabouts?
I don't think the line is holding.
I shall speak to you another time.
Okay, have a happy New Year.
Yes, asking too many questions there.
The old, I'm going through a tunnel thing.
Well, it looks like Kalki is with us twice now.
Can either one of them hear us, though, is the question.
Yes, I can hear you, Ian.
Speak.
I woke up late.
I woke up about 5-11.
I rushed downstairs.
Turned on a machine, turned on a mumble, turned on recording.
I am now in the car.
I'm away to work.
No shower, but I have coffee and bales.
Oh, let's.
Happy New Year.
Happy New Year.
It doesn't sound fun.
You're having to go to work that early.
Yeah, I have been enjoying today.
So I just put my day counting.
Yeah, still.
It beats the normal day, I guess.
Change is as good as a rest.
And, you know, I just.
I don't have to explain this to you, Kalki or Ken.
But anybody listening, wonder why.
Why we do this.
It's just.
It's the one day year we connect, connect.
I guess face to face isn't the right word,
but least voice to voice.
With all our friends in the community.
Right.
And it's also.
I think it's easy way for people to kind of break that.
Well, I like third wall.
Well, that's not what I call it, but it's.
It's definitely a third wall between the.
The podcaster and the podcast listener.
Because that's kind of how I did it.
I mean, it was.
It was one of the new year's shows.
I came on and I just started talking a little bit.
That broke the third wall for me.
And that kind of spurred me on to actually trying to, you know, do podcasting.
Wow.
I'm impressed.
That is actually cool.
And thank you very much for doing the organization with Kevin on this.
It's.
It's met is a loss.
More chilled out here in our household as a result of that.
Well, this year Kevin did like 90% of it.
I set up something up on the page.
I mean, I'm not doing the hosting the.
The eitherpad for the show notes.
But Kevin did a lot of it this year.
I mean, I have no problem doing the show editing.
I enjoyed doing the show editing.
That's fine.
But I just did.
It's.
You're not.
Trying to watch.
Oh, you just kind of choose a time amount of time or how many chunks do you want to take that giant thing of what?
How many, however, at many hours that you usually wind up getting an actual audio after I did you do truncate silence.
And then kind of trying to find the right place that you could kind of cut it and then.
Throwing in the show notes for that section.
I mean, I don't have to sit down and listen to all of it just so I can make sure that the show notes line up.
But that's what the only hard part.
I used to do the editing and.
For some reason, I had the idea of getting it out as quickly as possible, but.
Yeah.
What's the point?
So.
And that was madness.
But you did it.
We're proud.
Yeah, but you know, it didn't matter.
It's actually no harm getting the shows later on and then.
Oh, yeah, that was new year.
And that was the conversation that was going on there.
Yeah, it's it's timeless.
I mean, I think it was a good way to chill out really was the lesson that I learned for the new year show.
Well, also I think more people listen if you do.
Okay, here's here's a new year show and then we got regular content in a week or two later.
There's here.
Here's the next section of the new year show, right?
You know, because there's going to be some people say, oh, yeah, it's going to be new year's show for the first for the next week.
I can't make that kind of time commitment.
And they skip the whole thing.
Yeah, 26 hours is a lot of shows.
Yeah, minimum 26.
Well, I don't know this this year where we've got.
They were doing okay so far, but.
You know, where's the work day and stuff?
I'm sure there's going to be a little bit of dead air in there.
Oh, yeah, I'm expecting it to be quite.
But, you know, if people pop on, then there's somebody here to talk to them.
So good.
That's actually something I wanted to talk to you about.
If you want us to do like last year, I sent it all to you at once and then you kind of.
Sprinkle it in throughout the year.
If you're going to do it that way, I can just kind of upload it to you as soon as I get like episode one done.
I can upload it to you and you can put it in whatever or we can try to do something where it's.
I get it all done and we do it like maybe once a week or once every other week where it's.
Tell like who gets up for some a series where every Friday was.
Was someone on leave office?
Well, when you have the first one done posted and on the posting show page, it tells you it advises.
That if you're doing a series, which this would be that you do it every two weeks,
but this is so different.
Leave it up to you.
I mean, I have no more say than anyone else.
Just you pick your slot and then put it in.
The reason I spiced it out last year was I think there was other shows in between.
So I put in I filled in the gaps.
Okay, I want to confirm confirm with you.
Not like I couldn't do this myself probably.
What do you have for UTC right now?
Because for some reason to get my clock to line up with the show notes, I had to do like UTC plus one.
Maybe that's a day like no, no, it's regular time.
So right now I have 10.51.
Yeah, that would be about right.
Well, 10.52, but yeah, 10.50.
Okay.
Well, that throws me off somehow because it shows the next next time zone on in the show notes
after you've typed to be 12 o'clock UTC.
Yes.
Oh, yeah, we're we're all off.
Okay, yeah, okay, my first post I probably jumped one.
No, it's probably me.
So we're going to 11.52.
No, I think we're right.
No, we're not.
I'll move it around.
Okay, you move yours and you get it done.
I'll move mine.
Yeah, done.
Okay.
Well, I'm glad I said something not to be critical.
But honky would be scratching his head in about a week trying to try to edit it now.
If we hadn't figured that out.
Oh, absolutely.
No, honky knows this from listing to Linux.
But when I installed Alex Qt over the default stuff for for the nitrix OS, I still have the
nitrix top bar and dock and all that kind of stuff.
So eventually I have to get rid of that for efficiency.
But right now I've got today I've got two clocks one my time and one UTC.
So I'll probably leave it like that for a while.
Sorry, we're struggling to get the photos onto the scanner.
So we should be going to the next four minutes.
The main New Zealand will be going.
That should be enough time to get a coffee, but you're right.
So honky, did you get the chance to see the Warvill?
Not yet.
I probably would.
No, wait a minute.
Didn't come out yet.
It's January four, doesn't it?
No, it was last night.
It was on Hulu at two o'clock my time.
Oh, I was checking out.
Wait, it was the 30th.
I even put that on the matter most for X101.
Well, I'm pretty sure X101 knows when it starts.
Well, shoot, I was going to talk about it, but we don't want to have spoilers.
I usually don't watch anything live and then last night was just, I don't know.
I didn't even think about it last night.
I'm probably watching it from like another day or so.
Yeah, I usually watch it.
Well, I very rarely watch anything on live TV.
I need to get tolerance in up so I can get all the channels anyway.
But even, even so, if it's something I can get later on a streaming service,
I'm paying for, it's just, it's just easier.
Well, I've said before, you know, I don't want to,
you know, we have the technology now.
So I don't want to have to be my tail is in the chair at this hour at this time
to be able to consume what I want to watch.
The only thing I watch live is the ball.
It's amazing how little TV I watch now mostly switched to YouTube videos.
Yeah, my trouble is, and I probably ought to kill one of my streaming services.
Maybe I will kill Netflix once they lose all of the Marvel content.
There's a lot of good stuff there, but it's just, you know,
there's way more stuff that I could possibly sit down and watch in my lifetime.
And, you know, even if that's all I did the rest of my life,
eight hours a day, or 16 or whatever, watch TV.
I think between YouTube and Netflix and Hulu and DC coming out and Disney coming out
and Marvel coming out, you know, there's going to be more stuff than I could possibly have the time to watch.
And then, you know, somebody would say, well, you need to cut one of those services.
But, you know, but there's that one thing I want to see, you're not one thing.
But, you know, these things I definitely want to watch on that service.
Yeah, that's where you get it. Happy New Year to New Zealand.
I just canceled my Netflix subscription because I realized the kids were watching the same thing.
So I ordered them on DVD.
And it's just cheaper after a month.
I actually owned the thing that's on the NAS.
And the real reason was because you know they changed the UI.
So it starts playing previews, and there was no way to turn it off.
I haven't seen that yet.
Well, they have it over here.
So you turn on the TV and instead of, you know, they're being a screenshot of recommended stuff.
So I go in on my profile, which is an adult profile.
And then suddenly there was, you know, around Halloween time, there was all this horror and stuff automatically playing on the screen.
As my kids are sitting around there, and I was extremely not happy with that.
So I contacted them and explained the situation.
And within a millisecond, they were able to give me a two-page, you know, answer.
Basically, yeah, a lot of people find it annoying, but basically there's nothing they do about it.
So I said, okay, then is there anything else you want me to do?
I said, yes, you can tell me how to close your account.
May I ask why you want to close your account?
Have you not been paying attention?
So, yeah, it's actually asking kids what they were watching.
And then it was just easier to order than Amazon.
And get the DVD.
Well, the friend I mentioned earlier, he, you know, where he's back on dish now.
But I mean, he was off for six months because, you know, he can put, I can't remember the problem.
He wasn't getting connected or whatever or something.
And, you know, he called him once, was on the phone for a while.
Didn't, you know, and then it didn't get resolved.
And, you know, called him back.
And a month later, whatever.
And, you know, they said, well, yeah, we'll credit you going forward.
And he says, well, yeah, but I called him a month ago.
And he's like, they're like, no, you didn't.
We've no got, we've got no record of your call.
I mean, you know, you know, that's not what you tell.
That's not good.
That's not good.
I mean, even if you thank the customer scamming, you were, it's not worth a month or whatever to call the customer a liar to their face.
Because you know, they're going to go.
Yeah, the thing about it is, especially with streaming services or subscription services.
It's in your best interest to move around because a customer who stays is not a problem.
But if you disconnect, then you can come in and you can get the new discounts.
So if you're just willing to go to another service for six months, then you, you know, wait for the new discounts on this.
And you come in as yet a new customer on the new services.
Right.
That always makes me mad when, you know, I, I get a thing in my email.
Oh, yeah, you know, we've got this discount.
And you click on it and it's like new customers only.
And it's like, so me being customer for five years doesn't count for anything with you.
And unless people do that, unless people churn, then they're going to say that, you know, there's no incentive for anybody because they know.
They know that people who don't churn are just going to give them, there's no, they're going to continue giving them the subscription money.
So there is no reason to invest any time and effort.
And just think about it logically.
Like if you're regardless, have bad service, you give to somebody.
And if they continue paying you, well, you know, the bottom line is you're still getting money from the people.
Why would you put any money into them?
So always, it's a pain in the ass, yes, but always switch providers every few years and make sure.
Yeah, well, if I don't get the discount, I'm just connecting.
And good tricks some people do here is they, especially if they're not married or, you know, they don't have a contract.
A marriage contract in the sense that they have, they're married, but they have separate maintaining their separate identities.
They will, you know, cancel the subscription.
And then the partner or wife will, or husband or whoever will then under their name will call up and go, hey, I'm a new customer in this house.
I want a service.
Right. Yeah, that's, that's a pretty good trick to do if you can do it.
And that's the point. If you can do it, if you're willing to put up with the thing.
So, yeah, get six months of Netflix, binge out and everything.
And then cancel us and watch the rest of the stuff because I mean, hey, do you really need it for the whole year?
Do you have a good switch to Amazon or Google or something?
At least you have choices, you know?
Well, all right. I mean, and I was last year.
I was not going to watch Discovery, you know, because it was the one, you know, only thing on the service.
And maybe if they do Picard or whatever and branch out, then maybe I, you know, and I hate to do another service.
But, you know, maybe that might be worth this more than one show.
And then people were talking about it online on stuff I heard and say it was getting better so finally I went in.
I think I was in there for about two months, but I, you know, that's the way I did it.
I got in there, watched the one show I wanted to watch and then canceled again.
Yeah, but if you're saying that it is, see, honky.
I wonder, can I, am I allowed to truncate it down to honky?
Oh, yeah, we call him honky all the time.
Unfortunately, I think he just got to work.
So he dropped off on the phone.
But so 20, I don't know what a cost over there for a month of Netflix.
It's 14 euros here.
So two months, that's 28 euros.
Could you buy the series on DVD for that?
Well, it's like seven here.
And like I said, I don't, you know, I'm going to have some decision to make when they do Marvel.
Because years ago, I did Netflix for a while and I looked at it and said, well, the only new move, you know.
If they had a whole bunch of old cowboy movies, you know, I still don't know a good place to get those.
You know, I would have stuck with them.
Then I would have stuck with them.
But old war movies, whatever.
Some of them could get cheap.
You would think they could get them cheap.
But, you know, the only first run movies they had back in the day and they're not much better now is that they get all the horror movies.
And, you know, okay, but I can't just sit there and watch horror movie after horror movie.
You know, so, you know, a few of the big stuff they get.
And like I said, most of it's Marvel, which they're not going to get anymore.
And what's the Marvel series have done?
Yeah, they're, and that was not Marvel pulling in the way from Netflix.
Netflix paid Buku about money for those licenses.
And they said, well, we've got all our independent stuff now. We don't need Marvel anymore.
So I think that may be a big mistake for them.
Maybe they could have negotiated a better price.
But, yeah, I, if those are your huge franchises, I just, I can't see stabbing a knife into them.
But especially since they're not going to come, you know, I think they're produced by CBS or something.
Everybody says, no, there's no way they're moving to the new Marvel network. They're not coming back.
So, you know, I am very disappointed with Netflix for that, for that action.
And so I don't, I don't really have a good feeling towards them right now.
And like I said, once, once the last of the original Marvel series airs,
I'm going to have a decision to make where they want to keep Netflix.
Yeah, I think a little bit of history or context series is interesting in what happened with Netflix.
Because they were, you know, a DVD company and essentially that was going over.
And they cable companies in the US were basically screwing the content providers.
And for, you know, they were able to collectively, I won't say it's a Napoli or a cartel,
but they were able to collectively agree what the prices were for the content providers.
So they were basically setting the price and the content providers weren't normally happy with that.
But there was no other alternative.
So what they did was they gave Netflix for something like two or four years,
rights to basically lots of stuff for cheap, for real, real cheap,
a lot cheaper than anybody could ever get it.
And then that's met Netflix a very big player.
And then Netflix were doing the same thing.
They could demand the price from the content providers because they had the outlets that everybody had.
And to respond then Hulu and Disney and whoever are now setting up.
So problem now is you've got one series that you want to watch on one service.
And that means the subscription and you can't get it on the other way.
So yeah, there you are.
Yeah, I'll be surprised within five years that we don't have some sort of packaging thing like cable where, you know,
you pay one price and you get Disney and Marvel or what?
Well, maybe they would never work together, but you know, get some kind of roll in some kind of discount.
Because yeah, I think a lot of people are not going to say I'm going to pay 15 bucks for each channel.
Oh, I don't think I ever answered your earlier question.
I believe Netflix is like eight bucks now.
Yeah, I was very disappointed comparing the content that was on Netflix.
And now the licensing here, they didn't have the same freedom here.
Basically, the stuff that they have here is terrible.
And you know, there was a time when I remember hearing you guys talking about it that everything was on Netflix,
but here you type in something and you immediately get a response back.
Oh, something like this movie that you want to watch brought up these other titles was just, yeah, frustrating.
There was nothing on there for me to be honest.
I'm not into any of the Marvel movies.
Because in the last 10 years, I've said it before and I'll say it again.
I just, this CGI just as soon as I see it, I'm out of the movie.
I just can't, I can't watch it.
And I can't invest the time into that number of series.
I don't have that amount of free time.
Well, that's interesting.
Now, the one thing I've always, you know, said YDC has never, never tried Green Lantern again is the CGI just isn't up to it.
I mean, I guess if you want to, if you want to watch Green Lantern, you're going to have to have a certain disconnect.
I didn't think the old movie was horrible myself.
But definitely, you know, you combine live action with Green Lantern type stuff.
It's going to, it's going to come out looking like a cartoon even now.
Yeah, no, to me, it's just looks like a video game.
Everything, they, from the YouTube series I watch called, let me, let me through the wonders of Truncate silence.
I'll be bringing it up for you.
Oh, you're looking for and say, you know, one of my favorite things on YouTube is all the history stuff.
And there's almost nothing probably can't find if you want to look, look for all these history channels.
There's a lot of, you know, what I watched in towards maybe military type history, but that's certainly not all of it.
I've just finished watching the entire series of the Great War.
Absolutely monumental work.
Oh, yeah, that, that should be a college course, you know, you just go ahead and watch it.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, go ahead over.
Yeah, I mean, I didn't catch it.
Well, I didn't, I didn't know about it, you know, at the beginning, maybe the first two years.
I wish I did and I didn't, I didn't catch because of that, I didn't catch every single episode all the way through.
But I mean, yeah, if, if you want to do a college course on, on, on World War One, I don't see how you could do better than just, you know, bring the people in, darken the room.
Do, do, do that, you know, do that episode.
Of course, I guess it'd be a five year college course.
Oh, yeah, but I mean, it is, it's just my, I call it there, there, there, there, there, there.
It's just such an excellent series.
It reminds me of the quality of the BBC World of War episode, World War series, which is about World War Two.
And even my entire interest with World War One history, in talking to people and talking to all the suggestions and stuff at the time, not at the time afterwards.
But my entire perceptions of that whole war, why it was started, everything just completely changed, and how inevitable World War Two became as a result.
Right, I mean, you know, I, I would definitely compare the, the Great War series with anything Dan Carlin has done, maybe even better, a lot more, certainly a lot more detailed than, than he has time to devote to it.
I mean, it's just, just, just, just blown, blown away, you know, like I said it, if you could have had the TV news that we do today, you know, following the war.
And if you didn't have a bunch of censorship and all that, by the, by the, all the governments involved, you know, this, if you've never watched, imagine that.
If you were in 1915, watching the quality of today's news reports, explaining what happened that day.
I disagree. There's no way you're getting an accurate picture in any of the news reports. And I tell you why, during the troubles in the North, right?
And you see this every, every 30 years, the release, the official secrets, the official secrets act expires on content. And you see that news reports coming out during the time were covering stuff up,
were not reporting stuff, were reporting stuff deliberately and accurately on both sides in order to influence what the information that the people had.
And also, and also the participants at the time. So if you assume that that's continuing on, because that was going on at the time of World War One as well, you can't, you have to assume that the news today is being reported exactly the same way.
But the news is, no matter what we do, there is, we're not getting the big picture. And you won't get the big picture until 30 years from now.
Now, well, you know, that was just sort of a kind of, but like I said, yeah, I did say without censorship, but there's a lot of stuff, you know, nobody would know about until somebody writes a book or a memoir or something.
Yeah, but also you don't know if a battle is important or not. He would say, oh, this was important because it was the first time this was used, but you know, first time a flamethrower was used, but sometimes things happened.
And they didn't turn out to be important. So it's actually even better than the news you get today, because you know what's important in relation to this will have a consequence.
Sorry, you will be, yeah, if you know what I mean, sorry, I'm making myself clear.
I understand another one I like is the ones that come out of the tank museum in Britain.
Imperial War Museum?
Yes, and they coordinate with, you know, the Great War and Forgotten Weapons and another one of my favorite channels.
And we all go so far and that may, maybe when the tilt skies come on, because it's, you know, lots of guns, guns, guns, discussion and probably not appropriate this early in the morning.
For some reason, you're under the opinion that I don't, I have a difference of opinion with you on the use of guns and who should have them.
But I do find us the Forgotten Weapons thing. They did a joint series with, was it them that did the joint series with the Great War where they went through the weapons and uniforms of the different armies and fired off the weapons.
Extremely interesting.
Yes, and occasionally when they had the funding, they'll actually visit first and second world war sites, mostly first world war and explain why those were important.
And I've really found interesting with those weapons shows was after the war, after the first world war, the Irish government both had a lot of the British weapons, you know, they got them over when they, when we got independence, they got the garrisons and they got the weapons from the British Army.
And I was in the, when I joined the volunteer reserves when I was a lad, they still had some of those weapons around and we got to shoot the World War One and World War Two weapons that were used by the Allies during the war.
Pretty cool.
Well, I've made at least one purchase and tried others, you know, things went higher than I, than I was going to spend, but I, I, I do have an old cult that is peer, period, you know, was talked about me doing the show on my reproductions that I've collected.
And the last one that I was looking at, pretty, pretty high, you know, and I say, you know, this, at this level, I can actually go, go get the real thing.
And I actually, I actually do, and they're probably, we've talked about this that was okay, but they're, you know, that may be my first HPR on weapons, my actual hundred-year-old cult.
Yeah, cool. I would, I would be interested in hearing that.
Well, that didn't take long, folks, did it to get to the old weapons, but the YouTube video series I was looking at was History Boss, where he takes a video and will say how accurate it is to the time.
And so, like he did get his murk, he reckoned was a brilliant movie, and Toro, Toro, Toro, do you ever watch that?
Oh, yeah, I've got that on DVD. You know, what, my favorite, my dad was a big western buff, and the next thing after that was, was, you know, war movies.
So, you know, that was one of the first things I started after the fire was to rebuild the collection.
So, so frustrating when you, when your stuff gets burned. It happened to me as well by, I left it, I left my collections with people, and they, for some reason, burnt them without contacting.
Not that I'm bitter.
Yes, and the reason I was thinking of that YouTube series, Toro, Toro, Toro, he reckons that is one of the most accurate movies that he's seen was that Pearl Harbor wasn't, and they relied there on CGI.
And ever since then, I've been looking for CGI.
Good morning. Good morning, you're, you're, you're, we're getting involved in that.
Well, Toro, Toro.
Okay, I'm going to have to mute you because it's completely unintelligible.
Toro, you're very nice. Welcome. You're welcome, obviously.
Yeah, anybody coming on just push the talk is the way to go. That means when you're going to talk, there's, you push, you push a button.
There are settings in mumble for a level when, you know, when the level coming from your,
push the talk here today, the only thing that you can do with so many people on was push the talk.
I think you're right because anybody has any background noise or anything like that.
You know, even with the best efforts, it just never works.
Now, and I'm sure you know this again, you know, the whole thing about Toro, Toro, Toro, they had two directors that a separate director for all the Japanese oriented part of the movie.
And then another one for the American oriented part.
It was, I didn't know that, no, fascinating. It was very fair, I thought, or appeared to be fair.
Right. And this may be a controversial opinion.
The main thing I have against the Japanese is that it was a sneak attack.
I mean, the United States clearly picked sides in the war between Japan and China.
You know, we're setting supplies to one side and we embargoed the other.
And I think under the Geneva Convention, General Rules of War, you know, the Japanese probably had a point saying, hey, you know, this is, you know, you're not being a neutral party.
And if you continue these policies past a certain point, you know, we have no choice but to declare war.
But of course, you know, they didn't, you know, they didn't have the only way they could succeed to Pearl Harbor was a sneak attack.
So that's the way they went.
And, you know, that, I mean, that, that's, I mean, the Japanese are already doing bad things, but I mean, as far as grievances against the United States,
that's the one thing that I would, the sneak attack is what I would point out.
You know, if I probably wouldn't have a problem with them if they'd said, you know, look, you're not playing fair.
And, you know, we're not going to be able to tolerate it past a certain point.
Yeah, but you have to admit that that statement that you just made is coming with a lot of American baggage.
So whether it's correct or not, I can understand if other people would have a different opinion.
No, I certainly understand that.
I mean, you know, you don't know enough about either side to be able to comment.
And as I said, after watching the, after watching the, the Great War, the reason, the reasons that I had understood the Great War had occurred just for blown out of the water.
Because it was, it couldn't possibly have been that.
So however, the facts are, there was a sneak attack on the Pearl Harbor base and it did bring the US into the war.
And the question is, why there were so few aircraft carriers there at the time would be an interesting question.
Well, I've seen different analysis on that.
You know, Yamamoto, you know, really wasn't interested in getting their craft carriers.
You didn't think they were important.
They did have, they did have a junior officer under them saying, yeah, we really need to get their craft carriers to.
So it was, it was a compromise, you know, that, uh, Yamamoto didn't even want to target their craft carriers.
Of course, they weren't there.
So the point was moved there.
I don't know who just, there was, there was a real good explanation.
You know, on YouTube, I saw the other day that because the carriers weren't there and things weren't where the, you know,
the Japanese thought they were supposed to be that the, that the attack was really not as successful as it could have been because you had, you had a bunch of guys.
The targets weren't there. They'd fly around and the only avenue down was, was really down this one.
Down this one slot where, you know, the, uh, the surveys flying in from the same way, they, they were pretty good targets.
Of course, the Japanese almost said, japs, they're sorry.
Did not lose that many aircraft compared to the damage that they did.
But, you know, definitely, I think if that sunk the carriers, the whole, the whole, uh, you know, I, I think with the industrial might of the United States, being from the US, you know, I, I think the outcome was inevitable either way.
But definitely that made, that made a huge difference that the carriers were not in port that day.
I think the video you're talking about is, is the one history, both toward or toward or it does go through it.
Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I've heard the channel. I, uh, but I'm not subscribed to it.
Uh, just general, just general history.
Just general history. Uh, one of my favorite channels I've discovered is the history guy and another one is today I found out and they have like for your four other channels associated with them.
Who do, uh, you should go through your, um, blah, blah, blah, blah.
You should go through your, uh, subscription list. I've done some HBR subscription tools shows coming up for offline viewing.
And then we can do the same thing a series on the interesting YouTube channels similar to what we have with interesting podcasts.
Yeah. Bookworm. Sorry. It is. The push to talk is kind of buried in plumble.
So that's probably something I should go add to the, uh, if it's not the tutorial for links like cast, maybe we should do it for HPR as well.
You know, yeah, you've got plumble. This is how to do push to talk.
Okay. If you kind of figure it out, then, uh, just come on and wield news instead.
Go ahead, bookworm over. Maybe we're too mean to a month. Yeah, we're sorry, bookworm is just that every time you talked, you just wiped out the channel.
Don't worry about it. If we're not talking, then we don't hear it back. Uh, he says I have a lot of background noise here.
So come on and say stuff. And then we'll go over at the end. And then I can mute you so that we can talk and we don't have the feedback.
Testing, testing. Is this thing on? No, darned. You have to get that looked at.
Happy New Year tattoo. Yeah, thanks. I think I'm, I don't know what time it is.
Good 30 minutes in to the new year here in Auckland, not Auckland, Wellington, Auckland time zone.
27 minutes to be precise. Not that we're in a little about that sort of thing here. Yeah, yeah.
So nice to talk to you again. How are you keeping good? I'm really enjoying your guys this community show.
I know that it's an open invite. And I always mean to, to join in on, on one of them.
But it's honestly really refreshing just to hear you and Dave Morris sort of review the state of the network every month.
In our, in our opinion, yeah. Yeah, you know, it's also helped now when people are giving their comments on the shows, because then we don't need to comment on those shows.
You want to get more opinions? Yeah, yeah. I don't think I'm usually a commenter by nature.
But it is important to give feedback. And so I've been trying to, to do that more often now.
But I think just in general, it's important because I've, I know that I've had podcasts in the past that I've always thought, oh, they're such great shows.
And I'm not going to email or talk to the host because I'm sure they get all sorts of email all the time.
And then the podcast fades away or something, you know, and you feel bad because you're like, oops, I guess I should have maybe made contact and let them know that they were appreciated.
Yeah, exactly. And I mean, for people who are listening and don't know, the community news shows we do it once a month.
And the idea was, well, when I started helping out was in the entire two years, nearly four years, when I started helping out, I only got one piece of feedback.
And it was like, you're wrong to a show. I don't remember this backstory. And that was why you started the community review.
Yeah, because yeah, you're going to have shows that are super popular. And if we interview Eric Raymond or our, if you ever do manage to get to learn this, Torvils, you know, everybody's going to download that show and it's going to be the most popular one.
Yes, that one show that tells you how to disable caps lock that works for five guys who have spent a week shouting in the emails.
Yeah, yeah. That's, you know, it's, it's, I don't think we're here there. Sorry, guys, I just cannot talk today for some reason. I can't put a coherent sentence together.
But I think HBO is different from other podcasts in that we're not about the listeners. We're about the whole switch is entirely different perspective.
Yeah, it's a really good point. I like that. Yeah.
Two, one ask, and I know a lot of times you can't talk about specifics. Is there, are you involved in any movie Hollywood projects that you can tell us anything about?
No, I got out of that, that, that racket. I've left the film business for good this time. And I am fish officially in IT.
He's doing, he's got a Fedora or another Fedora.
Well, yeah, I, I am where, yeah, a red Fedora. Did they give you one?
I actually had already gotten one because of my involvement with Fedora, someone who was involved with Fedora, but also worked at Red Hat gifted me a red Fedora.
So I showed up to the new hire orientation with a hat already. And so when they were handing them out, I just showed them that I already had one.
But yeah, they do literally give them out at the new hire orientation.
Oh, go ahead and work.
No, I was just going to congratulate Claw II for escaping the rat race, then I guess.
Well, I've changed the rat race for a different rat race, but yeah, I just, the film business is a lot of hours and a lot of work on it.
And a lot of work on stuff that you don't necessarily care about in any way.
So being able to work on something that I actually believe in, that being Linux is quite refreshing compared to free and open source software.
Yeah, it's, it's not a bad thing.
How is that working out for you? Do you have to travel a lot or working from home or what's the story?
Yeah, it's come so far as you can say.
Yeah, well, I mean, I can, I think I can say pretty much anything. I mean, I don't think I haven't bound by any agreements.
But yeah, I mean, I work remotely from my home in Wellington or my apartment in Wellington.
And we do have a local office, like maybe 10 minute bus ride from where I am.
So I can go in if I want to, but there's not really any reason to.
So I generally don't.
And yeah, sometimes I have to travel like, like next year, I'm going to travel in February.
I have to go to the States to meet like my team.
I've already met them in person once, but I have to, you know, accept sort of yearly check-ins sort of thing.
So I think it has averaged out that pretty much once a year I've, I've had the travel for work, but it's not, it's not terrible.
We have the interesting thing where our teams, oh, we have a team and then within our team, the sub teams, the sub teams by definition are spread all over Europe.
So you have the our team walking and then you're on your online tools the whole day because, you know, you're videoing with the guys and you're chatting with the modern group.
Yeah, you're emailing them and then all of a sudden there's complete silence in the office.
And then suddenly everybody will start laughing because by definition, we're also telling jokes in the chat among ourselves.
Right.
Why did I even bother coming into the.
Yeah, yeah.
Clot 2, if you know anything, any differences with the IBM buyoutness.
This is me being interested not being not me being.
Oh, let's see if we get caught too to say something or get them in trouble.
Well, I mean, technically it hasn't gone through yet.
So they still have to like the buy still has to happen.
Like the purchase has to go through the board, I guess is what I've been told.
And I think that happens early 2019 and they're telling us nothing will change.
So who knows this will be my second time being bought out by IBM.
Actually, I worked at a startup that got bought by IBM back in Pittsburgh.
So I'm not too nervous about this.
And frankly, as long as it stays open source, I don't really I don't really care whose banner flies over it.
That's that's kind of my my thought on it.
I did hear your episode on on the takeover.
I was I think it was on the new world order.
Yeah, sounds right.
I've been gone through a few takeovers myself.
I think everything you said was just made so much sense, especially related to it.
It's pretty open sort of software.
So there you go.
Yeah, I mean, I guess this will be a good stress test of the GPL.
I mean, that this is exactly the kind of thing it's supposed to mitigate slash protect us all.
Against so let's see what happens.
And I think in fairness IBM.
Okay, they they're not afraid to like have people pay for contracts.
And that's what they do very well.
Yeah, but I think they unlike other people have a track record of they really post Linux on the map.
They put them was a billion dollars at one point.
But in Linux on the map and you know that Linux what is Linux ads that they had.
Yeah, I'm from there.
And I think they've been committed to Linux as a yeah, as a thing.
So yeah, cool.
Yeah, I don't feel like their motivation is going to be that much different than red hats motivation.
You know, it's going to be the same old thing.
I imagine it'll just be.
You know, let's get Linux on all the servers and all the all the big installations.
I mean, I imagine that's what it's going to be.
Yeah, of course, the hybrid cloud.
So yeah, I would love it in my dream world.
I would love it if they would come out with a if they had some initiative.
Linux desktop initiative where they wanted to get a more stable version of Fedora out there to kind of compete for lack of a better term with Ubuntu.
That sort of thing, but I don't think that's going to happen.
I think they're going to be very much aligned with what Red Hat has already been doing.
Yeah, no, the desktop market is a complete nonprofit business.
Yeah, yeah, 100% nonprofit.
Sorry, not I don't mean that it's a nonprofit.
And they're going to make money out of this.
There's I as soon as the one to went down that road, I thought, now this has already been tried.
It's not going to work.
And actually when they went down the mobile road as well, I said that's not going to work.
It's been tried before.
Yeah, it's it's too bad.
Well, it's very much.
We have won the desktop thing because, you know, it is you've got Chromebooks and you've got Android everywhere.
It's it's a long thing.
And Microsoft sees this future in the cloud as well.
So yeah, very much.
Yeah, I think they're making that abundantly clear without really necessarily spelling it out.
But it's it's embarrassingly obvious.
Well, I was at Christmas dinner.
I go to some go with some friends and, you know, they're not like it.
Certainly was not like an argument, you know, but things, you know, use Mac for this.
Use Windows for that.
And I probably should have.
I should have been able to.
But I didn't just jump.
I didn't jump in and say, hey, you know, those aren't deal with you options.
Yeah, you got to choose your battles, especially around the holidays.
Yeah, and especially after running Linux now for nearly 15 years.
I just can't be dealing with the arguments because the don't make sense.
Because yeah, I have 15 years of proof to say what you're what you're spouting is wrong.
And you cover this actually before, you know, you're you're in.
Oh, sorry, people.
Anybody haven't to listen to my trouble.
You cover this in your new world order shows where you said, no, it's not that investing somebody who's only expertise is photoshop or whatever tool they happen to have.
That is a bad investment in people.
I'm actually not doing your show correct.
I mean, just us there.
No, but I mean, yeah, I think you're right.
I think like if if if people can't look at you and see that you've been running Linux on the desktop for 15 years or whatever.
I think that that's proof enough that it's a viable option.
Then obviously that's nothing you can say is going to change their mind about that.
Because you're you're the living proof that they can't see it.
Then they're not going to hear it.
So well, I mean, it's the trouble is if you can fit somebody to run Linux, you automatically become their free tech support forever.
Yeah, actually don't have a problem with that because there I'm there.
I have a vested interest in doing it.
So I'm I'm happy to do that.
And yes, the will be questions.
And but if you teach them the skills like CD, you know, open up a console, changing directory into something.
You could go back in time and, you know, 50 years ago, you could you could still sit in front of some of the early Unix consoles and type something.
Whereas now you can also crack open a control T on a Chromebook, one of the newest ones.
And you got a terminal and the same command still works.
So it's well worth my while investing the time and effort in that.
Whereas we're great of all the hours of teaching somebody how to use Excel 95 gone, you know, poof.
So I'm absolutely.
The trouble is I, you know, I deal with some people really shouldn't have a compute.
Well, I shouldn't say shouldn't have a computer, but when you know what I mean.
Oh, yeah, the best thing that about that 15 years of Linux is, you know, I can now say to people, sorry, I've never actually used Windows Vista or I've never used whatever Windows 10.
So no, I can sit down in front of this thing and I can try my best.
Yes, strangely, that's what happens to me.
I tell people to their face, I have never used this.
And they still, they just don't hear that and they're like, here, try this, you know, like figure this out for me.
And then I sit down and inevitably configure it out because, you know, I guess it's just the difference between generically looking at a computer and troubleshooting mentally and figuring out what happens, which some people are unwilling to do.
Yeah, I guess I'm willing ultimately because I mean, if they wanted to do it, they could.
Well, I have a difference between a decent operating system like Linux and Windows. I haven't had this so much in Mac, but professionally, you know, you sit down and you get this error.
And of course you Google there and okay, there's like these three different things that could be in Windows or these top three things.
None of them works.
Then you're going down the rabbit hole chasing all these different things and still nothing works.
Yeah, and that's when the experience, I mean, the troubleshooting can take, you know, all day.
And if you can find someone who's actually used to the OS that you are troubleshooting, it obviously, that would be the correct answer.
Because yeah, me fiddling around with something and hoping to come across the correct answer is just frustrating for everyone.
But people still tend to look at computer people as just sort of generally computer people.
We get recruited for it no matter what, which is fine. Generally, I'm happy to help.
It just sometimes isn't the most efficient way to the correct answer.
Well, it just reminds me, oh, it's not on anymore.
Top Boone County, one of the old comic strips that used to be in papers always depicted the computer guy as a bird with a wizard hat on.
Yeah, yeah, that's funny.
I just wish, I mean, it's funny, but it's like completely wrong.
Because, or maybe it's right, because I guess wizards are supposed to have studied to gain their knowledge.
So maybe that's correct, but it's, it's just frustrating to try to convince people that, you know, if you want to learn this stuff, you can learn it.
And you can become good at this, but you just have to be patient.
And you have to have, I guess, an innate desire to actually learn, which, I mean, a lot of people don't.
That's not, that's not an interest that they have.
And so it's not something that they're going to learn.
Just because it's, it's not there.
The spark is not there.
And it's also not important.
Yeah.
It was a years ago, somebody said, yeah, heart surgeon who could go into a operation and say people's lives.
And remember the exact amount of dosage of something that somebody needs to have to keep them alive in a stressful situation with all sorts of chaos going on.
And that person can't remember any character password.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
I always compare it to car mechanics or car repair for myself because I know, like, when I had a vehicle, I just always thought, oh, man, I should really understand this thing.
I should understand how to troubleshoot this.
I should understand how to repair it.
And it's just one of those things that's in the back of your mind, but you never actually take action on.
And for a lot of people, that's the computer.
You know, they maybe in the back of their head, they're thinking, I should, I should learn this thing.
I should really get this.
I should remember this.
But it's just, it just doesn't happen because that's not, that's not their default setting of, that's not where the passion is.
I think it's somewhere else.
It's cooking or painting or whatever they do.
All right.
You know, for most people, computers and appliance, and it ought to just work.
And when it doesn't, they get frustrated, you know, and like, I work for doctors and lawyers and stuff.
And it's like, yeah, these people are, I don't think they're more intelligent than I am.
It's just a matter of what interest you have.
You know, I do not have the interest in memorizing the minutiae of the law and, you know, knowing these things.
Of course, a lot of these guys probably, you know, just like us, we go to Google, they go to their law books.
You know, and doctors and stuff.
I'm, you know, I'm not interested in, I think I'm probably intelligent enough, but I'm not interested enough in cutting people open and sticking my hands into their wet guts.
Yeah.
And although not to give people too much of a pass here, I will say that I think that educators, you know, we as a society of people who have to take care of education.
I think we could do a better job of educating people, just the basic idea of problem solving.
I think that we fail pretty miserably at that, you know, it's like we just don't tell people, we don't teach people how to look at a problem and then disassemble it into separate parts and then solve each part until you have a solution.
And that goes for computing, it goes for mathematics, it goes for just all kinds of things.
And I think that's a, that's a failing on, on, on us as a whole.
This is, we're not educated.
Yeah, I think it's getting better.
I agree with you, but I think it's getting better.
Could be, yeah.
I mean, I'm a little bit outside of outside of that.
I don't have kids in school.
I know you probably do, Kim.
Yeah, but I, yeah, in some schools, I don't think education itself is, is greater than you can be lucky or not.
So yes, you're absolutely right. We can do better, but problem solving is becoming something that people have to tackle.
And my daughter is in a school system, in a, in a Dalton type school system where they're thought to break it down and break it up into individual parts and try and do problem solving.
Nice.
I can be good.
What, what, what, what did you call the school?
What, what did you call it?
A dolphin.
The Dalton D-A-L-T-O-N.
I'll put a link.
Okay.
Dalton.
Yeah, hear a lot about Montessori schools.
I'm, I'm never, I'm not 100% sure on what that is either.
I mean, I've read about it, but I, I've never, I've never seen it in action, but a lot of people speak very highly of it.
I think it's a little bit too free and willy-nilly from, from my liking.
And it's similar.
The Dalton school method is sort of similar in a way.
And this is not, this is not what I'm looking at.
And the Dalton school method is similar in a way.
So the kids have project based stuff that they need to do, but it's aligned over the week.
Some stuff is called classically.
So the whole class in front of the teacher, the teacher explains the stuff and then they split up and do it.
And the default action is that you have to try and figure it out yourself.
If you can't, then your group of four people, which, which changes every week or every few weeks, they have to figure it out there.
And if the whole team can figure it out, then you come to the teacher.
Nice.
That's great.
It works brilliantly for some people and it fails massively for other people.
So I'm not saying that's the panacea for all the education.
Yeah.
I took a class, a mathematics class at the movie studio that I was working at.
They were offering like a mathematics for 3D image stuff.
And I took that class.
And the teacher seemed really great at first.
And he had this theory that, you know, if the students essentially taught the course, then the students are learning by teaching.
And it seemed like a great theory.
And then it came around to me having to teach.
And generally speaking, I consider myself a pretty good teacher.
And I was studying up on this topic and I thought I'd had it.
You know, I just, I thought for sure it was like on a matrix transform.
I think a 2D matrix transform.
And I thought I totally got it.
And I watched a bunch of Khan Academy videos on it and some YouTube videos.
And I'd read articles about it.
And I was, I was ready.
And I got up in front of the class and I started teaching it.
And at the end of my little lecture, they were someone who knew this stuff.
Raised his hand was like, shouldn't you have done it this way?
And it was a completely different hand.
You know, and so I, I'd gotten up there and talked for 20 minutes.
Completely wrong.
And so I don't know what good that did me or anyone else who wasn't familiar with the topic yet.
And at that point, I felt like maybe the, maybe the theory was, maybe it had some, some problems with it.
And now that's burnt into other people's minds.
Right. Yeah.
And to this day, I don't remember how to do the thing or even what I was, what I taught on.
Because it was just, it was all wrong.
It was all, throw it out.
Very, very, very frustrating.
We're coming up on 12 o'clock UTC.
And really?
I thought it was, oh, okay.
Sure. 12 o'clock UTC.
It must be 13 hours ahead because it was just 12 o'clock here.
Yeah, because he got summertime.
Oh, okay.
Yeah, 13 hours.
No, we don't have one.
Yeah.
I'm, it is 13 hours.
I don't feel bad.
We got, we got a whole confusion.
You know, we were, we were one notch off on everything and had to move the show notes around earlier.
Yeah, it's, it's a real, it's a real puzzler trying to figure out all the, the time zones.
It's phenomenally entertaining.
Silly.
Well, how this came out?
Yeah.
I said, I sent one of my clocks to UTC and it's, well, that's, you know, that's an hour off of their show notes.
And asked, uh, get and he said, no, uh, yeah.
And then he figured out, yeah, we, you know, we, we jumped the gun one notch.
Well, I, um, I have family on the East Coast.
So I generally, I know I should probably go by UTC.
But I, I, like in my mind, it's easier to equate, uh, to, yeah, to relate times here to the, to Eastern standard time.
Just because, you know, of, of all the other time zones in the world.
That's the one I'm sort of more aware of.
So I just kind of go off of whatever you guys say EST is going to be.
Yeah.
I, I am happy with UTC because it's the base time in Ireland.
So exactly.
I've got to know.
Nice.
Yeah.
And I can't imagine if that's why I can't propose UTC as a solution for everybody.
It is definitely the solution for anything on the computer.
Uh, yeah.
Yeah.
I can't.
I would like to have an easy solution where, uh, we all do this, you know, like the Esperanto thing.
Yeah.
I don't, I don't understand why we don't all just use the same numbers.
And we just adjust what those numbers mean to us locally.
I, I don't get that personally.
But I've proposed that idea online once and people got really up in arms about the, the travesty of losing noon being, you know, the time that you eat lunch.
It's like, who cares?
Like, why does it matter that you eat lunch?
That you have 59 a.m.
Why can't it be some other number?
Well, the funny thing is, uh, in China, they have a one centralized time, but on the east coast.
Uh, sorry.
Yeah, north of the west east.
No, like Hong Kong, right?
Sure.
Yeah.
So the time zones make sense if you're on the east coast, but on the west, in the west of the country, uh, steps and stuff, then it doesn't make sense because you're, uh,
your noon is like evening or something.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So they operate an unofficial time.
They're local.
Interesting.
Well, right now, uh, on my calculations, it is 12 o'clock UTC and greetings to small regions of Russia, the Marshall Islands, five more.
Yeah, we need to fill that in sometime.
Uh, what the five more are hard because they probably are like, hey, uh, I'm going to butcher this and and your food, not a foodie.
Now, food, foodie.
Yarin and Tuarwa.
I know that's pronounced Tuarwa at least.
I've not really heard of many of those places, but there are lots of places in the world struggling with photos at the moment.
Any cool events planned for, uh, for the year?
Are you going to, uh, Linux come?
I am going to Linux come from actually speaking there.
I'm giving a talk on Lua.
Nice.
It'll be my first time.
Yeah, yeah.
I've been wanting to go, um, but until this year, I didn't really have, didn't really have a time to do it, but.
Uh, new job has afforded me a little bit more flexibility.
Are you going as a employed employee?
Uh, employee.
Very nice.
If I see, uh, Linux, I'll try to, I'll try to grab a interview with him.
I, yes.
Cool. I'd like to hear that.
Obviously.
I mean, I don't even know if he'll actually be there.
I know he frequents it, but I don't know how frequent frequent is.
And I'm also pretty sure that he's, he's probably difficult to, to pin down for an interview, I would imagine.
Yeah, he does some luck interviews.
And I think you may be taking some time off.
Yeah.
I'd be a tough one.
I feel like someone who's interviewed or who is well known, I feel like it would be difficult to interview them.
Just because it's like, what are you going to ask them that hasn't already been covered in 30 other interviews?
And that kind of annoys me when, when just the same topics get, you know, sort of dragged over and over and over again.
I actually had an idea for that.
Oh, yeah.
Specifically.
Okay.
Which I will talk to you offline about.
Okay, cool.
Yeah, I'll do that.
If you do get the opportunity, I have a good way to get around this.
Okay, cool.
I will be interested in hearing this offline.
I did for the first time have the experience of being recognized at a Linux conference.
Really?
That's self.
You know, a couple of people come up to me that said, yeah, I know that voice.
Yeah.
That's great.
That's really cool.
I got recognized at a little tech thing the other week.
I was at this, it was like a Christmas party sort of.
It was like a sort of everyone in tech in the city sort of got together for this sort of convention,
except it wasn't really a convention, so it was kind of a weird thing.
And I was there as a Red Hat employee.
And so I had a name tag on.
And this person saw the name tag and recognized my name from some articles I wrote online.
And it was just like, hey, I read your articles all the time.
And I was just, I was blown away.
I was just like that had never happened before.
It was just, that was crazy.
I have this weird thing right where, despite all my HBO stuff,
I have this series of articles on how to get a particular type of firewall working on Linux on my website,
which I keep up to today, as you distributions come out and you're forced to do yet another work around together working.
And all of a sudden, you'd be walking around and you go, hey, you're Ken Fallon, you've got the firewall.
That's cool.
I know it's great.
Go ahead, sir.
No, it's going to tell Ken, I keep meaning after all these years, sit down to your reverse tunneling tutorial.
Never get around to doing it.
All the reverse tunneling, I always feel a little bit guilty doing this because you know you're violating 400 security policies and setting it up.
It's just, it's one of my favorite things about being an IT is that you can connect with the people who have influenced your, really your success in the industry as well as, you know,
if you're doing this for fun, then just your personal life.
And I just love that about this industry.
And I just, I never have seen that before.
You know, you go up to someone in the movie business and say, oh, I really like your stuff.
You know, you'll get strong armed to the ground.
You know, leave this person alone. Who are you?
How dare you? Speak to them.
But in the IT industry, you can just go up to, you know, the developer of Slackware.
Tell them that, tell them that you really like his distribution and that you've been using it for the past decade.
And he's totally cool about it. It's great.
And that you've been contributing money and it's going to somebody else.
That was so cool.
A whole other problem. Yeah. I hope that things have gotten sorted for the long term on that.
I haven't really heard a whole lot of sort of reporting after it sort of got solved.
I'm not clear on whether the short term, it's the short term solution or something has gotten set in place.
Yeah. I think came up on the last Linux logcast when the listeners wrote in said, yeah, there's a thing sitting up Slackware on arm that sits by default.
It sits the hard drive to read only and place where he went, finally, found a red edit or reddit, you know, instructions on how to get it unborked, you know, and all that.
And one of our contributors, that minor, you know, he was saying, yeah, I think probably at that point, I would go install a different distro before I would go through all that stuff.
And I immediately thought of you, Claude, you know, no, no, if you're a cloth, too, you would fix it.
Yeah, I mean, it's open-source and I think that's probably the expected response, honestly.
I mean, if you can, then fix it and then keep going.
But at the same time, you know, you don't want, it is a lot to ask people to fix something and then jump through hoops to contact you with the fix.
Like, if they can't reach the person who they need to contact in order to update a document or something, then I think that's a problem with the process, which is why docs.slackware.com is so great because people can edit that.
It's a wiki, people can edit it. So that's gotten a lot better in terms of user contribution.
I'm just standing here listening to you two guys talk and thinking, gosh, what is this podcast? When did I download it?
I can walk over right now. It's really weird. It's really nice.
Hopefully that will help. I'm planning to be on the bus hearing you two guys talking and then start talking and uploading the bus again and be embarrassing myself.
Now, it's just deja vu because I think I just, well, I know I just watched that on YouTube, the clip from Spaceballs, you know, the whole, you know, what is happening?
It happened now when, you know, yeah, when they're rewinding the tape for fast forwarding or whatever they're doing.
I mean, actually, and it shouldn't be, it shouldn't be ignored with open source. You can, you don't necessarily have to contact the person with the fix.
I mean, that's the best way to do it, but you can always write your own, you know, a blog post or, you know, a note somewhere and post it online so that others can find it if they run into the same problem.
So, I mean, it's not ideal because it's not getting merged into master as it were, but it's still a possibility.
Well, in this particular glitch, you know, rather than, you know, it's probably enough to let the developer know, hey, for some reason, this is coming out and it's setting the drive to read only and, you know, fix it on your end rather than, you know, putting out documentation.
Okay, yeah, you've installed this and it's broke and do this to fix it is probably not the best way.
Yeah, sure. Yeah, just filing the bug is often times all that's necessary. It's just like, hey, I don't know if you knew this, but this is happening.
I will say about the arm thing too is that there's the arm, the arm market or whatever just seems so.
It's just really difficult, I think, to pin all of those different devices down.
So, I think a lot of times installing, well, even many Linux distributions installing it onto something, you're looking for an image for that thing.
You know, you're installing the, the open source image onto your Raspberry Pi 3 version A or whatever they call it.
And, and if you have Raspberry Type 2 rev B, then you're looking for an image for that one.
So, it's very specific to the device. It's like a cell phone almost, you know, everything has to be exactly what you're looking for, which, which annoys me.
And Slackware is a lot more generic than that. They provide arm builds, but you kind of have to, you have to do your own bootloader in your own firmware and all this other stuff.
So, it's not, it isn't like all the others where you just get an image and DD it over to your micro SD card, pop it into your device and boot.
So, it reminds me of, oh, 35 years ago, when, when they installed Unix on the servers at my college, and it wasn't like, you know, you, you, you got a binary image, it was like you downloaded the source code.
And you had to adapt that source code to particular hardware that you had.
Yeah, exactly. It's like the idea of portable code doesn't, didn't mean what it means today, where it's portable. It's easy. You just run it anywhere. It's like portable. Yeah, you can adapt it and then recompile it and then it'll run.
Yeah, I remember that weekend. They were like, yeah, the server, you know, everything's going to be offline this weekend because we're figuring out this Linux thing.
We're not Linux Unix. Unix, sorry. I have been playing around with Unix properly lately in the form of Open Indiana, which is the new version of Open Solaris. It's been pretty interesting.
It's one of the things I've always wanted to try playing with and never downloaded and done I should.
Yeah, I mean, I ran Open Solaris for a while back when it was a thing. And then I just had a spare drive on my laptop and just figured do something a little bit different.
So I've been playing around with Open Indiana. And yeah, it's coming along. It's coming along really nicely, really.
Do they have a GUI fork beyond X or?
Yeah, I mean, it's it is the X server, if that's what you mean. And then they're using.
I remember if it's mate or sentiment, I get those two next stop. I think it's mate.
It's styled very much to look like Genome 2 when Open Solaris was was a thing. So it's got the same theme and everything.
Yes, it looks for all the world just like Open Solaris.
See, I have, you know, I think not very common experience. When we were in school, AT&T, back around the whole breakup thing, donated to Kansas State about a dozen, what they called Unix PCs.
Also known as 3B1s. And, you know, it was pretty much, you know, had 220 gig heart, or not, 20 gig, 20 Meg hearts, which was huge for the day.
But, you know, came up and it was pretty much X windows or some sort of precursor of X windows because it looks just exactly like it.
But, of course, everything we were doing on the command lines, so we just dropped straight into a terminal, never, never used the GUI.
But these were the ones that they came back a year later, and they needed these for an interface to the phono exchange machines so they took them all back.
That's funny.
We were all, look at these men, and we wish we could get one of those, take them home. Of course, they were way more in a standard PC in those days.
But, you know, if you were to buy one, but, you know, these were the things we all wanted.
Yeah, I feel like it's a really unique, unique experience to have. I mean, I certainly don't have it, but it must be a unique experience to have a memory of a time when you wanted a Unix box at home.
You know, like now, if you grew up or whatever knowing about Linux and then having Linux at your disposal, the idea of lusting after a Unix box on the desktop is just such a weird idea to me.
And we had early max, and it's like, man, this is crap. We don't want, you know.
Yeah.
And of course, there was no GUI for DOS boxes in that day, but we were like, you know, what is this mouse crap, man? We don't want this.
Yes. You know, that's a really unique experience to me as well, because, yeah, I never I was raised on computers with with a mouse as a pretty much a requirement.
You could do probably more without a keyboard on Mac than you could on a Mac without a mouse, I would say. So, yeah.
Well, you know, a few years later, you know, we had went, you know, we had windows and we're into it.
And, but I had the experience went, oh, one of my earliest customers is like, yeah, I don't I don't want that GUI thing because they're going to have to take their.
My secretaries are going to have to take their hands off the keyboard to grab that mouse and it's gone efficient.
That makes sense. That's so brilliant.
We had an IBM program written by one of the guys in work to do a help desk management of them, and it was perfect.
And then they have to replace it with a GUI based off the shelf product.
It was so frustrating when something that works had been thrown out because you're replacing it with something that's pretty.
So depressing.
Well, then it's a job so you have to get used to it. So get over it. Get on with it.
Yeah.
When they got myself some cheap, gotcha coffee.
Nice.
I feel honky should have inserted the coffee, go get yourself a coffee thing that you have.
But I killed the conversation again. Sorry about that, folks.
No, it was, it was over.
I think we moved on to, I think we finished up with that topic.
Well, on coffee, and I think about you caught, too, when I, when I brew some.
But on Black Friday, I did get myself a, what's the thing with little individual cups?
I had it in my head just a second ago.
We're not going to even talk about that on, on this network.
It would be advertising for that horrible, horrible system.
Okay. Well, I did get a, I did get a compatible, which I don't think is keyed in.
You know, you can't, you can't put somebody else's cups in under whatever favor where a lot cheaper.
Yeah, but I mean, the, the, the coffee that it produces is just not very good, is it?
I, I, I had to use one at work once and it was just disamely bad.
Well, you know, I've had kind of the same conclusion. It's convenient.
But, of course, the coffee is just incredibly ridiculously expensive.
I did buy off or mark some, you know, variety packs or whatever to try.
But it's like, I know it's the same way for my beer.
I, if my beer is going to have a flavor, I want to taste the flavor, not just the hint of a flavor.
And I, I am the guy that, if, you know, I go to convenience store and I'm going to horrify you caught two.
But, you know, I get the coffee and then, then there is the, the, the, the add-on machine, you know, the, the, uh, the vanilla flavor or other flavor.
Oh, no. You're right. You're horrifying me.
Yes. You know, I just go pump, pump, pump, pump, pump, you know, you know, in, in my coffee.
And, uh, you know, in all these, you know, I get all these different curic packs.
And it's like, yeah, most of them just taste like coffee to me.
They do have a replace or a reusable thing where you can put your own coffee into it.
But, I don't know, in my experience that it renders the same, the same dismal results because it's, I mean, it's just pouring hot water through some coffee grinds.
It just doesn't quite, it just doesn't, I don't think it simmers quite enough. It doesn't, doesn't steep enough.
And I, I have those. I haven't tried them yet. Of course, when I do, just as horrifying, it'll probably be folders, but, uh, you know, other than, other than that, I've got some loose tea that'll probably work as well on those things.
Yeah, probably 50. I keep buying, um, I want to get a kind of settle on a good regular beer to have from time to time.
And, um, so we're spoiled for choice here without having so many Belgian breweries around.
Well, I keep buying beer that I've bought before and remembering I didn't like the taste of it.
Do you have any way, or do you have like a former something that you used to fill out your beer reviews?
No, I wish I did. My preference is a multi beer rather than a hoppy beer, so I think you're on the right track with Belgians in my, in my opinion.
X 1101, you know, he, he's a big hops man. So, you know, uh, my favorite beer is always one I haven't tried before.
Yeah, exactly, which is fine. I don't mind trying new beers, but I don't want to try a beer that I've tried before and it seems like senseless where I'm continuing to go into the shop and go, oh, yeah, they've changed the, you know, they'll maybe put it in a new pack.
Are you buying a different bottle size, or they've changed something with the branding and I feel like I, you know, you get coned into buying this beer again.
So on your beer review thing, which you did with HPR some time ago, you were going through the beers in sort of structured way.
So is there like a office template that we could, that you could make or things that you should check for in beer.
I'll call content to name the brand.
I don't know about that. I, I think, keep experimenting, see what you like. I mean, shoot the beer I drink the most.
You know, it is cheap and powerful. I'm, which allows me to experiment with more expensive beers that sometimes I don't like as well.
I mean, the beer drink the most is steel reserve, which like I said, it's, it's, it's a logger, which is unusual for me.
I prefer ails, but it's a, it's a multi logger and it's inexpensive, but probably not something you see over there.
And I'm sure probably, you've, you've, you've got way more selection. I would think over there than I have in rural Kansas.
I mean, maybe not, but, you know, I really like to frequent brew pubs, you know, and try their experimental beers.
How do you keep track of your coffee tasting?
I really don't. I don't check anything like that. I just, I, I try stuff, stuff that I like. I remember.
And then when it's either when I lose access to that thing, I move on to something else or I, or I just, yeah, tall.
That's just, yeah, I'm not very scientific about it at all. And I do like, I mean, I like a lot of different kinds of coffees.
Like, I'm not a coffee snob, really. I like, I like bad coffee a lot of times. So, yeah, I just, yeah, just go with what I like.
Probably open a text file called beard or text or something.
Yeah, we probably ought to come up for standard. I mean, and you guys will think I'm weird, but, uh,
we're way past that too. We're way past that.
But still dark outside. So, what you guys and I am, I'm drinking a beer.
And why I just picked out is Garden Party Lager by Free State, which is a brewery.
And Lawrence Kansas, the home of Kansas University.
I tried not to hold that against them, but it is very refreshing. It's first time I've had it.
But it's got notes of cucumber, basil and juniper.
And, you know, this, this would be very good if you were thirsty.
Who, Kansas, the first state I ever entered in New York, or a JFK?
I didn't know that. Why did you come to Kansas?
Uh, Purys and Bennett. Do you ever hear of them?
Purys and Bennett Medical Device Manufacturer got taken over by Nellcore, Nellcore, Purys and Bennett.
They got taken over by Malang Crott, got taken over by Tyco Medical.
Okay, I'm sure I've heard of some of those.
Was that? Go ahead over.
Were you developing a particular product or were you just doing IT in general form?
We were IT in, we did the European IT firm.
And then every so often I go over to the head office because the teams I've worked with were over there.
What city were they located in? I can't sit here, which car?
Kansas City, Kansas, sir.
Okay, cool.
And, yeah, I arrived the first weekend and I didn't have a, I had a provisional, like a learner's permit in Ireland.
And I rang the, I think they, uh, was it the statute of limitations and the story has, has exceeded so I can probably tell it now.
They, uh, I opened them up and like did about two inches of my fingers.
I went, oh, that's the drive going down to Tulsa, you know, 24 hours from Tulsa.
You know the start?
Yeah, take a little, take a little drive down there from Kansas to Tulsa.
How long could that be?
Around the, uh, you know, the car rental place.
And the guy said, I said, look, I've got a provisional driver's license.
Do you think that's going to be, is that going to be a problem?
And the guy says, do you have a major credit card?
I said that.
And he says, I foresee no problems, sir.
I'm married.
Yeah.
Walk down to the, uh, walk down to the place.
Anyway, um, come in and the guy goes, yeah, I got this, uh, going to give you an upgrade to her today.
And it's a, you know, a black trans and just like, uh, what's this?
What's the space?
The lounge.
Yeah, exactly.
So here was I, yeah, exactly.
That's it.
Yeah.
Typical.
I couldn't get more American than the car was right park right outside of the, uh, of the office.
Yeah.
So I get in anyway.
And the car starts going, bang, bang, bang.
Why is it going, bang, bang, bang?
Okay.
I'm in America.
Okay.
Seatbelt, seatbelt.
Okay.
Stop, just going, bang, bang, bang.
Type start, car, car wouldn't start.
No clue how it's going on.
Uh, just getting so frustrated and the guy was then looking out at me.
So I had to put the map up on the front of the windscreen.
So I could figure out how the car started.
So it looked like I, I wasn't being weird.
Eventually I figured out I needed to put my foot in the brake in order to move the gear shift.
Really.
First time driving an automatic by the way.
Wow, that's funny.
Don't feel too bad when, uh, we've got my dad's transport van, which, you know,
was a van with a ramp.
So we could get his, uh, you know, chair, a power chair on and all that stuff from locked in.
It took me like two weeks to figure out where the dimmer switch was.
Uh, because I had never, never driven the vehicle the dimmer switch wasn't on.
Yeah, yeah.
And I also learned that day that you should always carry cash on you in the States.
Always dollars everywhere for the tolls and stuff.
That's a help, you know, because that, that at least always works.
Of course, it's gotten a little bit, it's gotten a little bit better now because they've got the,
um, the easy pass, right?
Do they have that in Kansas?
Like the, for tolls, the easy pass.
Of course, I don't have one, but, uh,
yeah, and these, these days, you know, cash machines and whatever, you know,
when I, when I was in college, my, uh, my parents would tell me,
oh, yeah, we'll send you a credit card or not credit cards.
Uh, travelers checks, you know, because those are safe.
You got to have travelers checks.
Wow.
Yes, I am old.
Well, our, the company at the times, uh,
credit card was American Express, which you can't use anywhere in Europe.
It's just completely, so locally, I had a visa at the time.
Well, American Express isn't much better here.
Well, I shouldn't say that.
I mean, there'd be, but I mean, you know, of, uh,
if every place it takes fees and mastercard, there's maybe 70% to take American Express,
I may be awful.
And I don't want to get sued by American Express next week.
But definitely, there's a difference.
I had to get an American Express card for work for, for a flight because they,
the travel agency, inexplicably, only accepted payments from New Zealand
to the American Express.
It was so strange.
And so I had to get an American Express just for one flight.
Really weird.
Well, my bank here in the last year switched from mastercard to visa.
And, you know, and the visa fraud protector,
whoever pops up all the time.
And it's like, here a month ago, they denied Walmart.com.
Yeah, I don't, I, I would love to hear some macro public radio shows about
what exactly a lot of those verification systems are doing.
Like, especially in the credit card realm, all the way.
I imagine no one can legally talk about that.
But I'd sure love to hear an episode about it.
Boba can always send one in and we'll find somebody to text the speeches or in our reaction.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, I, I was talking to Ken earlier this morning.
I'd changed my internet provider to something called BlazingHog.com.
And apparently that did get past visa.
You know, I'm surprised.
I mean, first, if I, you know, if I were to set up a professional website,
BlazingHog.com is not going to be my first choice.
I mean, if you, if you Google BlazingHog,
you come up with a bunch of barbecue restaurants.
Plus, I think I wonder how much of it's even a human, you know,
making a judgment call versus just a bunch of algorithms,
timing different purchases and flagging things that are not normal and all that other stuff.
And I mean, I've never, I've never been, I've never been contacted by a credit card or a bank,
even about a purchase and, and had the result be,
oh my gosh, I'm so glad you contacted me because you've, you know,
you've intercepted a bunch of false charges.
But I have heard from people who, who say that they, that that has happened to them.
So it's a mystery to me as to what exactly really is going on and,
and how they do flag different purchases and so on.
Yeah.
And you would go to Ireland that they would occasionally ring us up and say,
I'm seeing transactions over here in Ireland all of a sudden.
So they say, oh, when we, before we're going holidays,
we tell them we're going to be going in two weeks.
So just don't bother with this.
Yeah, I used to do that too.
We've been joined by Yoroon.
I think I said that name correctly.
Yoroon.
Well, it, it sounds similar to how I pronounce it.
That's good enough for me.
How are you?
I've been enjoying your episodes a lot.
Well, thank you very much.
And I'm just trying to get this mumble set up on my daily workstation.
So I, I hope it keeps on working.
Yeah, I mean, the fact that you can hear us and that we can hear you.
And this is the first time you've joined, you're, you're, you're doing well.
You're doing better than I do.
Pretty much every time I join.
And I've joined like 20 times.
Yeah, well, well, actually it's second time that I joined the mumble.
So first of all, during my holiday in Fonds, I believe,
when I gave some feedback on my first podcast and how I experienced it.
Let's put it mildly like that.
Okay.
And also welcome to Mongo, who seems to be muted, but listening to us.
Yeah, it's always so hard to tell who means to be muted and is just listening in versus who means to call in
and just is having a hard time routing their sound.
So, Claire, too, just one question.
The way your name is spelled in the channel.
Is that the official spelling of your name?
No, I don't, I have no idea why I did that.
I'm sure at the time I had a reason, but I, yeah, it's just arbitrary.
Okay.
I think I thought it looked heavy metal to have dots over the A's and the U.
Well, in a way it does, yeah.
Sadly, I don't know what, you know, those dots suggest to speakers of a language
that actually uses dots over letters.
So, I have no idea what that would actually do to the name.
Well, the A with double points in German would sound like an E.
Oh, yeah, short E.
And you would also, you would be an E.
Yeah, some three.
Yeah, definitely not.
I'm not native German, but it depends, of course, on the language.
I mean, it does length.
That's true, yeah, that's true.
You would also see those letters in, I think, Sweden and Norway.
So, and they probably do something similar, but not exactly identical.
So, well, all bets are off, I don't know.
Hey, and there's Stuzz.
Stuzz is from Australia.
He must be in the new year by now.
But he's muted.
I just noticed.
Hi, guys.
Hey, Tony.
How's things going?
Pretty great.
Hi, Tony.
Hi, Ken.
Were you located, Tony?
Are you in the new year yet?
Probably not.
No, I'm in the UK, so it's quarter to one in the afternoon here of New Year's Eve.
Yeah, so, yeah, got a while to go yet.
So, are you a native UK guy, Stuzz?
Sorry, Tony.
Yeah, I am.
I'm native to this country.
I live in Blackpool on the west coast of the UK.
And I was born and bred in South Manchester, which is about 50 miles away.
Okay, then.
Well, let me be the first to offer you my humble apologies for one of the latest Dutch musical
verbs called the reunions.
And it's five guys who can't hold a tune even if their life would depend on it.
And they're sort of singing something like Britain come back as a sort of what they consider
to be a positive addition to the whole Brexit.
But it really sounds great.
I don't know about the song, but the message sounds great.
Yeah, I think the message as they try to convey them is for a positive angle.
But the way they've realized it is, I don't know words really.
There are a lot of everything else from the Netherlands is better than what they have produced.
Let's put it like that.
But yeah, I guess they're hearts in the right place.
I think that's something we can agree on, but other than that, it's on YouTube.
I mean, if you have five seconds, I think that's all you need.
It's really, really, really bad.
So did you start on time to midday or time?
Did you manage to get everyone in?
Yeah, sorry.
Yeah, I think so.
Ah, everything working super.
Nothing could possibly go wrong.
Nothing.
Nothing at all can.
So, Ken, when I recall correctly in one of the last episodes of the monthly news,
you mentioned that you wanted to see the graphs associated with my podcast on monitoring oxygen levels in my stepchild.
Did you get that we added the URL to a blog post of mine through the articles?
So you can probably see the graphics.
Yeah, I saw it coming in because I'm on that list.
Okay, great, great.
Thanks very much for that.
Yes, I'm going to be hopefully, unfortunately, my daughter has something where I need to monitor her blood oxygen.
Nothing serious.
So we're going to get some kit from, you know, Delic stream and all the express and places like that.
And then see if we can go up some of your stuff to us and do some plotting.
And so your work, hopefully, will lead to some more stuff.
Show us for a hit.
Oh, this is an unexpected twist through the story.
I hope everything will turn out fine, of course.
After I published the blog some years ago, I got an email at some point from a guy in America.
Who had done similar things with his child, but he made a really nice looking kibana dashboard.
But that was well, not what I was going after.
So if you like, I can look in my gigabytes of mail logs and probably find the original mail again.
If you like to get.
No timing to see how it goes.
Although I'm looking for for the show for HVR people who have expertise in kibana would be good because it's a useful skill to have.
Yeah, there would be a nice subject in a way that it's it's it's to getting started, but that's always difficult.
So sorry, can't help you there.
But I mean, I did do some Elk stack, but I never got any further than then just installing it and making it work.
And not tuning or making nice dashboards.
Yeah, the problem I have with kibana is you have a running, the data's in there and then, okay, now what?
Yeah, exactly.
I'm sure that somebody listening is thinking, oh, I have nothing to contribute to HVR, but they do know kibana.
Well, now would be an ideal time to send in the show.
Yeah, that would be a good idea.
Okay, you know it.
Yes, you know anyone to listen to the whole of episode 3000.
Yes, I did.
I actually found it very interesting because every time every time we hear this show, I was going, I remember that one.
Oh, I remember that one.
Oh, that one was really useful in that time when I did that thing.
No, I haven't used that one yet, but I was kind of to that's where that show like there was a whole go of as I was listening to it.
I was thinking, oh, I'm going to listen to this because I have a thing where I promise I will listen to every show in the network.
And actually, I thought it was going to be a bigger chore than it was.
I went back and was actively engaged with every show that went on.
Wow, you're kind of selling me on the show.
I did not download that one even.
I didn't even bother.
Oh, you're sure because it's it's like, oh, this is when what did Morris only come on then?
And he's done a hundred and two shows.
Yeah, I had to listen to some of it, but I think I got about 20 minutes in and it started to great on me. I'm afraid.
I was planning on doing it on another text-to-speech thing, but to be honest, everything collapsed.
Nothing was capable of doing it except e-speak and I was thinking, well, e-speak is the voice of HBR, so yeah.
You know, with some with better planning, and I don't mean that in a mean way, but if we thought about this earlier, we could have had like several different hosts like Reed.
You know, like, hey, Clot 2, you read every third show.
Can you read every sixth show?
You know, and then we could have, well, that would have been a lot of it.
Who would have had it together?
Yeah.
All right.
That show already took me six hours to make because it was a nightmare.
Sometimes you have a show like that and it goes, bam, bam, bam, and it comes out good, but that one was just a nightmare.
Oh, it's not particularly because there was one gap in the episodes between 3,000 and nobody was filling it.
So did you use the script to get the episode?
Yeah, we have them in the database, but then you've got the twice episodes where, yeah, we really need Thunder to do list as well.
To get those incorporated into the HPR database system and we're probably going to look at a new database system going forward.
But I use the script and then you have the names are all along.
Yeah, you listen to it a little bit and then I was using some text to speech APIs and then they've bombed out and you could only do two 20 minutes a day.
It's just a pain.
Okay.
Do I understand correctly that you're talking about replacing the eSpeak scripting with something else?
What I wanted to do and I still want to do after your episode, after your comments on your first episode was to guess a replacement for eSpeak or a different voice for eSpeak that would be more modern and more up to date.
Ideally, for, so I contacted the guys from, what do you call that open source in home automation system?
Micraft.
Micraft, that's it.
So, micraft have taken or had taken pokey's voice, pokey's voice from the Ubuntu UK podcast, so therefore it was possible to do it.
But they use a closed source engine to generate it and yeah, I'm going to want to go down that road.
So I know the speaks or festival.
Yeah, I've used both of them.
They're both a pain to set up and the quality of the audio that you get out is no better.
Ah, okay.
Because when I was just setting up mumble, it had a spoken wizard at the first, the first one of the first screens and it was, it said, well, this is generated by speaks.
So, it's all pretty good to me.
Yeah, please speak.
Well, what I'd like would be a way to take a voice.
Now, not on who does the outro text and said that she will do it to have a voice, an open source voice based that we could use in HPR for that sort of stuff.
You don't really need is you could mix the two that can you read this bit and then we'll text to speech the rest of it so to go from her actual voice to the robot voice and back.
So you use somebody's voice to create a digital definition or something?
Yeah, exactly.
The tools for doing that are closed source, so I can't do the voice.
So no use to us.
Right, right.
And if mumble is open source and mumble has this wizard and mumble speaks.
Yeah, mumble you speak.
So it's the same too.
Okay, but then it's the definition which makes it.
No, no, sorry.
Yerun, I think you, I think you misheard.
I think it said this is this, I think it's talking about speaks, the codec that it is using.
Yeah.
I don't believe that that voice was being generated by eSpeak.
I think it was speaking to you through the speaks codec.
I could be wrong.
Oh, okay.
Yeah.
I'm no expert there, so.
Yeah, I don't know.
I don't know.
Probably.
I remember what you're talking about.
I just, yeah, I don't, I haven't heard it in a while, but I think that it wasn't saying what you think it was saying.
Although I'm happy to be wrong because you're right, that voice does sound good.
So if anybody can get a voice, that's as easy to do as DNF install or advocate install.
That's fine.
But when you go down the road of festival or HTSS or something like that,
it just, you need a PhD in the, in the guistics to get it installed.
That is what I'm looking for.
It's eSpeak, dash dash voice equals black.
Okay.
And if they, there's a voice expert that can do the blabet and then give that to us as a binary blog.
The blog.
I also produce a HPR series about the blabet.
Then everyone's happy.
Okay.
And that's, that's how those acronyms in IT are born.
You know, somebody says blabet, everybody laughs and then suddenly it's this keyword that everybody knows and understands.
And everybody out of child of IT, what are they?
How are they talking about?
Foo.com.
If it wasn't for you.
Thank you.
And thank you.
I would never have known what Foo and Bar was but tattooed early on in the podcast experience explained where today came from.
I don't know.
Thank you.
Finally, somebody's explained.
I don't remember this, but you're welcome.
It was before your, even before your Urban Camping series.
I think it was before the New World Order was the New World Order.
Wow.
So there's a similar IT myth like the printer on fire bit, right?
What's the printer on fire thing?
Oh, well, yeah, exactly.
Well, so in a, I often tell this when I do a Linux, I'm going to give a Linux training.
You know the old parallel printer cables.
They had two status bits.
So you could do a zero, one, two, and three.
That's a max.
A zero would be printer offline.
One would be printer online.
Two would be out of paper.
And three would be printer on fire, actually.
And if you look at the Linux source code, it's still there.
And it's because back in the day, you had a printer with, and this is hard to describe it all tried anyway.
It was a printer that high volume printer that would print one line at a time.
And to do that, it used a sort of a band of cloth that was pulled through a bucket of ink.
And at the top of this band of cloth, it would be moved by two cylinder irons, cylinder bars in a way.
But because the cloth was at some place soon sewn together, it was a little thicker there.
And occasionally it would get stuck, where the two metal bars, one of them was rotating to pull this band from a bath back under to the bucket and then up again for printing.
And when it got stuck, those iron bars just kept on rotating.
And at some point, it would just heat up and, well, guess what?
The printer would actually catch fire.
And at least that's a story that I've been told.
That's great. I'd not heard that one before.
I remember one from early in computing, you know, actually the IBM PC was one of the first computers that
advertised that you could not enter a code and fry the computer.
You know, the TV show Halt and Catch Fire is not really very far from the truth.
But there was a guy came up with the code that would vibrate the hard drive so that given long enough, you know, it would throw the computer off the table and crash.
Well, this brings you, when you talk about that, that's what, it's a couple of years ago, but that was something that really amazed me was the construction of the Stuxnet virus.
That it was sort of a binary in and in stages, it would decrypt one part after the other.
So the first stage would be, am I running on a PC with an Iranian keyboard?
If yes, I will decrypt my next payload. If no, I will just do nothing.
And the next one would be, if I'm running on a system with an Iranian keyboard, am I, am I, oh yeah, do I have a controller for a Siemens S5 programmable logic controller on it?
If not, let's leave it to that. If yes, I will decrypt the next part. And then it would download a virus into this programmable logic controller that would then check.
If a certain motor hardware controller was in the system, if not, it would do nothing. If yes, it would check the frequency of this motor.
If this frequency motor was 1453 per minute, then it would probably be plutonium, what's the word for it?
And richer plant, exactly. And it would change the frequency to start oscillating between 0 and 3000 and back to 0 and back to 3000 as fast as possible.
And it would actually ruin the complete machine, which it's a very advanced type of warfare. But for a technical perspective, it's interesting. Let's put it like that.
Those naughty kids in their basement say, yeah, right.
28 just pointed out that it is now the new year in Vanuatu, which I know where that is now, because I live near enough that I've actually heard of it.
Well, in that case, everybody, a happy new year then.
How is life in New Zealand?
That's fantastic. It's really, really just beautiful. And this holiday, my partners planned out like a big staycation where we're visiting all the places that, you know, you should visit, but you never do.
So we've actually just been going on day trips just every day. And it's been fantastic. It's been great. It's a beautiful country.
Well, I've told you before, you know, all the locations in, well, sounds silly, but Hercules and Zena, you know, I want to come over there and see.
Yeah. There's actually a really good show that they were producing. I don't know if they're going to keep producing it, but it was, what is it?
It's like Legends of Monkey or something like that. And it's a very sort of Zena Hercules style sort of fantasy show.
This was my copy of the Chinese told me that maybe, yeah, yeah, I think I think, yeah, I think that's correct.
Because it's like, it's called like the new Legends of Monkey or something like that. You know, it's like, it gives me the impression that it's good.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
I want to say that's on Netflix. It might be. It's weird. I, that's another thing I would love to hear more about on, on anything on Hacker Public Radio is, is how in the world to do networks in this new global, you know, entertainment scene.
How do they figure out like, why do they enforce regions still? And then how does, how does Netflix sort of and the TV networks? How do they dice up their offerings? It's so weird.
Because like things that'll come on TV in New Zealand will show up in Netflix in the US and things that show up on Netflix.
Yeah, it's just, it's weird. They split it up in a really weird, unexpected way.
Why should I like an answer to that? Because I, I do know the land. Oh, all right.
Yeah, because this as somebody who works for a cable network and is responsible for a pan European thing. And these thoughts are the thoughts of me and not the company.
And this information doesn't come from the company. It just comes from other people in the industry. Yeah.
Cool. So this is my discussion. It's not anything to do with my employer just so you know.
Anyway, back in the day, you had film reels, yeah, physical content. So gone with the wind would come out, you know, 27 reels or whatever.
And there would be distributed out. So they would go to the premieres and the big, in the big places in the US. And then we get played there.
And then they would go from, you know, one movie theater to the next. And then they would be played there and then to the next and they'd be played there.
Then all those reels would be gathered up, put on the ship and sent to the next region, which was the UK.
Now the shitty real that has been playing in all the movie theaters in the US is now in the UK.
And it goes to the premier and they play it there in the premier area. And then when all those movie reels are done, then they go to the next region.
So that's where all the regions come from. Everyone would be so far. Yep. Yep.
So you sent yourself, ah, but Ken, then we have DVDs. Yes, but everybody else. Then we have distribution companies who buy the rights for the movies in those locations.
And depending on where you are, they would give you a better deal. So for example, Ireland as a country would guess the movies immediately are the movies and TV series immediately after the US because they're smaller nation.
And there was no risk of it being exposed to anybody else. So they had their own deals, which is why movies used to come out in Ireland before there would be on the BBC for instance.
And there would be on the BBC before they would get translated and put into other countries. So all their countries, they don't even have the translations done or the voice prints done or anything.
That's why they would have to be further down the chain. So then businesses start up based around these regions and then the medium changes.
So the businesses are still there. And then they still have a 20 year right to get all the movies from this region, but it doesn't really matter now because everything's digital, but that still doesn't matter because they have the contracts to do it. So history.
It does. I just I in my foolish, you know, completely no business since whatsoever. I would imagine that it would be more beneficial for a company to simply say, oh, we have this fancy new digital distribution thing that we can do.
Let's release it to the whole world instantly over the digital network. And people can subscribe to that network and pay us money for the content.
It seems obvious because you're no, because you're you're making you're making a thing popular in one location. And you're creating.
Demand. Demand. Yeah. Okay. I get that when they know the movie is going to be so atrociously terrible. So all the reviewers hate the movie.
What they do is in that case, they will release it in all the regions at the same time in order to get around the fact that people go on to rot in tomatoes and places like that.
And nobody would go to see it because it's got so many bad reviews. So there is a there is a change of foot in order to do that for movies to release it on the same day everywhere.
Where we're wide because you can't afford not to get that big bang of opening night everywhere.
However, for somewhere like Switzerland, for instance, where you have multiple languages, each language of the same movie is has different licensed distributors for the exact same movie from the exact same studio.
So just because you as an engineer would think, well, I get this in the movie and I will change the audio track, you know, add three additional audio tracks and the customer can then pick the audio track.
You don't have the rights to do that. So what Netflix do is they will take in their movies, they will add all the audio tracks, they will all the video track, the subtitles, and then they will enable them as soon as the licenses come in.
Yeah, one thing I'd like to add in my experience now back in the 70s when you had old movies on your TV stations and I'd actually forgotten this.
It would depend on how good the how old the film was because back in the 70s you'd be watching this on TV and there would be lines and all that.
No, wear and tear on the film and you would see that whole thing on the on the movie and then things went to DVD and you didn't see that.
You know, it's what they mean by remaster.
But a few years ago and this don't have any more this for the fire.
The school I did work for had a, you know, had a laser disk system and they eventually threw it out and custodians would tell me about these things.
Well, maybe you got to grab that. So I did. And first, you know, it came with an educational disk and I plugged it in and I had English coming out of one speaker and Spanish coming out of the other.
And then a little research on the internet. Yeah, for educational stuff. That's what that's what they did.
They, you know, to have two languages, they would have left track being one language and the right track being the other. You only plug in one at a time.
So that was interesting. So, you know, I didn't want to do, you know, watch a movie on it and I went on eBay and wow, these things were expensive.
But I didn't grab like Lawrence of Arabia, put that in. And the same, you know, same experience is back in the 70s. You wouldn't think.
But it came out on a laser disk and all the lines and stuff. You don't know.
Well, no remastering at all. You know, it was just like watching watching TV 40 years ago.
And I find it fascinating in some countries here in Europe, they double all the movies.
So if you have somebody like Arnold Schwarzenegger, it's dubbed by the same guy the whole time.
So if you're new to the industry and you just happen to be lucky and pick somebody who becomes, you know,
a multimillion, multimillion, you know, movie star, then you are lucky as a dubber because all the work for them, people expect the voice to be the same.
Yeah, that's a pretty good gig.
And I've been waiting for nearly an hour to say welcome to Longo and not to be flippant.
But when I hear that name, I go, I go, I go back to blazing saddles and all I can think about is, is Candy Graham from Longo?
Sorry.
And in Poland, to do this interesting thing where instead of dubbing the movie, they have a guy, usually a guy in a monotone accent doing the whole audio for everybody.
Yeah, that's the worst.
My partner is Polish or her heritage is Polish.
So we have been learning some Polish for fun.
And so as part of trying to learn more Polish, we turned on Netflix and went over to the Polish content.
And yeah, there are all these movies that say, yes, they're translated to Polish.
There's this one dude speaking Polish over the soundtrack.
So you hear the original soundtrack mixed in with the narrator speaking Polish.
It is so confusing, it's horrible.
But apparently that's what they like there because she's complained about it online and people are like, what's wrong with that?
This is great.
Yeah, Longo has replied in the bubble chat.
I didn't think about it when he picked the name.
He hasn't ever seen them.
I've seen the movie a long time ago, but I don't remember anything about it, much less that quote.
So growl and breaking up the time.
For a movie to have a flatulence in it.
And, Ken Fallon, you were asking about my preference for beers.
I've moved on to add one left for pre-state, a barley wine.
Barley wines always win.
Actually, I was asking, do you have a way to track your preferences for beer, not go and have beer to 50?
You should actually go to bed, my friend.
He happily misunderstood that.
I had a landlord who was banned from having a drink by his wife and when I come up to pay the rent, he would say, you have a drink and I go,
oh, only if you're having one yourself.
Oh man, that was a bad move.
Then every month I would have to physically come up and pay the rent and then three hours sitting with him drinking.
That was good.
I really don't see the downside.
Sorry, I'm putting stuff on the scanner as we speak.
Hence the delay sometimes.
So we have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine people on the chat at the moment.
I'm kind of pondering going to a lunar calendar this year rather than the traditional solar.
Has anyone ever used a lunar calendar in real life or does anyone understand how it works aside from, oh, you track the moon?
How does it translate to, what's a year in a lunar calendar?
It's still got to be judging the Earth's rotation, not the moon's rotation, right, for a year.
Or do you just arbitrarily say, this is what a year is in a lunar calendar?
Well, the matchinness would be different, I don't know.
I've been reading up on the lunar calendars that do exist, but apparently all of them are technically lunar solar calendars.
They're not true lunar calendars, probably for that very reason, because you can't really track a year if all you're doing is saying,
oh, there's this thing that's rotating around us.
You know, what's a year then? You just make it up, I guess.
But if I do go to a lunar calendar this year, then my new year technically isn't for another five days,
because the new moon doesn't happen until January 6.
So I may have celebrated prematurely this afternoon.
I mean, the whole point of a calendar is that you're in sync with other people.
Oh, I was not aware that that was the point.
Well, what's epoch like? We should all switch to epoch and then celebrate when it goes to a next binary digits or something.
Yeah, okay, I like this.
Well, what is the point of a calendar if it isn't that?
I've just something to track your, to sleep by, really.
You go to bed when something happens and then you wake up and you call it a new day.
I don't really know what the point of a calendar is to be honest, I'm not sure.
I feel like the current one is, I don't like the month structure right now.
I feel like the arbitrary structure of the length of months is really annoying to me.
And I want, I think we should all fix that together.
There's an excellent presentation from, I would call it a presentation from a British comedian where he fixed the calendar properly.
Okay, I can't remember, but he ended up getting one free day every so often.
So yeah, I'll win there for everybody.
So Tuesday always falls on the same day.
So if you're born on a Tuesday, it's always a Tuesday.
It's stuff like that. I'll see if I can get it in the show notes.
Yeah, yeah, try to take that up if you can because that sounds like it's worth listening to.
I think I thought I saw Dan, yeah, Dan S connected, but he's in the lounge.
Didn't the Mayans kind of figure that out?
Who?
The Mayans?
Probably, but didn't they only go to 2012 or something silly like that?
I mean, they need to, why did they, why did they declare an end to their calendar?
Or is that just a myth? Did it not really end?
They just ran out of stone at that point?
Well, that's a question.
I mean, if you're 1000 years in the past, you may have thought, yeah, 2012, that's far enough.
You know, we get to that point, we'll do it again.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, I should look into their calendar.
I don't know a whole lot about it, really.
I've never thought to read up on that.
That sounds like it would be an interesting read though, actually.
So guys, you may have already talked about this, but did anyone get any decent cakey present inside the Christmas?
No, I got myself a new drill.
Actually, no.
I can't make it any elaborate on that.
No.
Well, the thing is this year in the Netherlands, getting presents with Christmas is not a big thing.
It's increasing in popularity, but it's not a big thing yet.
And we have this other guy.
It's at the 5th of December, so a couple of weeks prior to that.
And it's called his name is Santa Claus.
So that sounds very similar, I know, but it's not far to Christmas.
But he's sort of a bishop and he comes from Spain and not from the North Pole.
He doesn't have a reindeer, but he has a bunch of helper guys.
And don't mention the war.
Don't mention the war.
Yeah, well, there is this discussion in our country going on because...
Some of them are discussion, yes.
Well, yeah, sometimes it's pretty heated.
It's a tradition called Black Pete.
And so his helper guys are usually these days have a completely black face.
And of course, from a colonial perspective, it's kind of loaded.
But the other half says it has nothing to do with colonialism.
And it's just to...
And he's black because actually the presents are delivered by going through the chimney.
So he gets black.
And the other says, well, yeah, okay.
But then a couple of smudges on the face would be more realistic.
Yeah, but the other guy says then they get very easily recognized by children.
Hey, I know you.
You're my neighbor or whatever.
So you have a group of people who are adamant against this sort of tradition.
And equally, there is a group of people very adamant in favor of keeping the tradition.
And I think about the majority of the population in the Netherlands is in between.
Okay, let's put up this for discussion.
I mean, if somebody gets...
Is offended by the way we do things.
Let's discuss how we can change this in a way that works for everybody.
But that's of course from a new perspective never interesting.
So both the proponents as the contrast, whatever, get the equal share of media attention.
But anyway, back to the original question, which is, did I get any presents?
And the short answer is no.
And a little longer answer is that, well, we used to celebrate it with all our children of course.
And we've got five girls.
But by now they're all sort of grown up and have their own celebrations at those days.
And my wife and I were contemplating, should we give each other presents?
Yeah, but you gave me a present just last week.
So I'm good.
And we felt the same.
So that's the pretty elaborate answer to the no.
Yeah, definitely a little elaborate answer.
Yeah, but what would, if we didn't do elaborate answer, we would have really, really short podcasts, right?
That's true.
Give another generation and children will say chimney, what's that?
Yeah, it's the same with, we have this technical, technical museum in the Netherlands, somewhere in the South.
And I was there with my kids when they were about 10 and 12.
And there was an original part of an original telephone switch with the rotary dials, relays, etc.
And they also had a few phones there, also with rotary dials.
And there was a number on the wall that you could call another phone a couple of meters away.
And they were just picking up the hand, the hand said that that part went well.
And then they were like, OK, how should I dial a number?
Because if you've never seen anybody use a rotary dial before, it was hilarious.
At least that's what I thought.
They felt differently.
Let's put it like that.
Oh, yeah, you know, we would do.
One of mine called me, you know, one hand holding the receiver and another, you know, finger, rotary thing.
And kids these days have no idea what you would mean.
There is actually a hilarious.
I think it's on YouTube, but this Helen, the generous, Ellen, the generous.
She has this talk show in America.
And at some point she, she did a stand-up comedy performance once.
And it, and she discussed how you would signal another driver in traffic to roll down his windscreen
by rotating with your hand as in roll down your windscreen.
And today, of course, everything is electric.
So she would like, I'm sort of trying to get across it.
I'm pushing a button to roll down the windscreen.
It's, well, pretty hilarious to see.
And I think something gets lost when I try to explain that here.
I have to admit that.
No, I think we all fall.
You know, shifting a manual transmission.
That's another thing that's going to be lost to us.
I think there's even a website that sort of collects sounds that are going to disappear,
like calling with a rotary phone or a dial tone or a modem sound or a steam engine,
all those things, all those sounds that are going to go away.
And there's sort of a sound museum in a way.
That's a great idea, I like that.
Yeah, I know it's exist.
I don't know the URL by heart, but I know it's there somewhere.
Speaking of museums, why don't you talk a little bit about your museum, your room,
or have you already said everything that you have to say on the podcast?
Well, yeah, I hope I've said everything there is to say.
Otherwise, I should make another episode.
But, well, it's, and this is, of course, something with a sort of broader thing.
I think that we are now entering a sort of time period when there actually is a computer history
that's going to vanish in a short while.
I mean, in somewhere in the Netherlands, we had in the 50s, I believe,
one of the first computers at some R&D lab, I know it's not nothing of interest internationally,
but just as an example.
And the guys making that system then are still alive and sometimes do a talk,
but they won't be alive forever.
And this is, of course, when we can still capture
that goes, of course, for other people as well.
I mean, you know, Ken Thompson, Dennis Richey,
Kurningham, whoever, just sort of grasp their thoughts and stories for history's sake.
And so that when in 40, 50 years or so, we all drown because of global warming
and after 3 million years, they dug everything up.
At least they have got nice stories to listen to at the campfire, or whatever.
But yeah, it's the same with, I can't preserve every piece of computing history,
but I just got the opportunity to preserve a part of computing history
because this friend of mine, he was cleaning house in a way,
and he had been in the AS400 business for, well, since it started, so 1988, 1987, 1998.
And I actually now have computer tapes with the OS400 is 1.0 on them.
Well, there are three computers there.
Actually, I got about two meters of them if I stacked them.
But three of those have the original first edition of the operating system.
Yeah, and I think that's something that should be preserved for history.
At the same time, I see that IBM these days, although they do great stuff in R&D,
I'm not an IBM fan, don't get me wrong, but they do some great R&D stuff.
But at the same time, and I can understand that because it's a business, they are business
and so focused on making a buck and not on preserving their own history in a way.
So I've got it now in storage.
You could say it's a lot of stuff, and it's not an exposition, but, well, it's a start.
And by starting the website, I hope that at some point, some people will say,
I have got an ASROM assistance going out of production.
Hey, there is a museum over there. Let's just ship it to them, and I can preserve it then.
So I don't know if it will work, but it's something that I'll try, and let's see what happens.
Yeah, I had a boss, I had an old job of mine, Bill Von Hagen.
And if you go to his website, vonhagen.org, Vio in H-A-G-E-N, dot org,
he has a computer museum, and I mean, to the point where he had to rent a warehouse to store all of his computers,
and it's not just like desktop computers, he would be very selective in what he was archiving, I guess.
So he has, you know, I guess, deck computers and Vax probably, those types of systems.
And I think he said he had a couple of models of some CPU that did math incorrectly or something.
It was some weird buggy CPU back in the 80s, maybe.
But yeah, it was really interesting to hear him talk about these old systems, and I always, now that I'm not even in the same country as him anymore,
I always wish I'd made him take me out to his museum and had a look around.
Yeah, I can imagine that. Yeah. Well, can you spell his name again so I can look him up?
I will paste his site in the little text on the left.
Oh, that works too.
Although looking at his site, it doesn't look like he has a whole lot of information on it.
I know he mentions it somewhere on that site. I thought he had more information on that, but maybe not.
Maybe I'm just remembering the verbal stories that he passed on to me.
Yeah, my username, if no one is aware, I'm sure it is, is taken from the original IBM Intel PC.
And I'm very interested in these steps towards that, because I think once the Intel came out, it kind of dominated the market.
But, you know, we had all these alternatives included in Europe to BBC Micro.
So, you know, I am in awe and very interested in all the information on these earlier projects.
Yeah, it actually looks like my boss, my old boss von Hagen.org slash collection.html lists all of the systems he currently has in his collection.
Yeah, a whole lot of them. I just followed him.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, do any of these mean anything? Like to me, these are just names. I'm sure they're very interesting.
But, yeah, it's like Apollo, DN, Kado systems, out there, 8800. Yeah, no idea what any of that means.
Well, I can tell you a little bit about it. So, yeah, Apollo, I used to work with Apollo back in the day.
That's about 1990-ish. And it was a workstation. It revolved around 68,000 processors.
It had the ISO bus so similar to the PC at that time. And it had a network based on token ring.
And every note on the network would have its own unique hexadecimal ID.
And just by plugging a note into the network, it would join the network so you could do...
So, the CD slash would be the root of your hard disk, but CD slash slash would be the root of your network.
So, you could do CD slash hexadecimal node ID slash, it would be on the root of another system.
No, that was also of course security attached to it there. So, it's not like you could do weird stuff.
But it was very easy to run software on another node or visualize stuff on another node like with X windows.
So, it had a non-standard keyboard. So, for instance, it had an edit key.
So, if you press the edit key, it would... it was graphical. So, it would pop up sort of a...
Let's say a node pad like an ASCII editor, but then...
It was a great system. It was bought by HP who then subsequently buried it.
Because, of course, they wanted to have to gain market share with their own workstations.
But it's a shame. And if you look at the system study heads, or DN 100 would be the smallest of them.
Sort of a single user workstation, if you look at the load, and the 3,000 would be the first generation.
After that, the 30,000 and the 3500 were subsequent generations of...
Well, what we these days would go... I guess, sort of a PC.
So, it had a keyboard screen and a system unit.
But you could run with more users on that system if you prefer.
So, yeah, Apollo was great. It's a shame that it got lost.
Let's see. What else do you have?
Data generation. Data generation was... Back in the 80s, you had this proliferation of computing platforms.
Everybody who could solar a piece of RAM and a CPU on the board would suddenly be a hardware supplier.
And the general was one of them. Out there, 88 hundred was, of course, the first...
Actually, first, hobby computer. You had to solar it together yourself, in a way.
And it used switches on the front to program it.
So, you did it have a keyboard, you did it have a screen.
You had a bunch of LEDs and switches. And it had a believer...
I could be wrong, but the Z80 processor. Somebody correct me if I'm wrong, of course.
What else do we have? Well, of course, as the Apple... Oh, wait.
You can scroll in the workstation. What else has you got?
Maybe an intergraph. Intergraph, of course, was a workstation.
Well, intergraph was a hardware and software manufacturer.
They made workstations for graphical work, mainly in the computer 80 design and manufacturing world.
Next cube was, of course, the next cube was... Let's say that the next burp from... What's his name?
I don't know what I'm not going to say it.
Yeah, you know what I mean? The guy who run Apple. Steve Jobs, yeah.
So, he was kicked out of Apple and he started his own, he started next.
And at some point, he ran back to Apple. Silicon Graphics were, of course, very...
At that time, very heavy graphics systems.
You occasionally can still find them on eBay and...
And then the sort of the sun systems. A friend of mine, down in Eindhoven, he used to collect sun systems.
And at some point, he got a call from somebody.
Because he had a web page showing all his sun stations, sun workstations, sun servers, etc.
He had a pretty big collection. And at some point, he got an email or a phone call from a guy somewhere.
I believe in Korea, which is, for the Netherlands, pretty far away.
And it was like, do you still have this sun, whatever? I said, yeah, still have it.
Okay. Can we buy it from you? And he was like, well, if you contact me all the way from Korea, you're probably pretty desperate.
So he asked for... I believe he used to say 20,000 euros, you know, 20,000 dollars in that ballpark.
And the other guy said, yeah, sure, no problem. Excluding, of course, whether it's a transport.
Yeah, of course. And it turned out that somewhere in Korea, there was this production facility.
And all the production was running on the sun system. And it just, it was outdated.
And it just went up the fritz, I believe they say.
So the production was doing nothing because the system was down.
And they were pretty desperate and wanted to pay anything to get a replacement in place.
That's pretty brilliant.
Yeah. And then after that, Walter Belkens is his name. That's a Dutch guy. Walter Belkens is his name.
He just got last year. He was one of the guys working on the Higatron.
I don't know if you heard of that project. But the Higatron is...
So that's Higatron. And this... Yeah, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.
So he got involved in this project called the Higatron.
And it's an 8-bit system with no processor chip, but by discrete components.
So 8,778 series of chips on them.
And it even does audio and RGB VGA, I believe.
So it's hilarious to have a look at it.
Anyway, back to the list. Apples, of course.
Sofjet computers, I know nothing about. Way cool peripherals.
Nope, doesn't ring a bell.
Oh, teletype. He's got teletypes. That's pretty cool.
Of course, you know that teletype is the basis of Unix.
And that's why TTY is a TTY command.
So, well, that's my small burp of knowledge on his list of stuff he collected.
And I give the phone back to somebody else because I've been talking way too long.
Tony's turn to talk about TNMock.org. Have you been there?
Sorry, no, I haven't.
I was at MIT a couple of years ago now.
And I went down to there on the lower floor of MIT.
They have sort of a, I don't remember if it's a full-blown museum,
or if it's just a makeshift museum of where they put old stuff.
But they had some list machines downstairs that I got to see.
That was really cool to see an actual just a list of machine.
It was just like this rack of components. Very cool to see.
Yeah, the museum of computing that we've got here.
The one that I put the link in the chat.
It was the base for the decoders of the encryption machine during the Second World War.
I can't remember.
Ken will probably be able to remember what it's called.
That's it, Enigma.
The Hegging system itself was called Colossus.
That's correct.
Yeah. But the broader get together a team,
which was including Alan Chorin,
which a lot of people will have heard of.
They made a movie about him recently.
And they eventually cracked the Enigma code.
But they've now turned that into the computing museum for this country.
And these all sorts of cool stuff there, including the Colossus is still there.
Although it's under wraps at the moment,
because they're having problems with the roof.
That's very cool. That would be really neat to see.
As a small addition to this,
I believe the side is called Bletchley Park.
And if you go out to Bletchley Park and to the left and to the back of it,
there's small entrance there where there's sort of the hobby,
hobby club of people who used to work at the museum.
And they have another load of hardware that they like to show off and run for you.
So if you go to that museum,
this is of course something that you have to do once.
Don't get me wrong. Never been there, but really want to.
And after that, go to the back and do another more.
More round.
Oh, that's it for now.
Yeah, it's definitely on my bookit list.
And I also, somewhere in the south of Germany,
I believe are also computer museums that are really worth to look at.
That's because I know one of the guys in the Netherlands
who started to work with the first release of Unix back in the day.
And he's still alive, 17, 17 years.
Yeah, it's nice, 68 now, I believe.
Anyway, and he traveled to a few museums.
So I can hardly just buy if he endorses something,
I just know it's good.
So I'll look it up and paste it in the channel notes from in a few moments.
That's cool.
So if anyone got any shows planned for 2019,
but they're able to talk about.
I am hoping to get back to my admin series,
which I'd started last.
Think and sort of fell off from.
I think I want to cover setting up.
I think I already did a VPN setup.
But yeah, there are a couple of topics that I still think basics this admin stuff
would be useful to know about.
So I want to go over some things in detail.
It's pretty much all I have planned for this coming year, though.
I think more stuff will arise.
Yeah, I'm hoping to go to a few geek events.
Liverpool make fresh again.
And hopefully the 10th anniversary of all camping October.
Can you come in?
I can step the way earlier.
Right.
Yeah, of course.
Yeah.
Right.
But yeah, Ken, can you, I first met Ken of camp several years ago.
And he got me to do an interview and it took me another three or four years
before I got around to do the first show for HBO.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, it's funny.
I think sometimes work out.
I mean, I was at Orch camp this year for the first time.
And somebody approached me and said, well, can you make a podcast of your talk?
So that I know where the podcast was.
There was never really any interest or never did anything with it.
And then I made my first podcast and you get a few.
And then you get your first feedback.
And now if you do your first podcast and you're, you know, a little self aware about it.
And then the first comment starts with, now, this is embarrassing.
It's not really what you're looking for at that particular point of time.
But it turns out he was embarrassed because he had been thinking about doing this talk for years.
I just beat him to it just by accident, I guess.
So having done one, I thought, well, do I want to make another one?
Why not?
It's sort of a, it's not, it's for me.
It's a way to do a brain dump, I guess, for prosperity's sake.
Or I don't know why.
So I just started recording podcasts on a sort of a,
approximately on a monthly basis for the things I've been doing the last few years.
And at some point in time, I will probably come to a halt because, well, there's nothing more for me to talk about.
Having said that, yes, to answer Kladou's question, if I have ideas.
Well, my idea for my next podcast is I've been a volunteer firefighter for 10 years.
And I stopped five years ago because I'm now 55 and I was feeling getting too old to do this.
But I think I can share a lot of knowledge about how does, what it entails to be a firefighter because there's a lot to it.
And again, make a brain dump of that.
And beyond that, I really have no idea.
The other thing is, although I want to do it on a monthly basis, so that would probably be half of January, I'm challenged to do that because on the first of February, we get the keys to another house.
So we are pretty busy packing up the house.
So I don't know how you call it in English, but anyway, getting set to relocate.
Get the removal men in.
Sorry, what's that?
In this country, we call it getting the removal men in and packing up and getting the removal van to come and move your gear to the new house.
OK, the removal, yeah, sure.
Yeah, well, I got a quotation that the other day and since it's only two kilometers drive from this to the other house, I think I'll just do it myself.
That's OK, then.
Talking about how you got into doing the podcast and you mentioned that it was your first talk at Ogcamp.
I did my first barcamp talk the other way around.
I ended up doing my first barcamp talk about Hacker Public Radio at Manchester Barcamp a few years ago.
A, it was a way of talking about something I knew about and B, it was my introduction to barcamp being a barcamp presenter.
I've never done it before.
So barcamp is dead, what I think it's about.
Barcamp is just an unconference.
They just call it a barcamp, whereas Ogcamp is an unconference with a track that's fixed.
And they've got guest speakers that are already programmed in.
I think yeah, barcamp's a room program completely.
I think barcamp is as opposed to food camp.
Do you know if that's correct, Tony?
There's such a thing as a food camp, right? Or am I just making that up?
I don't know what that is, so I couldn't answer that.
Yeah, probably it's death.
I mean, I prefer barcamp as in, you know, drinks and bar, but yeah, probably it's related to food.
Oh, usually if you go to these events, when the actual talks have finished, is usually a little bit of drinking goes on?
That was the same at Ogcamp and I must say that it was very nice to attend the social gatherings and talk to people.
And share a beer and a few stories. It was excellent. Good time.
Yeah, Ogcamp's particularly good. I've been there a few years, but I managed to make it last couple of years.
It's almost 3 a.m., so I'm going to head off and get some sleep.
Happy New Year to everybody and whoever's up next on the New Year list.
Some place in the middle of the Pacific, I guess.
Yeah, happy New Year to you, Class A, and thanks for joining us.
Yep, my pleasure. Talk to you guys later.
Wow, you're actually 12 hours ahead of me. It's incredible.
Okay, I haven't just actually had a nice talking to you.
Yeah, nice meeting you and invoiced person. All of you.
Yeah, okay. Cheers, Class A.
So we're the only ones around at the moment, your own.
I think we are. I think we are.
This is a bit strange because I was on my podcast last night.
I don't really listen to MintCast.
Not yet. I don't think so.
Is URL I can look at?
Yeah, if you go to MintCast.org, it's a podcast that got started 10 years ago
about Linux Mint, but it's now Linux Mint and all about other Linux as well.
So, you know, we entitled it.
We entitled it a podcast for the Linux Mint and all community and all users of Linux.
I have found it. Yeah, it's funny how these things work, you know.
So in August, I was at ORCAMP. I liked it.
I did a podcast by request.
I got interested in podcast.
I installed a podcast app on my phone.
I subscribed to a few RSS channels and a few weeks later, I had to drive for eight straight hours.
Well, not straight, you know, but I do it two hours interrupts.
But I had a long drive ahead of me and I put on the podcast, any podcast.
And it's so relaxed when you drive to have no ads.
Well, sometimes you have a podcast with a few ads, but not really irritating ones, mostly.
And it's so relaxed.
And I was just flew by.
So, since then, whenever I go driving my car in my alone, it's broadcast time.
Yeah, I used to do that.
Before I retired, I used to commute to work and it was about a 45 minute commute.
So I'd stick a podcast on the way to work and on the way home from work.
It was our money to get through most of my podcast list.
Yeah, exactly.
It works brilliantly.
Okay.
So when we're just two of us, what do you currently think of the...
Well, I know it's a loaded question, but I won't judge, but I'm just curious.
What do you think of the Brexit at the moment?
Oh, politics.
Is this a good rabbit hole to go down?
Let's just say I'm not a big fan of it.
And even though the country narrowly, very narrowly voted for it,
the government seemed to be making a right hash of it all.
Yeah, okay.
But my personal choice would be to stay with the status quo and leave as well we are.
Yeah, like you said, it's of course, it's a rabbit hole.
And with inter...
What's the word for it?
Intercultural exchanges like we are doing now.
It's always best to avoid politics and religion.
But at the same time, I'm curious about how is it perceived by people living in the UK?
I'm clearly not, but...
And I have my opinion, of course, but I'm also interested in what other people think of it.
When I was in Sheffield, I stayed in an Airbnb.
And the Airbnb, there was this woman staying, she was an accountant.
And I asked her, of course, how do you think about this?
As she was adamant about leaving.
And because her argument was that she had a few grandchildren.
And in a couple of years' time, the original English people would be a minority.
That's what she said.
And that's how she believed it.
And clearly, she was very emotional about it.
And so I asked her, how many people are there in the UK?
Because I know how many people are living in the Netherlands.
But I don't know it of every country.
And she said something like 60 million.
And I asked her, how many people do you need to add to that from another country before?
You feel that it's...
That you are becoming a minority.
And somehow, she never thought about that way.
But she was really emotional about it.
Yeah, I don't know how to...
I don't know how to really respond to that other than seeing somebody being emotional about it.
And that does something to me.
But I'm rambling on and it doesn't seem to be a point anyway in sight.
So I'll just shut up for the moment.
I have a question for you, too.
Sure.
Sure.
Was it you, Tony, who said...
Oh, no.
Or was it you, Jerome, who said...
Tempting the fate of bringing politics and religion up.
Which way?
Who said that?
Was that you, Jerome?
Can you repeat that?
Who said about tempting the fate of bringing politics and religion up?
I think I mentioned that it was quite a rapid hold to go down.
Okay.
So this is something I've been bantering around with my wife for some time.
That thought of politics and religion being rabbit holes and makes for uncomfortable situations.
And you're always told to stay away from those particularly in mixed groups and company.
But yet at the same time, if we don't bring those subjects up in mixed groups and companies,
we end up in a situation where we have very little say in a public forum on those topics
which immensely impact our world around us.
Without challenging that and being uncomfortable initially in those situations,
because they do bring up heated debates and boil the blood.
We can't get to a more centrist place where we can look at what we agree
and what we disagree with, challenge ourselves on what we disagree with
and come to a more hopefully informed opinion.
Otherwise, we just end up in echo chambers, not discussing this with the people around us,
particularly our neighbors and family, and become surprised at life changing,
world changing events like Brexit or you pick the topic that's going on right now.
In the world. And it's ugly on TV, but nobody wants to address it where it really counts
at the community level or in your backyard.
Yeah, I tend to agree with you there.
I've got a really good friend who has got the totally opposite standpoint for me about Brexit.
And he was totally in favor of it.
And we argue before the actual vote, there was a lot of stuff going around on social media
and we'd argue the point on a particular thing he might have posted and I'd argue my opinion on it
and stuff like that. Luckily, we've managed to stay friends,
but I think we are where we are with it as far as the Brexit vote goes.
My problem with it now is not the people who voted for it or against it or whatever it is,
the hash, the actual politicians make.
Well, it's to get back to for a moment too.
I had to answer somebody here for a minute.
I find myself that I can ask people things about difficult subjects like religion or like politics
by putting foremost the fact that I respect people for what they are as a person.
And I have my opinion, but my first thing is that I'm curious about what makes the other tick
and why does another person think the way they think and by listening to them
enriching me in a way by listening to other viewpoints.
Yes, I agree that if you say some subjects should not be discussed like politicians,
then you get into a silo and you look up the people that think similar to you.
But if we could put our respect for the other one first and say,
look, I'm thinking that you are a reasonable human being and maybe misguided, that can happen.
Sometimes make a decision or make a viewpoint based on the data that they have,
but the data that they have doesn't need to be accurate or anything else.
But if my first, my basis of the communication is respect for the other and then we start a discussion
and listen to them and maybe the other one does the same to me and I can fill in the blanks
where there are any or we can just agree to disagree.
As in, okay, for me, some viewpoint is different from the viewpoint of my opponent,
but he basis his own because he values certain principles differently than I do for instance.
So then you can, I think, agree to disagree with keeping a mutual respect.
Does it make any sense?
Yeah, that makes perfect sense.
I've got a complaint.
I come from a family that was migrants to the UK at the beginning of the 20th century,
so I'm on the second generation on the mother side.
If you go to many places in the world, the predominant population actually weren't the original natives of that country.
If you go to Australia or America, Canada, the predominant population is European,
but the natives, Native Americans and Canadians and Australians are still with that,
but they've been shunted into the corner.
Yeah, that's what they call colonialism, I believe.
And it's the fact that they, as I get it, the fact that they told themselves that this was tolerable behavior,
was based actually on the origins of species by Darwin saying,
okay, if I can conquer your world, then my species is superior to yours,
and survival of the fittest, you lose.
And that's how they did a lot of this in colonialism,
colonialism time of period to rectify their behavior.
Yeah, there's a lot of that.
But it's a massive topic that you can, like you say, when you want to discuss it,
if you can have a rational discussion and agree sometimes to disagree, that's fine.
But there's been so many cases where that discussion has turned into violent conflict,
both in this country and other places in the world.
It's just biggest belief sometimes.
Yeah, I am a standard.
Just another thing I have, my dog here, and he is standing next to me with his legs crossed,
that's what we say, when he really needs to go.
So I'm hopping off the channel for some time and walking the dog.
I'll nip out and go and get myself something to eat, and now come back later on.
Well, I was nice talking to you.
And nice listening to you.
Sorry, I did have one question for you, Tony.
What was Joe on the show last night?
To be Joe Ressington?
No.
The other Joe?
Yeah, one of the new crew.
Yeah, he was there.
Oh, that bastard.
What's that about?
He goes on a lot of shows, right?
And he talks about some really, really good stuff.
He brings a lot of great stuff.
But the problem is, he never brings it to our show.
What's your show?
The Linux link tech show.
It might be around tonight, because I know you're planning to have a bit of a group meet-up
at two o'clock Eastern time, aren't you?
On this channel?
I hope so.
I hope so.
I got to go help my wife move some stuff out of her business into another location in her business.
But I hope to, yes, so hopefully.
He's a good guy, though.
I like Joe.
Yeah, I was planning to join in on that.
So I might see you around again later.
Bye.
I'll talk to you later.
Talk to you later.
Cheers.
And that's it.
And that's it.
And everybody's gone.
Hey, this is Mongo.
I'm still here.
I just couldn't get my thing figured out.
I don't use mumbled very often.
So I took me a while to get started.
Sorry, Mongo.
I don't know what happened, Mongo.
But you sound a heck of a lot better than 5150 did.
Well, I don't know what I sound like.
But I wasn't able to figure out how to set up push to talk.
You got it now, right?
5150 sounded like he was coming from across a, a cavernous room.
Yeah, I think 50's microphones are like Missouri and he's in Kansas.
No, I don't know what's going on.
Well, I'm off for something to eat.
And I'll see you guys later.
Wow.
I have 50.
Please go ahead.
What's that 50?
Oh, faster network.
Ever.
I'm on a faster network than I ever have been.
Can you, can you like turn your mic up a little bit?
Maybe that's just red shift.
Because you're very faint 50.
How's that?
It's getting a little better.
Crank that whole throttle you're up.
Just a second.
How's that?
It's getting better all the time.
Now I can actually hear you.
No, that's max.
There we go.
That's good.
Before it was like really hard to hear you.
Well, it's a new ISP.
Who's your ISP?
Oh, it's, it's, it's going to sound weird glazing hog.
Glazing or blazing?
Blazing.
Okay.
That sounds better than glazing.
If you, if you, but yeah, but if you look it up on Google,
you're going to come up with a bunch of barbecue sites.
So they local?
No, I think they're pretty much national.
It's a, it's, it's over the wireless network.
Cellular tech.
Ah, I hate it when a company only has a big code page.
No, if you could, uh, yeah, that, that made me a little spissus,
but they have a link there.
It's, uh, blazing hog dot com.
Okay.
They were a month.
I added, you know, I, I am, uh, trying it out.
I am not, uh, backing it yet because it's a lot slower than, uh,
what they promised.
I, uh, but my neighbors did have to get, uh, additional antennas
and plug it into their, uh, uh, cellular mode.
So all of that far.
And then if I don't get any speed, I, I will say, yeah,
it's not a good deal.
Are you rural?
Very.
Yeah.
That's the, uh, my wife and I are looking, uh, to figure out if we want to move.
And every time I, we look at a place, I go out and check to see what's the internet
like because we're in the city.
And of course, we have pretty decent cable, uh, internet service.
And, uh, we've got friends who do the, uh, mobile phone conversion,
uh, that costs a fortune.
And it's crappy.
But once they even wind up, they work, you know, and we don't want,
I don't want ever be in that situation.
Yeah.
It's like, uh, my five, but, uh, from a last provider, they,
they, well, they guaranteed like three.
Sometimes they would jump up to six.
And a lot of times it was like one megabit down or less.
You know, uh, I was always having to unplug,
yeah, play can, and plug it back in and then sing what I got.
Yeah, it's been a long time since that was, it kind of speeds,
so we're necessary for most people.
Yeah.
Since, since I've gone to this, I'm getting like four, four point six.
Uh, but like I said, my, my neighbors, they had to go on Amazon,
buy extra antennas, get into the modem.
I was hoping that I was like a mile from, uh,
not even a mile, not even a pro name core mile from, uh,
that, you know, uh, the wire is playing on the local elevator.
So yeah, I hope they won't have to buy any other equipment,
but it looks like I'm going to have to.
Yeah, sounds like it.
Take all the Europeans have dropped off.
Uh, kind of, you know, we talked about Brexit.
Uh, of course we're not British, but, you know,
being Americans, being independent, we're kind of suspicious
of any sort of government, uh, beyond our own.
So we kind of understand the Brexit thing,
or at least the conservatives do.
I'm sorry, I won't say the whole country,
but I certainly understand the, uh, you know,
that why people would have voted for Brexit.
Well, I certainly understand the feeling of, of it.
I think the, in the United States, we've got the,
uh, you know, we're sovereign,
and we don't feel like the European countries,
individual countries are sovereign
because they have the European Union over them,
and the European Court,
and, um, and it kind of makes us feel a little creepy.
Uh, but, as we certainly understand it,
it's just, I guess, history will tell us
how this is going to work out.
It doesn't look pretty right now,
but, uh, I certainly understand the why I got started.
Well, I can, I can see, you know,
from every aspect, looking at it economically,
it does not look like a good idea.
Oh, it's going to hurt for a while.
I have pretty stock, too.
It's just in the tank, and I'm going, oh, man.
Well, yeah, my ancestors were all a Scottish,
which today see, you know,
they see more towards the left side.
I would really, you know,
uh, on my bucket list is to go over there,
and, you know,
try, try the old side,
uh, as it would be,
but, uh, probably,
probably my politics from top-of-the-popular.
Well, I, when I said stock,
I didn't mean my genetic makeup,
which does include some,
uh, the course of the European,
uh, for tobacco, I meant, uh,
uh, stock market.
Okay.
I own some British utility stock that,
that I thought was going to be, you know,
have a little bit of a,
a, a, a, a,
a nice dividend plus a slow increase in value
over the time for my retirement,
and that it would look pretty good in my portfolio,
uh, and, uh,
as soon as I, you know, about it,
now, six months or a year after,
I bought this stock,
uh, they start talking Brexit,
and okay, it's,
I, I don't have far it's off now
from where I bought it,
but, uh, with the, um,
even the dividends aren't worth anything now,
because the, the money exchange thing has,
has gotten worse,
uh, and, uh,
and the stock,
you can't just like sell the stock,
because now I'm down 15 or 20 percent,
probably at least,
um, and it's like,
oh, I guess I get to keep it.
Yeah, I always, I always say,
uh,
I'm an idiot when I didn't, uh,
put every dollar I had
into, uh,
Bitcoin when it's like four bucks.
Or Apple,
or Xerox,
or Harley Davidson,
or, uh, definitely Google,
or Netflix.
Oh, definitely I should have bought Google,
and I never been college,
I should have bought Intel and IBM.
It's very funny, my,
um, I've never owned,
well, let's see, if I own Google stock,
maybe for a short time, I don't remember.
I, yeah, I think I did own Google stock for a while,
but not early back,
when Google was young,
and, uh, I was using
something that was, you know,
much older, and, uh,
and, um, me,
and, um,
my brother-in-law,
and then his son,
we're all telling, you know,
really works a lot better than my old,
uh,
works a lot better than my old, um,
uh,
alpavistas, what I used,
and, um,
and my wife's going,
well, you should buy some stock.
Of course, none of us did ever.
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