Episode: 1871
Title: HPR1871: HPR Community News for September 2015
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1871/hpr1871.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 10:37:37

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This is HBR episode 1871 entitled HBR Community News for September 2015 and is part of the series HBR Community News.
It is hosted by HBR volunteers and is about 92 minutes long.
The summary is HBR Community News for September 2015.
This episode of HBR is brought to you by an honesthost.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HBR15.
That's HBR15.
Better web hosting that's honest and fair at an honesthost.com.
Okay, bladder is off and we'll free up some, I don't know how much resources bladder
are used in terms of the things like pulse audio.
I know it's constantly listening so it must do something anyway.
I don't want my computer doing wacky things because what happens is I've always got bladder going.
And as long as I'm by myself everything's good but if somebody walks into my office and starts talking to me,
my computer sometimes will just start doing crazy things.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that sounds great.
I like that.
The first thing I have to do when somebody comes in to see me is hold up my index finger saying,
hang on one sec.
So I stop bladder from going and then we can have our conversation without any important
files being deleted or messed up or whatever, who knows what bladder is going to do
because it thinks you're talking to it all the time.
It doesn't know there's somebody else in the room.
No, no, that makes perfect sense.
That's great.
Right.
Okay, so we show we head off then.
Yep.
One thing just to point out we normally go through the shows, you know how this is done,
but the bit where we come to the the mail, reviewing the the mail messages,
what we normally do is I've got lots of links into G main where we have copies of our messages.
But the thing seems to be broken today.
I don't think it's up.
I'm having it difficult to get into it.
So what I might do is put I found that we have a full record of everything on the mailman list.
The the archive system used not to work, but now it is working.
So I'm going to point to that.
I don't know if you bothered particularly with you going to track that yourself,
but just just to warn you, you know, that's fine.
I mean, I I did see at the show notes here a list of the mailing list topics.
Yeah, but I can I can click through to that.
I mean, if it seems like we're going to be discussing something for a little while,
I'll go ahead and click through.
You might find that you that they don't get you anywhere.
That's a problem.
Those those links seem to be the thing the other end seems to be a bit flaky today.
Well, it opened up a new tab and I don't look like it's taking a moment here.
Yeah, maybe you're right.
Maybe it's not going to do anything.
Well, we'll see how we go anyway.
No problem.
Yep, no worries.
Okay, right.
Here we go then.
Hello, everybody.
This is the HBR community news show for September 2015.
And my name is Dave Morris and I have with me tonight, John Colp.
Hi, John.
Hey, everybody.
So Ken's not available tonight.
So I think I'm in the in the hot seat.
Hope I can remember how to do this and we're going to start off with
only me messing up my screen because I've got the wrong push to talk button.
I made control my push to talk and then I try and scroll.
And of course the screen shrinks.
I'm like doing this.
I really got to learn.
Anyways, new hosts.
We have one new host this this past month.
And that is Ged is I think his name is.
I'm not sure how that would be pronounced.
I yeah, I think it might be a Welsh name, but I hope he doesn't come back and tell me
off for saying that, but it's a it's a name you do do come across occasionally in
an English context, but it might be a handler or I don't know.
I don't know either.
I think I remember him saying it in his episode, but I've forgotten now how it was pronounced.
Anyway, let's launch straight into the last month's shows.
And the first one, that was that was me just clicking it.
Hopefully I'll be able to take all the delays out.
Now I'm talking about because we can't take the delays out, but the first one was
Sigflop. Welcome return of Sigflop, who did a show entitled client side,
C, W2, Tf is wrong with you.
That was a talk about using a rather wonderful bit of software called
M scripten, which is capable of converting C and C++ into JavaScript, which is something
I've never considered ever ever wanting to do. What do you think of that, John?
Well, I don't know. I got to confess, most of her episodes leave me a little bit confused,
but I think what this was all about was some kind of some kind of thing that allows you to run
C code like on the fly in a browser. Is that what am I getting that right?
That was my understanding, yeah. It's pretty astonishing when you consider that you can,
first of all, that JavaScript can actually do that, can emulate the piece of C,
and quite fast from what she said. There's a thing that's actually turning this stuff
in turning C or C++ into this. That's pretty astonishing.
That is pretty cool. I don't really know what application I personally would have for,
but I think it's a pretty cool sounding thing. I wonder if there are any security risks
to doing something like that? Yeah, I have no idea. You could just
have pretty evil things in C and presumably C++, so quite how that would operate in JavaScript.
I have no idea, but it's pretty cool. What we'll do as we go through the shows,
we'll just, if there's comments, we'll just deal with them as we pass through, yeah.
So there was a comment on this show from Gabriel Evenfire, who says,
I always look forward to your shows, because I know they'll be something really unusual,
some really unusual technical material in them. This one's no exception. I've never heard of
in script and before, but I'm going to have a look at this. It reminds me of a project a
while back to compile C code using GCC to MIPS assembly that would run on a MIPS interpreter in Java.
Holy cow. Wow. Someone build it as a way to compile seepering amps that would never buffer overflow.
Not exactly accurate, but the buffer overflows would never corrupt the interpreters stack.
So yeah, people have been writing some pretty bizarre things seems over the years.
Yeah, and these are things that a real programmer understands better than I do.
I understand a little bit about Bash and Python, and that's about the extent of it, but I'm...
Yeah, I've not really had, I've been a sort of, what do you call them, a system manager?
A system admin?
A system admin, yeah. My job title was systems manager, that's why I can never remember.
But that was all about, you know, this thing stop working, go and run about and try and make it work.
It wasn't really doing anything as clever as this.
Which is just a machine jockey sort of thing, you know.
About uptime.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Right, so let's move on to the next one.
Should we take turns doing these things?
If you want to, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Okay, so the next one, episode 1848, 1848, this was Introduction to W3M,
a command line web browser, by Frank Bell, who has done a number of interesting episodes.
Yeah, this sounded pretty good, actually. I didn't think I had an application for a thing like this,
but having heard what he was talking about, I sort of started to change my mind. What did you think?
I've used it a little bit before and it's, what I've used W3M for in the past is like testing for
my HTML code, like sites that I'm building. If I want to test their accessibility in terms of
making sure that all the images have alternate text and that you can navigate easily around using
things like skip to main and, you know, stuff like that. But it really is a very good text browser.
I got to admit, I normally use e-links instead of W3M, but I have used W3M in the past, it's handy.
Yeah, it's good to know that these things exist. I was listening to a touch gem. I think it was
when they were talking about a very lightweight GUI browser called Surf. When I'm using that,
where I need to do really lightweight stuff at the moment. But I can see W3M and things with that
sort could come in similar, similar place. I've never heard of that. You said it's Surf?
Surf, yes. Yeah. Okay, I may try that. You should check that out. It's part of the, what's it
called, Suckless project? Yeah, I think so. If you listen to Floss Weekly on the Twitch network,
they just interviewed the Suckless guys in that one. That's funny. That's a great idea. That's
fantastic. I like it. Really is wonderful. Yeah, I might actually check out that the Surf browser.
I'm looking for a browser to use with Zimbra, which is our mail and calendar application at the
university. It's a collaboration suite, I guess they call it. Yeah. Right now it works best on Firefox.
I've been using Firefox almost exclusively for a long time just because of a certain accessibility
feature, the quick search feature where you can start typing with either a forward slash or a
single quote and it will start searching the text on the page and allow you to put focus on it
quickly. I use this all the time with Blather, but I discovered a plug-in for Chromium that
implements the same functionality. So I've switched over to Chromium because it's so much faster.
However, Zimbra doesn't work right on Chromium. There's something about it. So I'm keeping Firefox
open just for that one web application and if I could make if Surf were to work with Zimbra
correctly, I would probably rather do that because it would use less system resources.
You should check it out. It's a strange beastie. It's just a simple window that doesn't have any
buttons or anything. That would be all right. It's a keyboard input. I haven't really got to
crypts of it totally yet, but it seems to have some potential. That would be perfect for the Zimbra
web app because the Zimbra web client has all its own buttons inside the window there and it's
got a very robust set of keystrokes to navigate around to the calendar and to create new appointments
and new emails and all that. So I don't need it to be very robust. I just need it to display
correctly. Yeah. Well, what I've tended to do is I've got two monitors now. I acquired
another one recently and I have one with them in it and the other one I've far up surf into it.
So if I'm editing Markdown, then I can generate my HTML and view it in the other window through
Surf and far up out of them. That was the time. Anyway, we're getting off the point here a bit.
I don't see time to talk about Markdown later. I'm sure there will. Yes.
Okay. There was one comment to this one from Tom Land. Do you want to do that one, John?
Oops. Have I been talking all this time without my button pressed here?
I think you've been you've been in mute. Man, that is funny. I read that whole comment without my
button pressed. I forgot that it's pushed to talk. I've done that. I've done it so easily done.
Let me start over again. Okay. Okay. The title of the comment is Automatize login
from command line. I don't know if that automatize is really a word or not, but I kind of like it.
I could say automate, but then I'm British. So there you go. Yeah, I don't know. Anyway,
he says I just discovered this tool W3M and I was wondering if it could be possible to access a
page that requires a login and password. I need it to be done automatically from the command line.
i.e. I wouldn't be pressing any keys. It's a headless server. Do you know if that's possible?
I would need to grab some text, but once logged in, the URL remains the same. Thanks in advance.
And there is no response to this. I don't really know the answer to this question using W3M,
but can't you use something like curl to enter a password and username?
Yeah. I think I would be doing something like that. I wasn't quite clear what he needed to do.
Log into web browser automatically. Why would you do that? I don't really know. I would need a
some kind of demonstration or a more detailed description of exactly what he's trying to accomplish
here, but there's probably a way. But as you say, something like curl might be the answer.
Yeah, you can do all kinds of stuff with curl. So it seems like that would be the tool I would use.
If it's a headless and you're not going to be actually reading it with your own eyeballs,
I don't think you would want to use W3M necessarily. Unless it's got some kind of,
what's the word? Some kind of detached? I don't know if that's the right word,
but where you can just send a command and it'll grab some text like e-links, for example,
I use the e-links dump option quite often to grab the contents of a web page and then scrape it
for just the part I want. And that will use the e-links program, but without ever actually opening
up the web page in a way where you can look at it. Yeah, I'm sure there's all sorts of ways
that you can do that. As you say, we need to know a bit more about what it was trying to do,
I suspect. Yeah. Right, that's, let's move on. 1849 was Lynette Lustcast. Sorry, you there, John.
Did you step on my toes there? Is it my turn? Or is it? No, you did the last way. No, you did,
you read the last show. I think it's a measure of how slowly we're going that I
forgot. Okay, I'll do this one. Linux logcast episode four outtakes. So this is where Kevin
Wisher posts some of the stuff that they don't publish on the logcast feed. So yeah, it's good.
Only nine minutes this time, we've had more significant chunks in the past. So come on, Kevin,
we need more. We need more. I can't even, I can't really remember whether I listen to this one
or not. I normally listen every day, but I don't, I don't remember if I heard this one or not.
I did, because I mean, I usually make notes on these things and so I keep a wiki to keep that sort
of stuff. And I just said to myself, very nice, but could have done with a bit more.
All right. So then episode 1850 is Ahuka doing SSH introduction. I'm not sure what the 18.
Is that a series number? I think it is. I think it's this is part of privacy and security.
I think that's the 18th of that of that series is the way I read it anyway. That probably is
correct. So the series privacy and security episode 18, this is SSH introduction. And I love
the, I mean, I've used SSH quite a lot, but it's just like with any show Ahuka does, he always
points out something that I haven't heard of before. Yeah, I thought it was a great introduction to
the subject and a bit of history and everything. I'd forgotten quite how SSH had come to be. It was
quite nice to have the reference back and go and check that out, actually. Just a moment. So
yeah, I read a book. I wonder what I seem like I might have, I might have sent that book to
NY Bill. Wait, for a while there, we were reading books and then sending them along to other people
in our little community. And then whoever read it next would send it to the next person and so
forth. And I think one of the books I sent along was one about the history of public key encryption.
And I don't remember the title of it now, but it talked about a lot of these kinds of things.
Yeah, yeah, it's, it's an interesting subject. I had not quite remembered that it started up as
as a sort of fairly open product that tattooed, and I assume you pronounce this name. I don't know.
In Helsinki. And then it sort of got to turn into a commercial thing, become proprietary,
and then in the OpenBSD guys that taken, taken away and done an open SSH based on it,
bulked it effectively, I think. I had forgotten that. It was good to be reminded of that because
it's good to know the history of these things, as I say. Yeah, yeah. And I think there's going to be
one more in this SSH series that we'll get to today. Over there are some comments here.
And comment number one from OXF10E, Oxford. Yeah, it was so trouble with that one.
He says the title of the comment is portable version of open SSH. Actually, the portable version
of open SSH is needed on every platform other than OpenBSD, not just Unixoid ones, winky face.
Right, right. Okay, thank you. And Gabriel even fired said this could be a very fruitful series.
SSH is one of those Swiss Army knives that most people just use for blade. I'm looking forward
to seeing where this is going. There's a lot of potential uses to cover. Class II already added
an episode talking about SSH config, which we're going to get to soon. And there are lots of
useful shortcuts one can include from that alone. So I hope that more people, including you,
are who could keep this going. Yeah, I agree with that. You know what also might be interesting is
for those of us who are not going to talk so much about how open SSH works necessarily is just
to run down the ways we use it. Yeah, I mean, I could, I have a number of ways that I use it that are
not necessarily the same as as other people. Yeah, I know there's a lot to it. There's a lot to it.
I used to work use it quite a lot. And there's a minus capital X option, which lets you reflect back
X sessions through it to to your local workstation. So it's useful to be able to go to those sort of
headless service or remote service and get X sessions back. It's slow, but you know, that's
there's tons like that loads and loads. There's one more comment. And that's from the host Kevin
O'Brien. He says, thank you. I'm glad you enjoyed this introductory episode. I recorded and
uploaded several more. And I am not done. Is that a warning? And Clatou has also sent in an SSH
show. So there is plenty to go around. Very good. Okay. So the next one was the community new. So
I don't think we want to reflect on that one. Otherwise, we go into one of those infinite circles.
Yeah. So I forget, did I do the last one or did you date? Are you?
Yeah, sorry, sorry. Yeah. I'm fighting my control and trying to take my finger off the control key
when I want to do something on the screen and then forget to put it back on when I want to speak.
I've got a second. I got you. But I can't remember whose turn it is here.
No, I can't remember either. How about I go on the next one? Do you want to go on the next one
because it's my show and that makes sense? Yeah, yeah. So episode 1852, Dave Morris,
Operation Wallacea. Wallacea? Wallacea? I don't know. I had difficulty knowing how to
pronounce this. And I'm told that the organization and themselves pronounce it Wallacea.
That sounds fine. That's good enough for me. This was a terrific episode. I really liked hearing
about what your daughter was doing over there. And I went to their website and looked and saw
that they've got projects going all around the world. Yeah, amazing stuff. It's a great, great
thing to do as a youngster to get involved in something like this. And it's great on your CV too,
which is what a lot of people are doing it for the experience and for being able to say,
look, I want to do biology. And here's how much I want to do it. I've actually done this during
my vacation. Yes, really, really terrific. So is she back in school this semester now? Yes,
yes, she's she's getting heavily into her biology degree right now.
She's doing three and behavioral behavioral studies or something about nature. I can't
remember the title for time. Sounds like something I would not understand.
Well, she's leaving me standing, I can tell you. My son is only 14 and he's already talking
about scientific things that I don't remember ever learning in my life.
No, it's scary when they start to run, run past you in a way. It's a frightening thing.
It's good though. So it should be. So with her comments on this one? Nothing, nothing on this one,
no. How could that be? We're commenting on it now, I guess. Yeah, that's that's what this shows all
about. Okay, episode 1853 then. Yeah, shall I, I'll just read this one. And this is, this is Alpha
32 and his shows entitled, I Heart Vista. I assume you pronounce it that way.
So what's this? Somebody's commenting on Vista and on this channel. How I got into Linux,
it is really. So I believe what he's saying is he loves Vista because it helped him get into Linux
because it was so bad. Is that what I, that's exactly it. That's exactly what I understood. Yes,
yes. Yeah, I thought it was a good hook. That was a good hook. That was a good hook. That was
everything. What? What? Oh, right. Okay. Got it. It was good. It's fun. So yeah, there was a
comment which made that point. It was where the Aaron B483 says a great name for a podcast. I'm
sure because of the name of your podcast, you've probably got a lot of interest. Yeah, it's
an interesting, interesting show too. Some, you know, some personal anecdotes about
learning the way around when those things and finding that Linux is better, just so it's good
to hear. Yeah. Speaking of moving from Windows to Linux, the next episode 1854 is me talking about
how we finally got Linux installed on my son's ASUS TP 500L which came with Windows 8 installed
and here I talk about how I finally decided to try to get into the secure boot protected BIOS
and disable that and allow installation of Ubuntu on there. Yeah, it was a good story. It's this
UEFI business is a worrying thing because you never know when it's going to lock you out
totally from doing what you want to do. So it's good to hear that you managed to crack that one.
Yeah, it actually wasn't as hard as I feared it was going to be. I mean, like I said in the podcast,
I knew when I bought this laptop form that it had this feature, this negative feature of secure boot,
but he just needed a new laptop and he actually didn't mind Windows 8 that much once he got used to it
and then he installed Windows 10, which people kept saying have all the security or privacy
issues and so we thought, well, maybe it's time. And I'll say, we did this maybe a month or six
weeks ago and he is not a single time booted back into Windows since then. That says a lot,
that does. Yes, that's fascinating. My daughter's also got Windows 8 machine and she is pretty much
content with it because the same reason that needs it for things related to study. She hasn't
yet reached the point where she's gone to Windows 10 and has hated it. So she's moderately content
at the moment, so continues. My son was, I mean, there are certain things he likes about Windows 8
just because there's so many things that will run on it that won't run on
Linux gaming kinds of things. But the kind of compatibility issues that I was talking about where
he was worried about not being able to work with his classmates at school on projects. That issue
is going away a little bit because it seems like more and more they are all using Google Drive and
those online free services, you know, free isn't beer anyway, services. And so he doesn't even necessarily
need to use this office product. Yeah, that's good. That's good. So he'll probably just stick with
that. The one thing that's come up repeatedly since installing Ubuntu on there is that every time
he gets a kernel update, we have to recompile the driver for his Wi-Fi. And that's always kind of a
startling at first because he'll run the updates and then he'll say, Dad, my Wi-Fi is not working.
Or remember, oh yeah, we've got to do so. So I finally wrote a script that he can run that will
recompile the Wi-Fi driver and then install it in the right place. And that's all good after that.
Yeah, that's good. That's good, but it's a pain that it has to be that way. But there you go. Yeah,
at least he's got something that's a little bit there, Dave. Oh, right. At least he's got
something that works well. That's the main thing. You there, John? Your audio is breaking up
a little bit. Yours is breaking up for me, actually. No, sure. I wonder if it's because my kids are
watching videos or something. Can you hear me? I can hear you, John, yeah. Okay. Okay, we're good.
Well, I guess that's the year next. 1855 is a hooker's number 61 in the series on
Libre Office. Libre Office Impress, Slide Layouts and Auto Layout Textboxes. So this is more on
the ins and outs of Impress and generating slides and so forth. I always go off and look at a hooker's
his own website for the details of this and it's always really, really good and very easy to follow
and stuff. I find this one very useful. I don't actually need it anymore, but I have used this
in the past and it's good to have this overview. I'm sure anybody who needs to generate slides will
enjoy it a lot. Okay, so you had just finished introducing the episode 1855 on Libre Office Impress
and I missed nearly your whole thing and I don't see any comments on it. Yeah, so I guess we could
just go on because I'm hoping that if we work with the recordings at this end, then we're good,
we should be good, unless you wanted to discuss it in any degree. Yeah, I mean, only to say what I
always, I should have this little disclaimer or canned response to all of his episodes about
Libre Office, which is they're awesome. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. I have no immediate need for
them at the moment, but it's really good to be able to look under the hood a bit and see
how it all works just in case, you know. Yeah, I mean, I usually Libre Office impress
doing school semesters. I use it almost every day. That's what I use to show slides in my classes
and stuff like that, but a lot of the stuff he's talking about here, I have not really explored before.
Now there's some useful stuff we want to generate different slide layouts and formats and stuff,
that's it's good to know. I don't create all that many new slides anymore. What I'm trying to do now
is essentially reduce the amount of text on all of my old slides. I have this ideal. One day, I want
to get down to where each slide just has a single icon and each one will prompt me to speak for
five or ten minutes about whatever the icon represents. And what I'm curious to see is whether
my students will actually take any notes at that point. I think they're kind of conditioned only
to write down what is on a slide. Yes, I know. I know the way that works.
My daughter says that if the lecturer doesn't give a hand out at a class, you know,
usually there's slides and usually you get a copy of the slides and sometimes some notes,
then people don't write anything. You know, they just expect this stuff to be fed to them and then
they sit there with the mouse open as it will hurt. Yeah, I find that I don't just post the slides
anymore for students do that or else they just don't do anything in class. I have certain students who
for like the office of disability has tested them and they say these people need a note-taker
for class. And so for those students, I will offer them outline versions of my slides, but I don't
just hand out the slides anymore because I want people to take notes. Well, yeah, the way my daughter
works is she takes an iPad in and then she's got a note-taking thing on that that she uses it
with a stylus. And then if there's slides to take away, she then goes and annotates them and makes
copies notes on top of the slides or around the slides and that. So for her, it's actually quite good,
but a load of people don't do that. You know, they just say, I don't need to do any work. I can just
go on. Carry on. She sounds like an ideal student. She's keen. She's keen. Very good. Okay,
let's get on to 1856. Yeah, I guess that's mine now. SSH config by Klaatu. And that is the entire title.
And then he gives an example. Oh, yeah, he's talking about the config file. This is something I
learned about maybe a couple of years ago. And man, what what a difference that file made once I
learned about it. So you can set up all these like aliases for all your hosts and store the
login credentials, the port numbers and all of that kind of stuff so that you don't have to type
these very long complicated commands. And so now I will do something like SSH Pi 2 and that will go
into my second Raspberry Pi using the right credentials and all that and I love it. Yeah, yeah,
that's good. You know, I knew this existed, but I'd never actually bothered to delve into what
it did. And I actually, in many cases, had alias command alias to do it. That's how I used to do it,
too. Yeah, yeah. So having heard this, I thought, oh, I'm just looking into this. Oh, yeah,
it's much better and so glad that Klaatu did this. And I've done the config a lot of mine that way
now. So it's it's it's very very convenient. It's wonderful. Not just for SSHing into things,
but for secure copying. I mean, you can copy files over to your servers using these aliases. And
man, it makes everything easier. Yes, I know. I do that. I use SAP and stuff quite a lot. So yeah,
it makes makes life considerably easier. Very good. Yeah, there is a comment by Oxford One Zuri.
He says nice intro to home slash dot SSH slash config comma Klaatu. He says the protocol two
option is the default for quite some time as in more than 10 years. I think the latest version of
open SSH doesn't even compile with support for version one by default, at least the SSH Damon,
where they have a server. Shortening host names comes really handy in cases like webfrontin.fancy
hyphen example hyphen corp.co.uk or you're not kidding there. And there's also patterns matching
like oh, yeah, he talks about pattern matching for host names. So asterisk dot fancy hyphen example
hyphen corp dot and so forth. And then he shows how to use a username and identity file. And very
sometimes it you should go read this comment if it sounds at all interesting. It is too difficult
to read at all. Yeah, what about you? Okay, the next one was next comment was from Be Easy,
who says thanks for the show. I immediately added a config file with a couple of accounts that I
commonly used. The only the only thing I added perhaps you meant I added for securities to charge
is to change the permissions on the file just to 600 or 644. So yeah, the only change that I added.
Yeah, I think that's supposed to be worth it. Keep up the great shows. No, I was thrown by the fact
he missed a word out there. I was trying to fill it in for him and failing miserably. So
should just shut up and get on with it. Yeah, I think you are forced to change the file the
file permissions to 600 if you're trying to do SSH logins, but I mean, because I've had situations
where I had forgotten to do that before. Yeah, maybe it's a key file. It might be the key file that
you have to do that, but because they won't let you log in unless your permissions are set to
600. I thought you had to be careful about the config file because that's potentially dangerous.
I thought you probably I can't I've seen this somewhere, but I might have might be conflating it with
the the thing you said. I'm not sure. I'm having trouble remembering right now too. It might have been
one time where I for the first time tried to log in using a new key pair and I'd forgotten to change
the key files to 600 or something and it it aborted and said you've got your permissions are
not secure enough. Okay, that's good. So do you want to do that last comment there? Sure. Gabriel
even fire comments identity file. I'm curious if from your example, you are creating separate
identity files for each host. I imagine not, but it's a possibility I'd never considered before.
I suppose it doesn't provide that much more security insofar as if someone can read one of your
private keys from .ssh slash. They can read all of them, but it does make me think.
For my part, I have this ruby script to run ssh with shorthands to the different identities
and accounts in our internal machines. This show is prompting me to do it the right way,
especially insofar as it will work with secure copy, secure fdp and scripts that use them.
Thanks for the show. I'm enjoying the people starting to break open the tools other than the blade
in this ssh Swiss army knife. I had never really thought about creating a separate key pair
for each server that I use either. Is this something that you do? No, I've never done that.
Never occurred to me why I would need to do it, to be honest. No, me either. Something to think
about, I suppose, but I don't really know. Okay, next show then, 1857, Adventures in Coffee
by C. Prompt Curtis Advkins. Another one in the series, the great series on Coffee. I'm not sure
we've had enough to make a series yet, but maybe we should. C. Prompt is talking about his
French press, which is very interesting, and the way he gets his coffee from, I think he uses
a creamer too, which I was impressed by the links and the various resources he uses. They look
really good. Yeah, we have a French press, but I haven't used it in quite a while, and in fact,
I think my wife took it to her office so that she could make French press coffee there. We have
probably six or seven different ways to make coffee in the house here, and yeah, I like French press,
you know, as long as you grind it coarse enough so it doesn't get too greedy, and I like the fact
that he talked about the temperature of the water and how that affected the taste of the coffee too.
I used to have a travel French press mug where you just drink right out of the thing itself.
I think it was actually boedum that made that as well, but it was a little travel mug that was a
French press. That sounds very good. I like the sound of that. Yeah, yeah. There's quite a variety of
different devices like that. I'm sure it's been in some restaurant where they maybe gave everybody
an individual French press or something, and a cup or something. I can't remember that. Probably so.
So Gabriel even fired comments. Nice episode even for non-coffee people. I'm not a coffee person.
I've tried a concept to acquire the taste. Definitely prefer teas, but it was nevertheless entertaining
to hear the process you go through. I heard people talk rave actually about French presses before,
but never had a clue as to why they were useful. Hearing the process, I can start to imagine why.
Thanks for the show. Very nice. Come at number two posted by Dave Morris. He says,
says I enjoyed this a lot. I like the relaxed style and the detailed content. Not use my
French presses or cafeterias as we prefer to call them for a while. I prefer to use my mocha pot
and brew a large strong coffee every morning. After listening to this, I had a craving for coffee,
so made some with some Kenya medium ground. I had all but abandoned in the freezer. It was great,
but that's double my normally daily intake. Got to watch it there, Dave. I know. I know. I
shall be shaking if I don't know what something is. It's true, though. It's something about listening
to people talking about coffee. They're like, wow, yeah, I could just drink coffee now. I like to do that
very thing. I don't use French presses very often. I've got a metal insulated one, which is
really good. Keeps the coffee warm after you've made it. We used one of those. When we were
traveling last summer, we stayed at a bed and breakfast place that had one of those metal
French presses that was insulated. That made really nice coffee. Yes, it was good. It's good.
A Michael made a comment saying, you've got my European mind. Congrats. You've got me for a long
moment. I mean, this is an interesting way to say he was deeply puzzled. Water at 200 degrees,
huh? After it finally dawned, I consulted an online converter to learn that 200 degrees Fahrenheit,
means 93.3 centigrade, which made a lot more sense to me. That's wonderful. I guess it would.
Fahrenheit centigrade problems all the time. Otherwise, I second Gabriel above. Thanks for the show.
That's that. I like that. The problem for me with the water temperature is that it's too difficult
to get it just right. I would like to have a water heater upper that just goes to the right coffee
temperature, because we have the electric tea kettle that will it boils it. I suppose you could
turn it off before it gets to the boiling point, but which is the right point. We've got a thermometer,
and it just can't be bothered to be doing all that to make sure the water is at the right
temperature. No, it's a tremendously complicated process, isn't it? I just happened yesterday
when I was just wanting to relax for a bit. I got the Wikipedia page on coffee up on my tablet.
I was sitting there reading this. The detail that they go into there about, you know, coffee,
work up, it comes from and how you make it and all of the complexities of what comes out when
and what different roasts and stuff. It's amazing. You could write PhDs galore on that, I'm sure.
You surely could. Somebody probably has, I would think. It's probably happened, yeah, yeah,
true. Right. So episode 1858, another one of my favorite ones here, multi-meter mods,
part two by InWideBill. And this one he talks about more modification finishes the mods that he
started in an earlier episode to his knockoff, well, I think that's putting it in negatively to
say it's a knockoff multi-meter. He just says that it's a very high quality multi-meter that's
not quite commercial grade like the one he uses for work. Yeah, I was impressed with his description
of it because he's also done a review of it, hasn't he? Is that in the past or in the future? I'm not sure.
I think it's coming up. It's coming up, yeah, yeah, but yeah, it's impressed with it. In fact,
I quite tempted, you can buy them here as well. I'm quite tempted to get one. So I just have a
cheap multi-meter moment, which is quite like something of a bit more quality to it, even though
that is not professional quality, certainly high enough quality for my needs. Yeah, I've got one,
I don't even know how much mine costs because my dad bought it for me as a birthday present or
something. I mean, it seems fine for me, but I don't think it has all the features that the
Bill's talking about this one having. Yeah, yeah, it's tempting, but I was very impressed with what he
was doing with it. It's quite a, quite a tale he was telling here of, well, a bit of a foe par,
if you like, going on, they're cutting the hole in the wrong side, which sort of thing you would
just go, oh, no, you just sort of throw it out the window, perhaps, so he managed not to do that
and carried on and 3D printed a thing to fill the hole in, which I thought was just amazing. That's
a brilliant piece of work. I love that. It's one of those examples of messing something up and then
instead of being angry, thinking, what an opportunity. I can learn some 3D printing and some CAD
and stuff. I mean, I love this episode. Somebody made the comment that we could do with the show on
the 3D. I don't know if that's following on later on, but it's, yeah, the fact that he
taught himself how to do this in blender and then got his friend to print these things out,
which was just fantastic. I like this very much. Me too. So my comment was the first one, I say,
another amazing tale of ingenuity, well done, Bill. I loved this episode, especially enjoyed the
inadvertent detour into CAD and 3D printing. Of course, the process of designing and printing 3D
model is good for another episode, dot, dot, dot. Very good. Yes, yes. I might grave,
bothered with the comment, hacking at its best, great stuff, hacking at its best, heard the names
of some old friends, two, two, and three, nine, oh, four, two, and double, two, etc. These are
not old friends to me, but I know he's saying. Yeah, I don't know those guys either. In
why Bill responds, thanks, John. Yeah, that detour into 3D design and printing was interesting.
A friend from our love, Jason bought a 3D printer about eight months ago. A sphere was interested
in it and asked lots of questions. He then designed a part for one of his model rockets and asked
if Jason could print it. Before I knew it, A sphere bought his own 3D printer kit, and while
designing my parts, I asked A sphere, is this how it all starts? I want my own 3D printer soon.
Of course, that's how it starts, Bill. Well, why would you not, I mean, yes. And NWB also
comments back to Mike saying, yep, those old two ends, one of those, if one of those if it ain't
broke, don't fix it parts. I mean, they still do the same job they've always done and do it
perfectly fine. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. I like that these guys are starting to talk code
to one another here. Like transistor nerds or something? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there are a couple of more
comments here. Marui titles his comments splitting here. I agree on old friends for the 2N304 and
2N222, however, I can't resist to add that these are unlike the 2N7000, not MOSFETs, but NPMBJTs
by polar junks and transistors. The point being that BJTs need some amount of control current
at the base in contrast to the virtually zero current at the gate of a MOSFET. Judging from
the linked pictures, you have compensated for that by using a bigger capacitor to get the desired
turn on time. In any case, thanks a lot for sharing this journey. Okay, I didn't understand very much
of that there, but no, no, well, it is, you know, the conusenti are discussing these things that
us mere mortals have to just sort of stand in the side lines and listen to, I guess.
NYU Bill replied to Mirui saying transistors. I started with a MOSFET, but what it wasn't doing
what I wanted. So I experimented with the transistors I had on hand and chose the one that worked
best for me. However, I can't remember if I went into detail about the part change between
episode one and two. Thanks for the clarification. You know, an episode on the final points of
transistors might make a fine HBR. Thanks, and my Bill, that's a good one. We need more of those comments.
Yep. And finally, Mike Ray makes another comment. Sadly, some of the old friend,
through whole mounting transistors, are beginning to disappear, or at least to be very hard to find.
And those that are still there are rising in price, I guess, to reflect the smaller numbers in
which they're made. It's getting almost impossible to find the good old 2N 3819 MOSFET. I used to
use to make oscillators and even workhorses like the BC107-slash8-slash9 transistors are getting
ridiculously expensive over here in the UK. Anybody remember scraping the paint off the body of an
OCR-45 to make photo transistors? Sorry, no, but I dare say some people do. Very nice.
Right. So I guess you're up now? Yep. Yep. Sorry, I'm just juggling between pressing the button and
clicking there. They're clicking to the next page. Too much behind the scenes here, sorry about that.
So this is 1859. A mouse in a maze on the Raspberry Pi by a Gabriel even fire.
And this is him talking about more about bare metal programming on the Raspberry Pi
but it's continuing on from some of these earlier stuff. Very detailed stuff.
Yeah, I'm interested, but I don't really understand very much of it. I'm sad to say, but I always
like hearing what people are doing with their Raspberry Pi. I mean, that itself could be a series
I would think. Yeah, yeah. No, it's interesting stuff. It's hard to get into unless you
have that sort of background. I mean, if you've done a degree in computer science, you might
well have covered some of these sorts of things, but I haven't. And so my knowledge in this area is
more sort of peripheral in many ways. So I did, when I worked at my previous job, it was in
the era when microprocessors, as they were then called, were appearing. And there was a team in
our department who was building a mic, there was a competition, I'm not sure if it was just in the
UK called the Micromouse competition. We had to produce them a mouse-shaped robot that physically
went through a physical maze to find a piece of cheese. They were doing this on
using processors like 6502 and that type of stuff. I didn't, I wasn't sufficiently knowledgeable
about how to do that, but in those days, but it was very deeply interested in what they were doing.
This reminds me of that. Yeah, it sounds pretty cool, but I can't really follow a lot of
what he's talking about there. There was one comment by Mike Ray entitled Welcome Return Great
Episode Gabriel, and great to see you back with more bare-metal programming. Looking forward to
episodes about sound rendering on the GPU. Wow, yes, yeah, quite interesting to hear that.
All right, so the next episode, 1860, is that it? Yeah, 5150 interviews Chris Wade of Save
Wi-Fi. And this is the one where they're talking about new FCC regulations and the potential
consequences for open source operating systems and for the firmware that many of us like to load
onto our routers. Yeah, this is a pretty scary prospect, I think, isn't it? The fact that,
yeah, there's a potential issue with software-defined radios being used to do things that
that more fixed hardware was being used for in the past is opening doors that weren't opened
before. And to understand it, this is sort of a bureaucratic response to that, which is to say,
you know, ban it, control it, stop it, rather than a more controlled response.
And it's, I think Chris Wade made the next, made some very excellent points about the stupidity
of this response by the FCC, but it's going to have worldwide ramifications as well, which is very,
very worrying. Yeah, well, for my own part, I'm not planning on changing the firmware on any of my
routers, all of which run DDWRT on them until I hear otherwise, I'm just going to keep running them.
Sure, sure, yeah, yeah, I'm sure that's the case, but it's more that new stuff will be restricted
in this way. And eventually, if it actually happens, it will spread to all sorts of places,
because, you know, there's so much stuff that could potentially have this sort of software-defined
radio equipment in it, including laptops and anything with Wi-Fi on it, I guess.
Yeah, well, there are no comments for that episode. Okay, so moving on to 1861, this was Curtis
Adkins, Adkins, sorry, Curtis, C. Prompt, who was doing another in his series of cool stuff,
this is part four, and he was talking about three main, main topics, C, C, new, CMUS,
is that what it's called, CMUS? I've never used it, but yeah. And I've not used it, I've used
NPC and MPD and some of the things that work around that, but not that particular one.
And recommending a podcast song exploder, musicians take apart their songs.
That sounds pretty cool, actually. I've not explored that podcast, but I remember thinking
while he was talking about it, that's a genius idea for a podcast. Yeah, yeah, I'm sure it's
interesting, I've not followed it up. And the third one was Mr. Robot, which is a TV show, I believe,
certainly heard of it, not seen it though. I haven't either. Maybe I should try it out though,
because my wife and I are having a real problem finding any TV series to watch. I mean,
watch one episode and then just can't be bothered anymore, and we just read our books.
Well, yeah, it's a funny thing, actually, without digressing too far, when my kids were here,
before they went off to university and one of the stuff, we reached the point between us that
we just got so bored with TV. And that was 2013, the TV's not been switched on since,
nobody wanted to watch it. There's plenty of other places you can read, you can go on the internet,
there's so much other stuff. We have not watched the television in that time, because the amount of
stuff that we actually enjoyed amongst what was available was tiny. Why bother? We really would see
it as the answer. We've found a few series that we like, but then there are the sorts of series
that are over after, say, six or eight episodes, and then there's no follow-up, and so then we
are left looking around for more, and I've always got a book going, and I like reading just as much.
The only thing I always watch on TV is the whatever American football games are on, and I'll watch those,
but otherwise I'd rather just read my book. I think it's a common response these days. I know loads
of people who see the world in that sort of way. Another one of the cool stuff episodes where Ken
might say that you could make three episodes out of the one. That's always true. Are you up next?
I forgot already. No, I did last one, I think, didn't I? Yes. So 1862, the awesomely epic guy to
KDE Part 1, and then the next day is Part 2, and in this one, the new host, Geddes. Geddes?
Geddes, I think it's... Geddes contributes his very first show, and he talks about the KDE
desktop, and I found it very, very interesting. I've tried KDE two or three times in the years that
I've been running Linux, and it has never stuck. There are certain things I really like about it,
like the Kate text editor, I think, is excellent, but overall I just have never found it all
that interesting. But I like hearing him talk about all the various ways to tweak it, to make it
make it better. Yeah, I know it's a great idea to do a show on this to be going through an article
like this. The article was brilliant, of course, but it's a great idea to do this because it's a good
way to consume that sort of thing, I think. That's right. All right. I'd forgotten. So he did not
write this article, but he had made the audio recording for Linux Voice, is that correct? That's
right. That's right. Yes. And he got the permission to put it up on HPR as well. Yeah, I enjoyed that.
Yeah, I thought it was a brilliant idea. I really enjoyed listening to this. I have been a KDE
user, actually, for a long time. Yeah, I thought so. I started on Red Hat Linux back in the 90s,
and then it turned into Fedora, and KDE must have appeared in that sort of era, and I just moved
that rather than the GNOME, because GNOME seemed very primitive. So I just stuck with it ever since.
Until now, I'm not on it anymore because Debian testing breaks it all the damn time.
So I'm currently using an XFCE, which is more basic, but it's more stable.
Well, I'm on open box with Tint 2, and it's much more basic even in the next XFCE,
but I like it very much. Yeah, I used to use CrunchBang on one of my machines and
had open box on that. Yeah, it's good. It does job.
Yeah, so there's one comment by Ken Fallon. He says, I just enabled a load of these.
Hi, get us. I just re-enabled a load of these. I didn't bother before as I mostly did
reinstalls, but then I realized that I could keep my config in my home door, so it would move
with me. Excellent reading and a great idea. I guess he's referring there to the idea of
taking this audio from something else and then presenting it as an HDPR episode.
Yeah, I think it is a good idea. Yeah, and Linux Voice product are always worth hearing again,
I think. Sure, especially for those of us who found Linux Voice too expensive to subscribe to.
That's a shame. Yeah, that's a pity. So if we hop across to the next episode, there's not
much more to say about the content, but there's a comment from John Kalp, who says probably still
will not switch to KDE, but I really enjoyed both of these episodes about tweaking KDE, although
I probably still not adopt the desktop myself. This also is a pretty good idea to read old
magazine articles, but there's still a current interest as HDPR episodes with some intro up front.
As long as it doesn't run a foul of any licensing, which we know it doesn't. So yeah,
great idea. Good, good way to join HPR too. Yep. Okay, so who's on it? It's me next. Does it
shall I do this one? Yeah, you can do your own episode there. Some of these are called Dave
Morris did a thing, turning an old printer into a network printer. This was me trying to make
my old printer work. I think somebody commented on all-cast planet. I just saw the comment,
and I logged in the other day, but old is 10 years? Well, yeah, yeah. It's a way of describing
it. I do actually have an even older printer, which is from the 1980s, but it's a serial laser
printer. So I want to get that one in some stage, but wow, I think I might be in for a struggle there.
It's funny, but remember, when my dad got his first laser printer, I think it was an HP laser
jet for, and I want to say he paid nearly $3,000 for that thing. Yeah, I can believe that. They
were very expensive. Yeah, that was about 1990. Well, we bought laser printers for our Vax cluster,
which we bought in 1987 at the university I was working at, and when it was junked, then the
laser printers were still working. And they were going to get thrown out, and I said, well, I'll have
one, but you try lifting it. Wow, it weighs a ton, and it's only a sort of desktop thing.
That's funny. It's amazingly heavy. It's made of lead, or something. I'm not sure what it is,
but it's concrete. I have no idea. Maybe it's a security feature,
if somebody runs off with it. Yeah. Anyway, the point of this show was I was doing this,
and getting it to work, and I'm a terrible note-taker. I have to write things down,
otherwise I forget them. So I wrote lots and lots of notes in my Wiki, and I suddenly thought,
oh, wow, I could write, I could make this a show, so I did. Sure. So you got my notes effectively,
slightly. Very good. So anyway. Yeah, I liked that episode, and I commented as much,
saying, whoa, remote scanning. Very cool, Dave. I've got an old printer on the network, too,
but hooked up to my Goodwill router via USB. The advantage of using a Raspberry Pi is the remote
scanning. I never even knew that was possible at all. I thought you always had to hook up with the
USB to scan stuff. Again, then again, I never really thought about it that much. Usually, I walk
over to the university library to do my scanning, because they have awesome scanners for public use.
Thanks for another great episode. Thanks, John, and that's what I said in response.
Thanks, John. I like that. I like that. Rooters can run printers like this. It's a great idea,
but I suspect the features are limited. I do have a router that can do it when I haven't tried it.
I have plans to experiment with cups, perhaps configuring other cues for different size
stationary, for example, just as an aside, we used to run cups at work back in the day. So I have
a little bit of experience playing around with it. I commented here about my deck LNO3 monochrome
laser printer. I've done a hard to make a Raspberry Pi talk serial RS-232 to a printer,
but it would be quite an interesting thing to do. Sure, it must be possible. The scanning capability
is good to have, and it's been used more than I would have expected. Quality is not particularly
high, but it's good enough for most purposes. Sounds fine. Man, look at me yawning here at two o'clock
in the afternoon. We'll get in close to the end, I think, are we? Yeah, next episode is four more
episodes here. Next one is number 62 in the LibreOffice Impress, or the LibreOffice series. This is
Impress working with text boxes by Ahuka. Yeah, so this is another, it's a follow-on from the
the previous one, actually, making your slides with your own text boxes to put them where you want,
and have as many as you want, and so forth. I'd never actually done this. I didn't even know
it was possible, but as usual, Ahuka does the great thing of giving us lots of information,
especially on his own site there, and leading us along the way to the answers to this. So
very good, thank you. Well, this is, I mean, this episode really helps to explain some confusing
things about the way Impress behaves. When you think you ought to be applying a text style,
you really ought to be applying a drawing object style. I mean, it really is counterintuitive
when you're using the program, and here he kind of breaks it down and tells you which styles you
really need to be using if you want it to work right. So that's, it's very helpful. Absolutely,
absolutely. Yes. Yeah, it's a, it's a strain, it is a rather strange beastie this, this thing.
It's to make it do what you want to do. It's not entirely obvious. I've certainly seen people
try and use slide presentation systems as if they are typing a document, and only to... Oh, that's
awful. Yeah, and then it flows from one slide to another and makes a hell of a mess and so on,
so it's good to understand it better in this way, I think. Yeah, there were no comments
so on to 1866. So this was Kuvmo, is that Kuvmo? Is that how you say it? Kuvmo, who was talking,
an awkward talk with two young computer users as his title, and he talks to his children Eric
and Emily, talking about operating systems school and fun uses of computers. So I love that.
That was nice. I didn't think it was that awkward. No, no, no, no, absolutely. No, it's the way,
you know, the way these things go. I think it's just seemed very natural and relaxed. It was
it was good. And they were certainly the two kids were very, very forthcoming with their thoughts
and opinions. Yeah, I've enjoyed that because my kids are one year off of their age. My kids are
14 and 11 and they would have had somewhat similar responses, although I think it sounds like my
son has a bit more experience in the programming part of it. It sounded like he was trying to
to get his son to show a little bit more interest in programming, and I wasn't sure he really wanted
it. Yes, yes, I think he hadn't quite dealt far enough into it yet to understand what was
entailed, but there you go. This was fine. Fair enough. And Frank, I don't know which Frank,
this was commented on the show. Was it Frank Belltabs? Probably Frank Bell. I don't know
how many Franks that listen to us now who comment. And he said, absolutely terrible, which I can't
but agree with. Yeah, that was great. So the next day was my episode called the Lafayette Public
Library Maker Space. And this was one that was made over a series of days. I think there are three
separate segments here. One ending in bitter disappointment and another longer segment where I got
just awesome help from the librarian on duty in the maker space. And then I finally come back and
give a little round up and talk about the results of the printing. Basically, what I was doing was
trying to get in there and make use of the 3D printers and other things that they have
in the newly renovated downtown public library in Lafayette, Louisiana.
Yeah, what a place. It sounds really, really good. I was so, so glad you told us about it.
You're very lucky. I don't know that those places quite of that caliber in the in the UK.
I don't really know either. This is the only one of the public library branches that's got a
maker space. Now we do have a new branch of the library. Well, I say new, but it was probably built
seven or eight years ago. And it has lots of excellent things in it. But I just like how they,
when they were renovating this downtown library, they thought of so many things like they thought
of the maker space. And I also liked the fact that it's not just for technology, but also for
more traditional making arts like knitting and sewing and things like that where you can
go in there and use these sewing machines or sit around with other people and knit a scar for
something. It's really very cool. Yeah, somebody with quite a lot of foresight must have
must have thought this through. How would that have been done? You know, is there some sort of a
community group that comes up with these ideas? Well, I know that there is a, I don't know if it's
a board of directors or something like that, but I'm actually friends with one of the people who's
a sort of official in the Lafayette Public Library. And she may have had something to do with it.
They also hired a very good architecture firm to handle the design of the interior renovation
and everything. The exterior of the building didn't change a lot, but it has some additions.
The interior is almost completely different. And it's really, really well done. It took
them four or five years to get it done, but man, it's awesome now. Yeah, yeah, it sounds well
worth the wait from what you described. It's really good. The only thing I wondered about was
the, maybe they didn't quite get the opening times sorted before. It became available.
That was the only sort of down, slight downside. I'm sure they will soon get it organized,
but it seemed a little bit lacking there. Well, yeah, I mean, I talked to the, I cut out the part
of the podcast where the librarian explained to me why they weren't there on that day when I first
went and it was, it had to do with personal reasons for her. And so I decided to cut that out.
It was very valid excuse, but I think they've got it stabilized now. And she told me that they're
starting to have lots of groups going in scheduling classes and stuff like that. So I think it's
going to be very well used. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I heard the bit where she said there were
classes coming in and stuff, which will be fantastic. What a resource. That's really good.
Yeah, it's like I said, a great public quality of life enhancement for the city.
Yeah, absolutely. Right. So next was me again, all it wasn't really me. I just posted the show
for the for the group. And this was the 1868 Glasgow Podcraw or Podcraw Glasgow should have been
whatever. Um, Kevin think puts it the other way around with the first two. Okay. So
Kevin was the organizer of the the Podcraw really. He and MacNallow, Andrew, Andrew Conway,
but it was it was a fun time. I thought there might be a few more people, but in fact, we had Andrew
Gregory from Linux Voice come along to join us as well. It was very good indeed. So that was good.
Then it was it's a good idea to come back and chat about it. I thought it was fun to get together
and chat. Yeah, it was really nice hearing Andrew Gregory's voice again. I've not listened to any of
his podcasts since what was it? Was it the Ubuntu UK podcast? What podcast did he do before Linux
he did? He was on Linux format and their their podcast was called tux tux radar. I think we'll go
tux radar. Yeah, listen to both of those. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, they they they have a they have a
really nice relaxed way of doing their their podcasts. Yeah, it's it's just always quite amusing.
And so yeah, he's I think partly down to Andrew. I'm sure the others contribute a lot as well,
but yeah, it was cool. It was fun. Fun hearing you guys sit around talking it reminded me a little
bit of the duffer cast. Yeah, yeah, there was there was some commonality there, I suspect.
I'm getting a little bit distracted right now. My daughter is outside singing La Vienne Rose
in a very loud voice. She and her friend are rehearsing because they're supposed to sing this
at an upcoming event at her school. I think the French immersion program is doing some kind of
thing. And so I like I'm hearing you, but I'm also hearing her singing outside my window. It's
very distracting. That's rather fun. It's not coming through me. Well, I just caught just the edge
of it that you know, your mic must be quite directional or something. Well, it's a condenser mic,
but it is outside. So I mean, I'm in the detached office, which is not
connected to the house, but she was out on the back patio there singing. And it's really funny.
Very good, very good. Yeah, I sometimes when I do these my daughters here, if she's
because of vacation and stuff, and she's occasionally forgets and makes noises in the background,
but not singing. That hasn't happened yet. It's good to get a little atmosphere there.
Yeah, absolutely. All right, so mailing list discussions.
Yep, and just changing gear quickly. So yeah, what we normally do is to talk about what's
been happening on the mailing list. And the notes are set up, but what happens if you're not
the way that is that when stuff gets posted to the HBO mailing list, it also gets copied to the
G-Main GMA&E service and is available there as well. So what I do is I scan that and link to the
various things for the notes, but I have a suspicion that G-Main is having a problem today.
When I tried it earlier on, I wasn't actually able to get through to it. So just hold on a second
while I check again. I'm actually trying to grab one right now and it's just spinning. It's not
loading up. Yeah, I'm seeing the same here. It's a great service. It's a free service, but I don't
know whether he gets attacked. The guy who runs this, whether he gets attacked or whether he's
maybe just gets overloaded or what exactly happens to it. Well, maybe let's view this as an
opportunity to have a shorter community news. Yeah, I think that the going into
minute detail with the email might be excessive. I don't know. We can probably skim through it
fairly quickly. The time I did this on my own at the show a while back, what I did was I summarized
the mail for myself and just quickly skim through it and said he was the main topics without
drilling down because you can always drill down yourself to see the details. And if you're an HPR
subscriber, then you probably are on the mailing list anyway. And if not, you may be ought to be.
The other thing I should say is that we are mailing lists have run with the mailman list software.
And mailman can keep its own archives or messages, which it threads and variously keeps them
in order. We used to have a problem with this and I think that's why Ken moved over to Gmail.
But since we've moved across to an honest host, the new mailman installation has fixed all of the
problems that we had with the archive. So the archive is completely intact now as far as I can see.
So if you can't get through it to Gmail, you can just click on the link to the mailman
mailing list site and click on the link to archive and you'll see all of the messages there.
So there's multiple strings to the bow there. Sounds good. I used to do administer a mailman
system for the University of Worktats, so it feels like home from home in many respects.
Anyway, the main topics on the mailing list then briefly are there was some just a question
about using markdown for show notes. That was one of the earliest subjects that came up with some
chat about the different versions of markdown that might be available and possibly some other
markup languages being used. I don't think we've reached too much of a conclusion. I think
the view that Ken and I hold is that we will take whatever you send us. We'd really, really like it
if you could send us something which was a no markup format. And if you tell us what it is,
that would be great. We don't want to have a mechanism for doing that yet, but you can just put
it in the top of the show notes as a few people have done. It's all included, John.
Right. And then I'm writing some stuff to help with the processing of this into HTML.
If you feel that you're able to generate good quality HTML5, then go for it. That's the best option.
But we'd prefer not to have to debug it, so we'd like it to be good quality, please.
Yeah. I mean, I tried markdown for the first time on this the latest episode that I uploaded.
And it seemed like everything worked fine, except for the image links were messed up by whatever
version of markdown. Are you the one that handled that? I actually processed on one. Ken
does most of the processing on the back end, though we're trying to work it out that we can
divide up the load, but we haven't got there yet. So, but in this particular case,
I ran my test script against your notes and it said, this is markdown. So it went and ran
pan doc on it. But what I hadn't realized was that it was running pan doc in its pan doc mode,
which which does slightly different things to standard markdown. So it messed it up, which you
pointed out and then fixed it. So it's a learning process. It's still discovering things about this.
Yeah, but you said that there was a flag that you could use on the command line that would tell
it to run in some kind of a different mode. Yeah, when you run a pan doc, there's umpteen.
Well, you mean it in the notes themselves? No, you mean on the command line? On pan doc. Yeah,
there are umpteen options to pan doc. So you can say, I think this is
plain markdown or it's pan doc enhanced markdown or it's github style markdown and many others.
Haven't helped us. Yeah, yeah, it's a brilliant bit of software. It seems to have written
very, very well. As I can see, I haven't found too many problems with it. But the one that worked
for mine was something like strict mode or something. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
And just switch off the pan doc extensions. Yeah. I mean, I was just going by the documentation
over at daring fireball as far as how to insert images. Yeah. Yeah. Now that's that's fine.
That's fine. We're like I say, we're still we're still learning. We're that was my fault. I
didn't quite appreciate that it was going to do that. Yeah, well, you fixed it. So the another
comment, another thread that we had was concerning the menus on the website. Mike Ray had pointed out
that the the menus that we have are not accessible to him because he can't hover over them and get
you know, the sort of spoken feedback that he needs. And the reason for that is because we're
using the hover facility, the hover capability to drop down stuff to make it look like a like a menu.
And so I think Ken commented back on this that he was off to to look to see what what could be
done to improve it. And he came back saying that it was going to be really, really difficult
and he could do with some some help on that. So yeah. So it's it's it's that balance between
HTML and CSS and and how those two things hook into screen readers and all of those types of things,
I think. What if Mike could, depending on what browser he's using, like if he's using Firefox,
it's extremely easy to just disable all styling. And that would open up the menus to his screen
reader. It seemed to me. Yeah, I'm not sure the details of this. I think the way that the the HTML
underneath has been put together means that it relies on the fact that there are going to be there's
going to be a CSS that responds in particular ways to drop down this and open up this and stuff.
So I'm not clear whether that would do the job or whether it would be better just to have
a different version of the of the main page. I don't know. I don't know. I'm not no expert on this
tool. So I can't really comment much. It sounds like a good reason to try the page in W3M.
That's true. That's true. Yeah. Yeah. So it's an ongoing thing, I think. And this help is
requested from people who might know how to better ways of solving this. So another thing we had
on the list was we seem to have an issue with the mailing list itself. This is this is a bit
behind the scenes. But what seemed to be happening was that when Ken was trying to send a message out
about, which I'll come onto in a minute, about more contributions needed, please, he was sending
attachments. The attachments, the message went to Mailman. Mailman apparently did the right
thing and sent it out to everybody. But it looks as if the anti-spam stuff on the server then killed
it because the reason I said that is because the message in its in its intact form was in the archive
and in a reduced form was in the digest because I subscribed to the digest just to make sure that
it works. The digest form of the list, digest always strips out the attachments and points to them
on the website and that works. So it was just the one with the actual attachments that was being stopped.
So I think that's been solved, but we were trying to test it. So that was all that was about.
Okay. Yeah. I'll be honest, I kind of ignored that whole thread.
Probably, I should have ignored it too really, shouldn't I? So yeah.
And then the issue of getting contributions was had a lot of discussion.
The threading in these notes hasn't worked very well because a lot of people did digest
replies and stuff and broke the threads. Yeah, I see a number of digest things here.
Yeah, I still try not to nag even though I did do a show on how I'm not to do that. But
anyway, hold me back, hold me back. But the point of it was that Ken was, I think Ken's
view was that you owe us a show. He said you owe us a show. If you've ever been a contributor,
or if you're a listener, even you owe us a show, but it was pointed out by Lost in Bronx in a
response that I didn't completely absorb when he wrote it, that maybe that wasn't quite the
approach that we should be taking and thinking about it, I think he was right. It was more that
it's a community. In order for the show, the whole community structure of HBR to continue,
we need contributions. But you don't owe us a show, it's just that we desperately needs your help.
Yeah. So the difference in sort of trying to, I don't think anybody was ever trying to make
anybody feel guilty about not contributing, but somebody might have been. Yeah, well, it might
have come across that way. So I think the point is, and Ken responded to this saying, yeah, okay,
that's not quite the way that we want to, we still need them. We still need the shows, please. But
it's more that if you want the project to continue, then we need your contribution, please.
Yeah, well, we did get a new host this month, and we could use a few more. I'm going to say my
episode contributions are probably going to go down this fall. I've got a number of things
going on, and so it'd be great if some other people could step in there and upload some more shows.
Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. So there were, there were one or two comments about, you don't
need to worry about the quality and don't think you sound stupid because it's just you who
thinks that not the rest of the world and so on and so forth. I would say, I think people should
worry at least a little bit about the sound quality. Just, I want to be able to listen without
hearing distortion. That's my main thing. Yes. Yes. Do your best. Do your best. But don't,
don't be, don't be frightened, but it's, that it's terrible. Unless it really is terrible.
Well, it's not, not mostly, mostly. There have been a couple of episodes where I had to turn it
off because there was so much distortion. But as far as worrying about the way your own voice sounds,
don't worry about that at all. I would say I don't, I just want to hear people talk.
I know, but there is a, there is a terrible embarrassment that first time you ever record your
voice. Sure. The voice you've heard all your life come in through your head to your ears and
all of a sudden you hear it coming from the outside world to your ears and it's totally different
and it sounds awful and you think, I know. But everybody else has heard it that way all the time.
So what are you worrying about? So it's, but I sympathise with that viewpoint. Yep.
Get over it. It's not so too big deal. What we want to know is, it's the interesting stuff
that you have to tell us and that you, if you listen to any of HBR, you get some idea of the
sort of things that we get to, to listen to and it's all fantastic. So just add your bit to that,
please. Yep. Okay, let's call a hold to the, the mail business. And I think we've pretty much
covered the comments. What we, we changed the way that we do the comments a wee bit because we
used to wait till the end of everything at this point and then go through all the comments.
In some case it was going back to shows we'd already looked at and doing the comments. What we're
doing now is we're just going through all the comments as we, as we go along. The only bit that we
don't cover by that means is where somebody in the month of September has made a comment to an
older show. And so we need to maybe just check if there are any of those before we call,
before we get to the end of that particular. And there was one, there was one, 5150 made a
comment to Lost in Bronx for his get of the Imagination Part 7 show where he was talking about
the zoom H1 I think it was and a, and a Tazcan. And I think 5150 was, was happy that
like Harrison being done because he went out and bought himself a, a zoom. Yep. And then the
a guy named Rob Blaine made a comment on my HPR 1750, which was where I talked about ex-clip,
XDO tool and XVKBD and how I use them in conjunction with Bladder. And I was really glad to hear
that he is using Bladder, although I'm sad to hear that it's because he also has a medical
issue and said he's got a dystonia or something. So it's, I hate hearing about anybody suffering
from those things, but I'm really glad that Blathers helping him out. Indeed, indeed. We had,
these are not easy to follow, or is it just me? We had a comment on 1831 back in August,
which was a shadowy figures show. No, we covered these last, last, last time, I didn't we?
I think we did. See, here's, it gets a little confusing because what we did was we, we, we reviewed
that particular show, 1831 last month. And the comment had already, no, it kind of already been
made because it was made in the following month. Well, it says it's September 7th. Yeah, yeah.
So it was a further comment. It was comment number five to 1831, which is shadowy figures show
on speed listening. And this was Foki, who came back and was commenting on the speeds of
German speaking podcasts and Swedish speaking podcasts and English and the different speeds.
I like that. It hadn't really occurred to me that you would have different speeds for
different languages, but it totally makes sense. I suppose, depending on your fluency in the
different languages. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I find I can't speed English up very much these days.
It's probably because my brain's slowing down or something. So old age catch on. But anyway,
but it's an interesting thing. It's an interesting subject, but good for people who can do it,
I certainly can't. That it might be about it. Yeah, yeah. There's some things on
NY Bill's HPR 1846. Did we? That was in August. That was the, oh, that was the review. Remember,
we had wondered about the review of that multimeter? That was his review show. That was last.
That was the, it was August. Yeah, yeah. Because the last community news was actually in September,
wasn't it? Because just the way these things panned out. So we were, some of the,
some of these comments had already come in. I think the David Whitman's comment hadn't maybe at
that particular time. Okay. David Whitman said, takes me a minute to open these things up.
Hold on a second. Damn you. He says, these good buys that NY Bill keeps bringing up,
causing me to spend dollars to the X61s and love them. And now this actually needed the ability
to test capacitors. This can save a bundle just asking, just ask Flying Rich who lost a bundle.
Okay. That's, yes. I'm not sure everybody will get that comment. I'm not sure I do.
Well, I guess what he's saying is all these bargains get pretty expensive. Yes. Yes. Well,
Flying Rich reference was, I think that the Bitcoin, you know, I have a Bitcoin problem.
I don't know anything about Flying Rich. I don't know who that is. So one of the TLLTS
presenters who is into Bitcoin at one time. So I think that's it. Because now at 1847 we've
already covered. So that's it. We need, we need to actually make it easier to keep a record of
what we have covered in the way of comments and what not. I need to do a bit of job with this.
I thought I'd got this one down, but obviously not. I think it worked okay. Yeah, with,
because it's better than it was. Right. I think we've nearly finished. I've just got
one, one, maybe two more things to say. One is that we put out a request for help with the tags,
the missing tags and summaries on older shows. And over the past month, we had one helper
to who came along and helped out with these. This is Guy whose hand is Colin 6128. I don't think
he's a host yet. Hope maybe he will think of doing a show for us, but he certainly was extremely
helpful in doing 40 or more tag and summary additions to the various shows in the database.
So just want to make it, make it, make it make a public vote of thanks for the Colin 6128 and his
help in this regard. So yeah, super, super, super, very pleased that we got that. The only other
thing was that we can and I've been, we've had, we've been putting HPR shows up on our kind of.org
for a while now. So from episode 1300 forward, we, most of them have gone up. And then before that,
we had problems because we didn't, it wasn't easy to get hold of the high quality versions of the
shows. Well, we discovered that they're probably never going to get the high quality. So we're just
going to go with what quality we have. So we're just starting the process of uploading the numbers
backwards from 1300. So the range 1200 to 1299, I'm working on it. So just in case you've got
shows in those ranges and you're interested in them being on archive.org, we're actually in the
process of doing that for posterity. So I should have from my own shows anyway. I think I've still
got the high quality for all of them. So for mine, I'd be happy to supply that. And by the, I want
to thank you publicly also for working on that and also for handling the pictures on my episodes
that have gone missing since one of my servers crashed. So thanks for taking care of that.
Hey, you're very welcome. We need to get a better method of ensuring that we don't lose links and
pictures and that's that type of thing. Sometimes links are just not going to ever be there again.
We're all the shows. But we very least need to be looking to see if there are copies on the
way back machine. There's things and linking them, bringing them on to the edge of the other side
and those sort of things. We're putting a disclaimer in saying, sorry, this links now dead. So
too bad. Yeah, yeah, that's life. But yeah, I could, I could be busy for, you know,
I lived to about 90. Then I probably got a job for that for that time.
So anyway, have a great success. Right. Thanks, John. That's super. We haven't gone too long. You
haven't, we haven't overdone this for you. Pushing, pushing two hours here. So
it's probably time to call a prince. If anybody's still listening, thank you.
Okay. Thanks very much for your help, John. Yep, you bet. Talk to you later. See you later. Bye.
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