Episode: 1546
Title: HPR1546: HPR Community News for June 2014
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1546/hpr1546.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 04:57:15

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Hi everybody, my name is Ken Ballon and welcome to today's edition of Hacker Public
Radio Community News for the month of June 2014.
Joining me tonight is Ahuka, Dave Morris and Ken Ballon.
Anyway, for those of you who are tuning in to Hacker Public Radio for the first time
or for those of you who have never listened to this show, they fast forward button on your
media player has stopped working and you can't power it off fast enough.
This is the community news show where we review things that have been going on in and around
the HPR community for the last month or so and as we always do, we start off by my traditionally
butchering the names of the new hosts but as Ahuka and Dave are here, they can take this
topic for me.
Okay, I guess I'll go ahead, Mark Waters and semiotic robotic.
I want to like both of those I think I could have done.
Anyway, no, I didn't.
Let's start off by going through the shows starting at 1521 which was released.
Do we have the release date on there?
Yes, 14, the second of last month and it was Carboard Greeting Cards by Shane Shannon
and he explains why he met Greeting Cards, this is a nice, very hacky thing to do.
Have a good way to recycle Cardboard.
Indeed and a very personal touch, I like getting as a father, I tend to get homemade cards
quite a lot and they're very nice to receive, I must say.
What would be nice is Holland, he has a link in the show notes actually to the example
cards that he was talking about in the episode, did any of you guys check those out?
Yes, yes, I made a note here, I was just fiddling with my sand which seems to be slightly
weird.
We can microphone stand creaking.
You get weird noises from my end, I think I might have the gain a bit too high.
I was just going to say, yeah, he's got a Google Doc with show notes and photos in it
which I thought were great, really added a lot.
He was able to explain it quite well but I just nipped over there onto the, when I was
listening to the show to get a visual of it.
So none of these are how I would say spectacularly complicated but it's just a nice touch.
So the following day was how to use Docker and Linux containers and this was by Tlattu
who didn't give us a lot in the way of show notes but did give us a lot in the way of content.
Do any of you use Docker, it seems to be a very, very hot topic right now.
I haven't used it yet but looking to possibly use it, don't have an application for it just
at this moment but suspect I might do.
It does seem to be very popular, I've been reading about it a lot but yeah, I haven't had
a reason to do it yet.
But I will say it is great to hear Clattu on Hacker Public Radio, it's been too long.
Yep, Clattu is my reserve, if anything, if I desperately need a show then dial up Clattu
and we're good to go.
Yep.
The following day we had the second version of HPR 1523 and that was dialed in for us
by Charles and NJ if I'm not mistaken, was that correct?
Yeah, I believe that too it was.
Now what many people may not know is that Hacker and I recorded our own show at the same
time for that but because of me being unable to read emails on time, I didn't realize
that that was actually a full complete show so what Hacker and I discussed in the show
notes maybe we'll come back to that and include them in the discussions at the end of this
as well.
Sure, but you know, I like what Charles did, we just need to work on this communication
thing a little bit more, I don't think, but we, we mean me actually, I thought it was
a brilliant idea and I'd love to do that some more if we can figure out a way to make
it really easy to do because we record this on Saturday so when you're hearing this,
it's only been two days ago since it was recorded so major amounts of editing are not an
option here so what would be cool is if we could maybe get segments for on particular
shows from people and then we could play them into the, into the recording as we're recording
it that would make it kind of easy to do, I'm open to suggestions on that.
Yeah, I take a look at that.
I think what Charles had in mind was that somehow he could add his own commentary on each
of these shows and somehow meld it in, but when you start thinking of practicality of
how you do that on an hour long recording, it just, it's way too much effort.
Well, I could have had a, had I known, known to listen to the thing beforehand, but I
could have figured that out myself and spit them up into chunks and then kind of played
them, but that would have added considerably to the show and when I listened to it, as I
didn't listen to the whole thing straight through, it sounded to me like a, you know, a
whole complete episode, which I think it was, but anyway, so there you go.
But open to suggestions, mailing list, all the rest of it.
Indeed.
The following was your presentation at episode 1524 at Washtelog, PGP and the email.
Yeah, this is my local Linux users group, which I've been a member of for quite a
few years now, and this is in Washtenaw County in Michigan, so that's how it became Washtelog.
And what I, it was something that Ken had suggested to me at one point, I, I listened to podcasts
on a Sansa clip and so Ken said, well, you know, those things have a microphone.
You could just turn on the mic and record something.
And it actually came out pretty well.
And the only thing is you, every once in a while, there'd be a question from the audience
and you couldn't really hear the question, you could only hear my answer.
Yeah, but you get that from, you know, with any recording option.
I didn't know it was a Sansa.
It was pretty good.
It sounded amazingly good.
I hadn't quite appreciated what it was.
Very good indeed.
Yeah, I just had a clip to my shirt collar, so it was, you know, right by my voice.
Yeah, that's how I did it.
So any of you out there that are wondering how I can record a show, it was that easy.
It is the Sansa clip ever since I lost an interview due to not pressing the pause button
or not pressing the zoom H2 bug of having to press record twice.
I've used clips and I've recovered more than one as an interview using that.
Okay, moving on the next day, was again, who can Libra office savings model.
Yeah, now that was a scheduled one.
For those of you who haven't been paying attention to how this works, the Libra office series,
I've been doing one every two weeks.
And so those are scheduled way out in advance.
The others were basically Ken saying, hey, we're really short of shows and it was like,
all right, I can whip out some stuff here pretty quickly.
So as it happens, it just wound up with like being the allahooka show for three days.
Yeah, and if you, but that's what we're saying now, the case and point, the scheduling,
if I was doing the scheduling, that wouldn't have happened, but as I'm not doing the scheduling
anymore, I do whatever it is that's in the show notes.
So yeah.
So if you put it next, next is what it's going to be.
Yeah.
So the moral of the story, if you guys really don't want to hear that much of me send in
your own shows.
Very nice.
Very nice.
And here we go again.
Penguin cotton 2014.
What was the red day in between these?
Or was it three days in a row?
I'm guessing that the Libra office is usually on Friday.
So the Penguin cotton was probably Monday.
That's right.
Yeah.
Well, this is, I could listen to you go on and, uh, go on and on, listen, sound right.
Bear in mind.
It's quite late here.
Now, I could listen to you, uh, you're, as Poki says, you're one of those people who
could read a telephone book and make it interesting.
And I have apparently as opposed to the own professional services.
So this is, uh, people who've been listening to me blather on for a while know that I used
to be the publicity director for Ohio Linux Fest.
I stepped down last fall and got involved with, uh, Penguin cotton, where I'm the tech track
manager, director, whatever you want to call it.
Uh, so I'm kind of reporting on what happened this year and, you know, I'm starting planning
for 2015 now.
When did you update your photo?
Um, don't remember exactly as you got a new, uh, but in the last month, that was, uh,
that was because I was, I think your, your, uh, gravitar was a few weeks ago.
Wasn't it, uh, hookah, or maybe, maybe a couple of months, that sort of timescale.
Um, yeah, probably around about the time that Ken said we were going to have something
that updated that kept the gravitas up to date.
Well, uh, yesterday I made the thing that made it made my own thing, um, update the, uh,
the gravitas.
So your pictures suddenly appeared against your, um, your, your episodes, I think that's
what you mean is that Ken?
Yeah.
What, uh, was there a bog in my script?
It's not been running.
I don't think Ken.
Oh, I thought it was, uh, I just made a little bit of it.
The gravitas were dated back to May and I looked at them yesterday.
Oh, strange.
Cause I, I thought I had a running everywhere.
Okay.
Thank you Dave for taking that off of my shoulders.
Okay.
And just while we're on it, you, you, you sent in a request for the first previous next
and latest thing, which, uh, I also implemented, and we have also been in discussions about adding
the duration field, which is added to the majority of podcasts now.
So you can, uh, you can get that coming up and, uh, little bits and bits.
Yeah.
We're gradually, uh, chipping away at some of the, some of the problems looking good.
Okay.
Moving on.
We had surviving a road trip GPS first part of a three part series, I, as I understand
it by when to go, I liked this very much.
It's a very nice and simple sort of, um, episode.
And I hope he gets to it before I have a road trip to Sweden.
So, uh, more of this type of thing.
Absolutely.
I, I enjoyed it very much too.
Yeah.
Some good hints and tips here.
I thought, uh, some, uh, some good rules to live by.
They, uh, I don't know, I was listening to this and I was going, I wasn't, I'm not the
only person who, who, uh, who's jeep, you know, I go, uh, talk back to the GPS and go,
I'm not going that way.
Please stop bugging me about it.
It insists that you turn around.
Yep.
So don't, yes, I don't like GPS personally.
I still tend to fall back on paper maps or at least have them in reserve.
I, yeah, I, I do have a, uh, push off for maps myself.
I do like paper maps.
And you know, when I, I recently, uh, put up today was a, um, there was an incident yesterday.
It was an, of no interest to anybody, maybe except, uh, and needle, who, uh, was also
late for work because of us.
They, um, there's a, on the way into the railway, uh, into the main airport from Amsterdam.
They, uh, there's a motorway, one way of going on one side, then, you know, the rail
network and the metro network and then motorway going on the other side.
And so half of it is half of the route is a tunnel and the other half is like
cordoned off behind concrete barriers.
And they, there was a train reports that there was a truck or a car vehicle on the, on
the road.
Everybody was wondering what happened and then they looked at the sign and I, there
was a car accident and in order to avoid a car and another truck, they truck driver drove
on to the railway tracks over a concrete barrier.
Luckily, no, he was injured.
So don't know what that's got to do with anything.
So, yes, open street maps.
As a result of that, we wanted to know how many train tracks were, uh, blocked.
And as a result of that, we went to open street maps.
And one of the things that you can do is put on the, um, metro and public transport
networks and you get a beautiful view of the, uh, all the rail, railway tracks that are
around the world.
Anyway, moving on now that I've bored everybody to that was, while swimming in France
by first time host, I think Mark Waters and who, um, as his name would suggest, went
to swimming in France.
Very, very original thing to do and record.
I think I, I thought that was fantastic.
The only thing that I would say about this episode that, um, I, uh, I missed a little
bit was I'd like to know what sort of set up he had to put it on to his head.
Number one, and number two, a little bit of history about, um, uh, the, um, wild
water swimming and that sort of thing, which he has linked into the show notes and I downloaded
those and, um, did a text to speech on them and, and read them.
It would have been nice to have that covered in, but I, I really liked this episode.
I was, I was there.
I was following along.
It was very mesmerizing.
Yeah.
I like ambient recordings.
It's something wonderful about sort of being along with him.
The only, the only thing I, uh, I regretted was that obviously had his sound level
right for speaking into, but when he had a conversation with the fisherman, because it
was, uh, sound level to it, we're wrong.
And, and so he couldn't knew what he was saying.
I couldn't work, I couldn't work out what, uh, but from bourgeois and stuff like that.
Um, yeah, yeah, you didn't get much more.
But I was really, I was really there.
I, I actually, I listened to my, the podcast sped up, uh, twice or whatever and, uh,
this one I just had to get the original and listen to it because, uh, even though it,
it took a lot longer, you, you just missed so much of the wildlife and everything that
was picked up.
Yeah, it's, it's a great thing to do.
It, it, I think we could do it more, more of that sort of stuff personally.
I would love that.
And the following day, bring this back to, uh, real world was a hookah again,
the true grape, heart bleed and the lessons learned.
Yeah, part of our security and privacy series.
And, uh, it, there was, it spawned an interesting exchange between Ken and I in the
comments. Uh, so folks, if you're not following the comments, sometimes you miss some of
the discussion.
Yes.
I was a bit concerned that I was going to feel somebody's wrong on the internet there,
but, um, awuka infernice is, uh, is, uh, put for you, was man enough to, uh, to
discuss it in an open manner, which was pretty cool.
And that's really, I think the way it ought to be with hacker public radio, it's, you know,
we're all trying to do our best, um, Ken thought I'd gone a little too far and brought in
some data and I looked at his data and said, okay, you're right.
Yeah, I think my main, my main issue is was with the, you know, the, the, the open SSH
team or the team that have taken over this have, have an awful lot of respect in the, in
the security community and, and that respect is very much nourished. Um, so that, uh, that
was my main issue and, you know, that's fine.
But speaking of that, we do have, uh, new features on the website is, uh, we finally
have an RSS feed for the comments, which you'll all be thrilled to know.
And I have it in my feed link.
And it works okay, does it?
Uh, yeah, it seems to be.
And Dave, one thing that I did on the reader, which is on the P, if you press the letter
P for, uh, public, it's also on the other, uh, uh, about links you can get there.
So, uh, I did a thing where it converts the, if there's a HGTP link, it'll put in, it'll
convert it to a little link so that you can, uh, click those links and get to it.
All right, okay, okay.
I know I think I pulled that on the RSS feed as well.
Right, right.
I hadn't noticed that.
That's good.
That's nice.
What's something you haven't noticed on the HGTP website, Dave?
Yeah.
Five minutes.
Asian, I sleep in, I, I know it's lacking, but there you go.
There you go.
There's, there's still an issue with the comments somewhere.
There's some, some weirdness that we need to deal with.
I think a few comments came missed out back in, in the midst of time.
But, uh, yeah, those, and we found out the reason for that is if, um, say somebody puts
in the comment and it gets truncated or there's some, um, HGML in there.
It'll truncate the comments and then when I edit it, it updates us with the last edited
page was the page that, you know, the admin page that I've used to edit it.
And then that is also used by the commenting system as the link to the page that
should display.
So we need to go back and fix all those.
I thought you had a script to do that.
Or was I missed out?
I, I have the show notes that I prepared for this, uh, recording use the preferable
technique of, of following through the comments.
And I would suggest that maybe the, uh, PHP that drives the, the comment, uh,
display and the, you know, I says, needs to do the same thing, but we need to debate this.
Need to discuss this one because, uh, yeah, I think it's more, you, you might know more
about the PHP side of it than I do.
Well, the comment system itself isn't as fantastic, but, um, I did actually try to activate
the email and, um, why not do, in order to get notified when people send in a comment,
but what it does is it emails you whenever a comment is sent in, even ones that it's
identified as spam.
And there are currently about one spam message every 30 seconds coming in.
So it is, does it, does it tag them as spam?
Yeah, it's, uh, it's, uh, can you, can you filter, can you filter them and drop them in the bucket or something?
Yeah, no, I've, uh, there's an SQL script that I can, yeah, they're filtered and dropped.
Yeah, yeah, that the comments system is doing that, which is good.
But, uh, if you enable email notification, when there's email, when there's new comments to be approved,
then, um, it's, it don't advise you of all comments, not, not just the one you filter it out.
So you filter, you filter the mail.
Yeah, I have, I've felt, I've got an SQL query that will tell me when it's, uh, when does the new one in.
And then I can run that and then email myself.
I also want to, myself about, uh, stuff like, uh, a reserve show within 24 hours of not being delivered.
That's what I think.
And, you know, when we're running low and shows or when somebody's posted a show on the website, I have all these statements ready to rock.
It's just to put them together into an email thing.
Anyway, this is interesting stuff that's going on in the background, nobody's probably interested.
Anyway, the following day we had GWP, which was a Friday with this EX2 file system.
I'm liking this a series.
Yeah, me too.
Yeah, I think it's great to dig beneath the surface of these things.
It's, um, stuff I need to know about, would like to know about.
And it does, it sound like he's recording this while driving in his car.
I thought it was more like in the restaurant and in the, in the canteen and work or something like that.
It's a nice, it's a nice, uh, regardless that you can hear exactly what he's saying.
But it's a nice kind of off the cuff type.
I've got some notes and I'm going to tell you a show, which is the only reason I brought it up is that, uh, you know,
if you're thinking of recording a show, it's not like you have to book studio time to do this.
He obviously is very knowledgeable.
And I gather he just collects his thoughts and sits down and talks and will, uh,
some sort of recording device for, you know, eight, nine minutes and sends it in.
Yep, absolutely perfect.
And you make a very good point.
Okay.
Thank you.
And that is, uh, audio, so long as we can hear it, it's a show.
That's what we have here.
The better the audio quality, the better, but, um, starting off, send in the show.
Yep.
Jezra sent us in how I use Linux and he has an awesome beard.
I can see that from his gravatar image, which is on the website.
On the website now, we have a gravatar one that just appeared as early, I think.
Yeah, that completely distracted me now from the rest of the show.
So everybody who can go there, uh, go there and do that.
And for all the, uh, blind or hard of, uh, low vision users, he's got a lot of, a lot of beard.
I think this is the mutton chopper illusion that in one of his, uh, it's the software.
Is it not?
I do not know.
He, uh, he's right about the 900 being the saddest mutton chopper.
What is mutton chopper again, remind me?
Mutton chopper is a sort of beard where you grow your sideburns down into your beard.
As, uh, as it looks like, Jezra is done.
Ah, yes, yes, yes, I did not know that.
Like a piece of, piece of mutton slapped on your face, I guess, I don't know, mutton chopper.
Ah, yeah, this is the one where I, uh, because he's going on about all the stuff he has automated
in this house, which is awesome, absolutely awesome.
And, uh, so they come on, I don't think, uh, I don't think you, a toaster means what you think it
means. And he has taken a part as toaster and heard that into a Raspberry Pi thing.
And it is absolutely awesome.
His house is the level of automation I want in my house, but unfortunately,
that's never going to happen.
I'm going to tell him about 99 or something and I have time to do it.
Jezra's blog is, is, uh, is really, really worth following it,
so yeah, I, uh, I've got him in my feed reader and he's got some amazing things he comes up with.
He's got the blather stuff as well going on.
Yeah, yeah, pretty cool.
We've come across him before and no doubt we will come across him again.
The following day, we had Keith Murray with a project idea for White House Spam Boss,
and this is something that he did with, um, Nightwise.
And they, when I heard this, I was going, I, well, when I posted this, I was going, I hope this,
this is not going to be about what I think it's going to be about, which was, you know,
spam-botting people.
But what they're actually talking about is a, uh, a consolidated way of releasing, um,
notifications about your podcast on the very, very social media sites.
So you, I don't know, you put it into a central location and you say, release this on Thursday,
release this on Friday, release this on Saturday or whatever, which would be very useful for HPR,
I have to admit. And then post it, send an update to Twitter, send an update to Google Plus,
Facebook, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it would seem to me to be a relatively simple,
straightforward thing to do. And I've asked them for more information, which they have,
is yet to reply to.
And the following day, we had Andrew Conway with their much awaited, I must say,
much awaited episode on Beginner's Guide to the Night Sky.
I, when I heard this, I was cast back to where I was the day that I heard episode one of this.
So all good stuff, all good stuff here. Some of these programs I have actually downloaded and played
a little with as well.
Yeah, same here. Um, I tried out K stars and Stellarium.
I, uh, I said in box and, uh, fantastic. Stellarium is amazing.
It is indeed, it is indeed. Uh, unfortunately, it doesn't get dark enough here to really look at the
light, uh, light, the lights and this guy. With all the lights around, you only sometimes see stars.
Oh, it's a problem all over Europe, I think, isn't it? The, what's it? The Dark Sky's project is,
is all about getting, um, uh, local authorities to change street lighting. So it's,
it's pointing Dan was rather than up and, and so on and so forth.
Yep. And there's, uh, initiatives to turn off the lights by times.
Yep. And, uh, yeah, good stuff all around. Um, I must say, when I go home to where my parents are,
it's in the middle of the country, uh, middle of Ireland, and it's completely and totally
dark, scarily. So the following day is semi, sorry, uh, hookah, you were going to say something?
No, I was, uh, if you can't, uh, see everything that way, uh, I just mentioned that, um,
NASA and related have, uh, a whole bunch of high death videos, uh, European space agency has
some as well. And, uh, I subscribed to a bunch of those.
Oh, very nice, very nice. The only thing about that hobby is I need a lot of sleep and
seems to me that you would need to be awake in the middle of the night.
Yeah, well, that's why I like watching the videos because I can keep up on what's going on during
my hours. Uh, good. You know what I like the, uh, what I've seen with some of the Raspberry Pi
things where they, you know, they set up trackers to do slow motion video cameras. I saw one where
they set up on and it tracked the night sky so that it adjusted to the movement of the earth.
Then you saw the night sky fixed and the earth moving underneath, which was really scary.
Yep, that's what you have to do if you're going to focus on one area to collect the light.
Yeah, it's pretty, uh, pretty impressive. Really makes you realize, oh my god, we're on a
floating speck in space. Yeah, I found myself wondering just the other day, uh, how does Hubble
focus on one spot because it's orbiting around the earth. So is it constantly adjusting to stay
focused on one spot and how do they do that? I don't know. You know what you could do to answer that
question is send an email to the mailing list with requested topics. That's true. Yes, I'm sorry,
folks. And you could do it. Sorry, you could, uh, don't forget that if there's a topic that you
want to request it, either send it to the mailing list or send it to AdminateHackerPublicRadio.org
and we will add it to the requested topics list. Alrighty. Then we had an introduction to HPR
by Sim Semiotic Robotic. There you go. That's why I have you doing the introductions because of
the thing is Semiotic Robotic. That sounds like a nice one that could flow off the tongue, but no,
there you go. And really cool. OpenSource.com, a site that I had been to once or twice before,
pretty, pretty cool site. And this is a pretty cool initiative. I liked it.
Yeah, this for people who don't know, opensource.com is sponsored by Red Hat, but I think their remit
is much broader. They're looking at all of open source. And I've been subscribing to their weekly
email for a number of years at this point. I don't know, two, three years. I think I've been getting
that. Uh, so it's a good site. And Mark Johnson is on there. Is he, is that the Mark Johnson from
the Ubuntu UK podcast or am I, he seems to be Mark Johnson? I digress. There you go. That's
proof that it's a good site. You can mosey on over there. OpenSource.com. Indeed.
Then we have the man of the moment. I'm south, uh, Huka with, uh,
Liberoff's cock. She's editing and navigation. And I have a bone to pick with you.
I'll pick away. I'm, you know, you focus quite a lot on, um, in the first series on word about,
or sorry, writer word, writer about, uh, separating form, you know, um,
uh, features and form and function. So I just want to think of presentation from content.
That, that's exactly the one. Should the same thing not apply in spreadsheets as well,
especially when you want to export them. And I'm thinking specifically of, you know,
using multiple tabs where you could collapse everything to one sheet for our printability.
And the other where you can export it, make it nice and exportable.
Well, the series isn't over yet, Ken. There you go. There you go. Tune in for another
exciting episode of Liberoff's Cali. Uh, as a matter of fact, I have, uh, about four shows written
that I haven't recorded yet that are on, uh, styles and templates. Uh, I'm going to do at least one
more, uh, where I actually create a default template and create templates for one or two particular
uses, uh, which will be available for download. Uh, so I'm actually going to cover all of that stuff.
And I will be burning is onto a DVD and giving it out to all the people who filled in, in, in
the IP address and port mapping spreadsheet that I've had to work on for the last few weeks.
So this is, uh, Ken is probably aware of this because he has to do all of the scheduling stuff.
But, uh, I've actually submitted enough shows now to go up through about the middle of November.
That's not to say we're short. It's not short to show those folks.
Uh, by the time I finish Cal, it should be maybe early spring of 2015. And, uh,
and then at that point, I start on impressed.
By the way, just, uh, for your information, everybody listening, which is kind of the point of
the show, if you go to hackerpublicradio.org and look under give shows and go to calendar or go to
calendar.php. You will see a list of upcoming shows with a chart of, uh, the status of the queue,
the next free slot, the number of hosts in the queue and the number of shows in the queue.
And all the shows for the next two months are listed there. And you can link on any of the links.
And you will be brought to a page for that episode, even though it hasn't been released,
you can listen to it live. Uh, you can listen to it right there on the website.
Then there's the also schedule shows which are further out than two months, which would include
a hooker shows. They will tell you as well the currently processing shows. So shows that have been
uploaded to the FTP server. And that's where I go to every day to see what I need to download.
And then the number of emergency shows. So there's currently only three emergency shows.
And there are now links in there to the org mp3 and speaks and the show notes file for those
shows. And I finally listened to pokies, the best eggs in the world. And, uh, I still need to
check and see if that is the case. By the way, I'm not the only one who is, uh,
putting in shows that schedule out a few months. Uh, I noticed that JWP, uh, is up to about October
with his file system series, which is delightful. Exactly. And if you're submitting shows, uh,
please update the templates and pick a date. Um, so if, uh, if you're doing a series like this,
and you have them ready, you can pick the dates, uh, kind of recommending, uh, once every two
weeks is about right. Otherwise, uh, you know, it's about, that's about 10 percent of the slots
that we have available. So if there's already JWPs, uh, series will be rounding up then, unless
people invent a few file systems between now and then, uh, Libra Office series is about once
every two weeks, uh, that's been fairly constant. Uh, yes, by design. So it looks like JWP is doing
the alternate Fridays from me. Yeah, that's just kind of the way we post them. So that's good,
good stuff. Good stuff. Yeah. Then folks, C-Prompt, who is costing me a lot of money because his
last show was a, uh, oscilloscope thing, uh, which I need, which I want to get. And this month was
a 550-on-one electronics project kit. And there is a kit available on Amazon that you can buy.
Links are in the show notes. And, uh, I'm going to get that. I'm thinking you're getting one for work
just to have on the desk and work that people can play with. Sorry, somebody actually want to say
what the show was about. Well, this is something that, uh, when I was much younger, there used to be
various project kits, uh, not just electronics, but chemistry sets and, and what have you, uh,
that, you know, you could do experiments and learn how things work. So the electronics one,
you can actually build some circuits and, uh, you know, plug in the various components,
resistors and, and start understanding how all of that stuff works. So that's good. And there's
one linked into the show notes. And what's cool is, uh, you don't need any, any connectors. You just,
pull back and spring and it clamps them in. And then it's got, um, you know, the physically the
microphone and you see the symbol for the, you know, the electronic symbol for the microphone. And
you get the electronic symbol for resistors and capacitors and stuff. So for somebody like me,
and you see the component itself, it's right there above the symbol. So somebody like me, you
kind of tends to be a bit visual or a bit, a bit slow and picking up stuff. Um, it's pretty,
pretty cool to see the various different, uh, various different things. And then you,
you know, you know, that that symbol is associated with that thing. So it's pretty, pretty cool. I
need to, uh, I need to do that. And see prompt, can you do me a favor and send in shows that are
going to be a lot cheaper in my pockets. Yeah, good luck with that. Yeah, exactly. You know, I'm,
I'm also quite interested to get one of those five, five thingy timers that he was talking about
from the last one to, to do pulses. He's, he's just kind of mentioned this as a buy the buy.
But that will be a requested topic show. Well, you've just requested it, I guess. Yeah, now I need
to remember to put it into the show notes, which I'll probably do when I hear this on Monday on the
train. Okay, the following day actually was a very good show. So see prompt, uh, ignore that.
Just keep sending them in brilliant. Uh, it's really motivating me to get into electronics,
which is something I, I, on the record, have, I'm wanting to do. Yeah, there's a whole background
of this stuff. Uh, if you think back to the early days, uh, and even until fairly recently,
anyone that was heavily involved with computers usually got there through a degree in electrical
engineering. And, uh, I've got a book on my shelf by, I believe Charles Petzold called code,
where he goes through all of the kinds of circuits that you would see on, uh, on a CPU and how it
does all of those things and shows how you can accomplish all of that with electrical relays and
light bulbs. We really use an insight in the very low level of, uh, how this stuff works.
Speaking of low level of how stuff works, how I make coffee by X 1101. And I like this show.
I liked it because, uh, I like coffee. Who doesn't like coffee? And if I was going to edit this show,
I would edit in, uh, tattoos. Let's have a coffee segment. That is wonderful.
Yeah. So if you all could, uh, as, as everybody knows, I don't edit yours. Uh, if you could all
mentally edit in that right now, that would be fantastic. Thank you. I had to go and make coffee after
listening to it. I must tell you that. So it works in some, some level.
Well, if we can get platoon to weigh in, uh, maybe we could combine making coffee with, uh,
toast with Vegemite. Indeed. Indeed.
Yes. And if you want to know what we're on about, we'll go over to canoe world order.
That info. John Colp, on the other hand, is overall, overhauling the school of music websites.
And I had to chuckle with this and cause, uh, it's called, as you probably guessed, I wrote a
bash script. And he said, yep, I guess that all right. Yeah. I really enjoyed this as well.
I enjoy pretty much everything John Colp does. But, uh, I was at one point Webmaster for a small college
and overhauling that website. So, uh, I identify with a lot of the things he was talking about.
I, uh, my, my job, I used to be the guy who ran the master website and set it up so that people
like John could access it and listening to his tale of having to, you know, poke around with it
through FTP and, uh, and Drupal was coming, but not, and not, not for another two years.
I hope sad. It's so sad. Yeah. I hope my, my users didn't feel that way.
I, yes, I know, I know what he's gone through, but he has a lot of tools in there. A lot of
useful tools if you're not into bash scripting tiny PGP, um, for optimizing, uh, PNG, tiny PNG
for optimizing PNG images and that sort of stuff, uh, the Google developer page, which I,
it's nice and all of Google, but at the same time, the one thing that slows down my web experience
is if I go to a Google search and then a click and there's a redirect through their system
before you get to the website, it's, it's often a lot faster just to copy and paste the URL in,
to go directly to the website, but that's by the way. But some very good tips there and also good
tips on accessibility tips, uh, sites as well. Yeah, that is important. Um, you know, the,
the laws are different depending on where you are, but here in the United States, uh, you know,
there is something called the Americans with Disabilities Act, which basically says, uh,
you've got to make your, your, uh, resources accessible. Um, and the mandate is if you get
federal funds, you have a legal responsibility to do it. I'm sure there's something similar in
the European community. Yeah, it's called a decency. And you know, it does, one of those things that
my habit is, uh, having been responsible for all of this is every time I put an image into a website,
you know, I always fill in the alt text and, um, do things like that. Yeah, an easy thing to do
is just open it in e-links or something like that and, and see what it looks like. Oh, yeah, do, uh,
I have a text to speech thing and just do a text to speech and then you'll hear pretty fast,
what it's like. Anyways, we had an open source news break from opensource.com, uh, by Sem
iotic or robotic. Is that lost or not? Uh, yeah, it's had reasonably close. I would have said semiotic,
um, but, uh, then again, I could be wrong. No, I think he says semiotic. Okay. And, uh, there was a
news update. Then we had JWP with the journaling file systems, journaling file system, which was
also, uh, quite interesting because I thought some of those features were included in previous versions,
but there you go. And Claudio with, uh, how I came to Linux, uh, answering the call for more shows,
um, very, yeah, very, uh, very nice, very Mac, I, I believe. Yeah, um, for me, I really like Claudio
and I think Linux basement seems to be sinking back down in the pod fade again. They,
they went away for a while. Then he and Chad resurrected it for a few shows and then it went away
again. So, uh, you know, maybe this will be an outlet for Claudio to come and, uh, do a few shows
for hacker public radio and keep his hand in podcasting. Absolutely. And you're more than welcome to
use this here. And again, an open invitation to people who may not know that the invitation is
available. If you want to do your own show, um, HPR has the option to put it under a particular
series. So you can put your show on a series here on HPR. And this is something that Dan
Mochco did with the, uh, Linux and the shell that's basically served directly, uh, um, the hosting is
provided by, uh, HPR and, um, we also have the option to do the, uh, series feeds will give you an
independent feed for a particular podcast. So feel free to do that. Agnes is an IT lawyer apparently.
And CT is a teacher in Sweden who interviews people. And this was very interesting from the,
uh, point of view, that that very day I had a need to know about this information for another
issue that was going on. And I did not know that the European Union were going to be harmonizing
as much as they are doing. Okay, did you just jump into, uh, beginning of July? I did. So now you all,
everybody listening to this has to go back and edit out that show. I just, I've, I've got my
list in front of me and it's like, uh, I don't see what he's talking about. But that's, that's, uh,
yes, that's just me. I pressed next basically. I figured that out. That's, uh, yeah. It has,
so I'm expressing that next thing, I think. Yeah, it was pretty cool. So, um, should we do the
comments or pot? Are we sure? The mailing list discussion from, let's do the comments. If
you guys can start, then I can dig out the mailing list discussions from the last few months.
So we're working through the, uh, the comments in the, are you going to put these out in the,
the show notes, Ken? Don't see a lot of point to seeing us there on the, uh, on the website.
So that, but you have there in the show notes. We haven't in the show notes so that it makes it
easier for us to, uh, to track them. It makes it easier for me because I always found it difficult,
um, bit, bit old and feeble and stuff. But, uh, um, yeah. So we, we've organized the comments in, um,
chronological order. So the first one is relating to, um, show one two eight four, uh, which was, um,
John Culp talking about blabber speech recognition, uh, with Jesra. That's going,
rather than we're back in time, I think, isn't it back to July last year?
One year ago, July 4th. Yep. Yep. And I think that just proves a point, you know, a lot of the
episodes go out. There's a discussion on the mailing list, which we'll be talking about in a while.
We get about 2,500 to about 3,000 downloads per day for a particular show, but you're,
you're download rate can go up to about 8,000 per show, maybe 68,000 shows. So quite a lot of the
shows are listened to, um, in the past. Yep. So this is somebody called, um, who's trying to, uh,
to implement the, uh, implement blather and asking for some help, I think. Uh, yeah. And I'm inferring
from this that we're talking about somewhere with a visual impairment because I see a reference to
Orca, which of course is, uh, for, uh, that's the thing that, uh, Jonathan Nado has been working on
from, among other things, um, is a text-to-speech, um, operating system.
The thing actually, a note to self when I hear this on the train tomorrow or on Monday, is to email this to,
um, uh, as email this to John as, uh, or Jes, and Jesra because, uh, they may not be on the,
the may not know about this and this, uh, person might be waiting for some feedback.
Uh, yeah. That's what it looked like. What I'd like to do as well, Dave, uh, just, or Dave or
anybody is more to myself. Why am I giving myself more work? Is also when somebody posts,
when a comment has posted that their person who hosted the show would get an email about the comment,
do you think that would help? I think that would be good because, uh, otherwise you've got to monitor it,
which is a lot easier now with the, with the RSS feed, but you still need to be watching out for stuff.
Yeah, I think, uh, I think it's something that should be doable once I trigger it.
I'll have to think about it. Yeah, if you can do it, it would be awesome.
Okay, speaking of awesome shows, Poki says, awesome shows, and he's behind on his listing. He's
referring to, uh, HPR 1387, which was posted on the 2013 11 26 Christmas light synchronization.
And, uh, yes, it is, uh, it is indeed. He wants to do the HPR song or the free song. I don't
know if people remember this one, but he sets up our Arduino system for doing his lights, the,
the funky American traditional doing lights, which all the world, um, say out loud that they,
that they hate, but everybody secretly loves it. Uh, indeed. I remember this show very fondly. It
was, uh, it was a really good show. Poki again is loving us. What is he loving, Dave?
Looks like one of my shows on encryption. Oh, you just can't get enough, can you?
Well, he liked it. I can't get enough of that. But again, this is one that, uh,
aired back in November of last year. So Poki's obviously catching up and, and on a previous note
that we looked at, he says, I'm maybe kind of on my podcast listening.
And then we had a APCR asking about how to set something into the Crown Daily script. So I just,
in the next comment, give them some advice with that. And tattoo commenting on what has to be
Johann V's, the set of prime numbers is infinite. Yeah, love that show.
And you wasn't aware that the number of creation, any number of creation, the one was either a prime
or could be expressed as a product of prime. And yeah, that basically is part of the fundamental
stuff behind RSA encryption. Yeah, actually, I have a, uh, Ted's, what has turned into a kind
academy talk that I want to put into your privacy and things, feet, feet. I haven't done it
just, but there you go. And they explains all that. And I would, because when I set up that
security and privacy series, my idea all along was that various people could contribute to it.
And it sort of feels like I'm the only one posting in it right now, but I welcome anyone
jumping in. No, I put on the, as part of the tidying up with the series thing. Um, now when
the show is posted as part of the series, the synopsis of what the series is about,
how is also posted. And in there, it will begin with this is a clause series that
tattoo date about urban camping or this is an open series on whatever. And the open series then
means that you're anybody can submit shows to it. Great. And then we had lots of comments about
Dave Morris's podcasts I listened to. And my podcast player has filled up with some excellent,
excellent, excellent shows. Thank you very much, Dave, for that. That it was appreciated. I have
thought it would have quite the opposite effect, but there's like a shopping list. What am I doing?
No, I must say some of them I, I was all range of them. I completely, I listened to three shows
of, of them all. And then some of them I went and I'm not really into viral biology. So I was
getting up and that's scary nightmare, I suppose. I really like that science fiction book, a
episode thing. Yes, that's really cool. Yeah, I'm really, really good. I'm very good quality.
Yes, yes, yes, some real gems in there too. We should get lost in Bronx, perhaps to submit one
of his to that, because his, his books would definitely be of the color for, for that show.
Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. And then we have me waffling on about comments as I trigger comments to trigger
stuff. Yep, good thing. And I'm, you know, the problem with the spam has led me to cut off
comments on my, I've got several websites and I'm just getting rid of the ability to comment.
You know, if you're a human being, you can find my email easily enough, but just so damn much spam,
I can't, I don't have the time to keep up with that. Yeah, that's why we have, we have the
comment system does the automated check and then that's why everything is, everything is
vetted by me and some days, especially for some reason, this seems like they know I'm away,
you know, if I'm away or at the end of a slow connection, suddenly there be 400 spam messages
for Louis Vuitton or something. Yeah, but that's all part of the day. And I'd have thought
is character key IDs are not enough nowadays. And the two people who should be able to comment on
this as one has one was a hooker on GPG and email. And Dave has already also done a show on
OPGP. Indeed, you know, I think the thing might response to this would be the key is itself,
the identification. This is just a quick thumbnail that says, okay, if there's six, you know,
I've gone online and there's, I'm not the only Kevin O'Brien that shows up on the MIT key server.
So how do you get my, distinguish my key from someone else's? Well, you know, there's an 8 key
ID and I can very quickly say, yeah, my key is the one blah, blah, blah. And that's all, it's not
intended to be secure. Yeah, okay. I think that I got the impression, I've not really dug into this
in depth. But there might be cases where bits of software using the 8 character ID go to search
for a key because that's the way into two things. You can ask for a key to be pulled out of a key
server using that, can't you? I don't know. If they use that and there's a collision at the 8
character level that could be resolved by the 16 character one, I think that's what it's about.
But like I say, I'm not, I don't feel I'm an authority on this particularly.
Poki says, in relation to Windigo surviving a GPS trip and surprisingly,
surprising enough, he is big into GPS as well, having done several open street map shows.
And there was also a comment to that on Pyrocketog who gets comment of the month, I think.
This is unsurviving a road trip GPS. Was, are we there yet? And just on the comment reader,
should I, I think that posted that, blah, blah, blah, should be the first line as opposed to the
last line? What do you think? Yeah, I think that would be better, wouldn't it? Because it's,
you find you have to read them backwards otherwise, don't you? Yeah, but a lot of this you just,
we figure out as we go along. As you are becoming painfully aware of all the stuff you're doing for
archive.org Dave, Kevin and I go into a big rant about stuff and Kevin, you know, I'm not 100%
sure I'm in agreement about the Wind 32 issue, they just pull that. So yeah, yeah, I'm not there.
I'm not sure. There are certain parts of this issue that I retain a certain amount of reserve
about. I think I just, I, in general, I'm fairly conservative when it comes to security.
So, and that's, and to be honest, I completely have no issue with the majority of your show,
it's just that one section on the Libre SSL. I think it's a, my personal opinion is that I think
it's a good idea that more eyes are looking at it. And I think also I think it's a good idea that
two different projects are going to look at it because we saw that when internet explorer basically
took over the internet, then development stopped on board browsers for a long time until Firefox
respawned and then Google came along and Apple came, or not Apple because it was a KDE project,
WebM, or not WebM, KDE, HTML. And then we saw a lot of people going back and looking at Web
browsers and making them interesting. And I think we need the same thing for something as important
as SSL, different, different libraries. If, for no other reason, that technologies that are
require SSL libraries, that there will be two different interpretations so that if there's a
vulnerability in one, you can fail safe to the other one. But I think the one thing we can all
agree on is that the initiative by the Linux foundation to get a number of the major corporations
to contribute resources to work on these shared libraries of things is a good thing.
Now, there you go. I agree in principle, but I am also a little bit concerned of that amount of
corporate control and something as critical as those vulnerabilities are as that, whereas
that will, everybody involved in that seems to be from a corporate background. And that's not to
say that they don't hold true to their heart, that the developers and coders don't hold true to
their hearts, but I'm just worried that there might be the motivation. They open free software
motivation there, which is why I'm glad that there are other projects who are willing to do that.
Well, have you looked at who's writing the kernel these days?
Yes, I have. And they are individuals who are employed by businesses. But there are also
quite a lot of people who are free independent developers that are not paid by people who's copyright
or not come to companies. So yes, a nice balance is exactly what we want. Maybe we should do
sure on this. Maybe not. Anyway, can we carry on? Toaster. Yes. Toaster, we're spoken about that.
Good plan. We also spoke about that. Beginners, guys, to the night sky. In the notes, the list is
most used like first. Okay, that makes sense. And then there was discussion about the 130 and one
electronics kits, lots of links there in the show notes, some of which I put into the main feed
itself, and the that goes on. And Dave and Pokey also had some comments on
overhauling the school and music website. And Pokey had a comment on how I met coffee and discussing
about coffee basically. Cold brew coffee, that sounds strange to me, but there we go.
Yeah, I've heard people doing cold brew and it supposedly gets rid of a lot of the bitterness.
So how far back do we need to go for the news on the mailing list? Because we didn't cover it
last month. So back to me. I guess if you want to cover it. I'll quickly run through it. It
won't be that much. All of this links to all the show notes, all the discussions on the mailing
list just for everybody to know. Policies on HPR are discussed on the mailing list. And
that's pretty much if those consensus agree there, that's pretty much what we want to do. I
don't think at least or I hope at least that that is the case. I will ask you two guys if that
if you think that that is the case. No, that's my understanding. Okay, cool. So somewhat happy about
is Kenneth Franck's city. I was happy because he was invited as press to one of the conventions
up there in Sweden. And pretty much was talked about as he should be and was congratulated on the
website. Patrick Daly, I'm just going to skip over the ones about the audiobook club.
Because they do their coordination for the audiobook club on the website, on the mailing list.
Sorry, there was a discussion about the comments system not working, which we worked on. Then Mike
DuPont had a new crowd funder. Yep. Is it still running just one second? I heard you can.
And unfortunately, it's over. Good initiative though. Maybe he'll come back with another run at that.
More stuff on the audiobook club. We had a small discussion about we were short to shows at the
time. We had a small discussion about whether we should syndicate other shows. I've asked troops to
get back to me about you were suggesting that we put in syndicated shows. And I have the feeling
and we discussed this before that what comes on the contribute pages that we will continue to
promote new podcasts and not the creation of those material. But due to lack of free slots,
we will not release material to create exclusively for HBO. And while we're short of shows,
it's very tempting to put in syndicated content. But then I feel that that is takes away from the
from the founding principle of HBO that we will produce our own shows and put them out. And when
shows are finished and people have no interest in submitting shows that we terminate the project.
I guess that makes sense.
So at the time, I put out a request for people to send in shows because we were short of them.
And people responded, responded quite a lot actually. At one point, we had nearly 45 shows in the
queue. This has been the first summer on record that we have had shows that we have
run out of shows. But then again, we were going to run out of shows. So yeah, I'm glad people did
that. And remember that we always need shows. We consume 260 shows a year. So kind of send them in.
Indeed. Then sent out an email notification about host information that you can send in host
information to me. And I will update that on the website. As a special notice to people listening
to this show, I have been working on a upload page. And it's called request.php hacker.publicradio.org
forward slash request.php. It doesn't actually do anything now. But if you go there,
you can see what I have in mind for the requesting a show page that you fill out to your form.
You fill out your show and then you press send. An email link goes to your address that you sent
in. You click on that link. You go back to another page where you can fill in your own host
information. And then eventually you'll be able to upload a website. Suffice to say I'm being
smidgen paranoid about setting up on that. The form itself took me a few minutes, about 15 minutes
to do. But all the checks to make sure that people are not trying to get around the
that are not trying to get around all the things that we have in place are taking considerably
longer. And there was an announcement that there's a new United States dial-in number.
That's correct. Yes, and it is 470224257R 47022HCKR. Isn't that awesome?
Good work. And that's going to a Google voice number. So it's unlikely to be delicious even if
the underlying SIP-1 is so pretty cool. And then there was a piece of common spam that came in
that was very well written. It nearly got past my, this is spam filter, which is in my head.
And the reason I delete this is because it's anything related to Episode 23 gets probably
about 90 percent of the spam on the website. So anything coming in there is immediately spam
unless otherwise proven. Okay. Yeah, I see it with, I mentioned how I'm turning off comments on my
sites. And they're getting really good. You have to read it carefully to see what's going on.
So there's a few flags. One of them for me is it doesn't say anything specific about that
particular page. And the other one is it has a URL that it's referring to. And I see those two
things together. It's pretty much guaranteed to be spam. Absolutely. At least this guy usually
they give it away because it's, I really like your blog. And this blog really helped me out.
That's usually at least the guy who had the word podcast in there. So that was very cool.
Then we had generic episodes subjects. There were some Nigel sent in a comment about
other generic episodes like how I got into Linux and what's on my bag. And I like this idea because
that's really those, those two are two good introductory, the how I got into Linux. One was a
really good introductory, introductory episode. Why can't I say introductory for some reason?
Anyway, and everybody's interested in what's in people's bag. So that is, that's quite a good
one. In fact, he suggests a number of possible ones. And I think my response is,
why don't you record one and see if anyone picks up on it? All of these should actually be put
into the requested topics section as well, not to self-entrain. And when I say not to self-entrain,
everybody, I'm actually mean Dave, can you send me an email after the show, like you always do?
If you could see what I was doing just then can applying a pencil to a piece of paper,
no, it's a brilliant idea. I love that. That actually might in itself contribute a lot more
shows than we know. And with these sort of spontaneous series kinds of things, I actually started
one without intending to way back when Ken wanted backup shows that he could hang on to.
I thought, well, you know, what can I whip out that no one cares about and decided to just go
through all the stuff, all the stuff that's on my podcast player. And lo and behold, other people
picked up on it and said, well, hey, I want to share the podcasts I'm listening to and all of a
sudden we got a series. So you know, I think the best thing to do is you just, you record a show,
you put it out there and invite people to make their own contributions. And if there's a demand for
it, it'll take off. Yeah, any more than three shows and that's a series.
Anyway, the next one we had, should we publish the HPR download stats? And this is with all
apologies to cyclop. This is me being slightly schizophrenic here in that I have two hats. They
Ken, this is information that we have on the web server and we need the web, we need your feedback
on what we're supposed to do with it. And Ken, the podcaster who's got certain opinions on that
subject. So I do my best to keep them separate. But I don't think I did it very well. But the
basic point is we do have every month in log file is generated of the IP addresses of and they
shows that people download and stuff like that. We do use that at the back end to try and filter out
obvious attacks and stuff. So not recording that information would be a bit, it is useful
information from that point of view for regular operations and that sort of thing.
However, the download stats is something that people ask how many people listen to the show on
stuff. And we kind of have this information, but it varies pretty widely. And I have a thing
that goes through and anonymizes the number of hits, but counts the number of hits, downloads,
actual downloads that any IP address and any 24-hour period makes for any show that's an MP3
org or speaks show. And it tallies those up and it will, it's produced in a report and you can
get the latest one at any time forward slash report.bz2 and you can download that to your
hearts content and parses. To this day's only about I think 100 people, 100 different IP addresses
is ever bothered to download that. So you take the search engines out of that, I don't know if many
people have any interest in that at all. I produced it and put it out on several community
new shows about it. But after the discussion, the discussion, it's a bit of a problem issue because
I would like this information to be available. However, for some reason you might see a show get
10 times more downloads than the others. And usually when you trace back in Google why the show has
10,000 more downloads than anybody else, you'll find that it's because they've used the name
of a popular song at the moment or they've used for some reason I've got onto an MP3 website
that indexes MP3 files around the net and you're going to get lots and lots of hits.
But by and large with podcasts, I think there is a number of people who listen to podcasts
that of those number a certain percentage will listen to HPR and that's pretty much it.
So that's why Dave suggested that perhaps we put in the number of subscribers that we get as a
better indication and I think that would be true. Does anyone else have anything to say about
this discussion because it got pretty heated or at least I got pretty heated during it?
My feeling looking at the overall discussion is that most people seem to think that the
information's there why hide it. And the reason yeah and the reason I say I hide it is because it's
not accurate information. It's for a start, it doesn't show the number of downloads
particularly accurately because if you're behind in a proxy IP address then 20 people might
download it. It doesn't include all the people who listen to the show on other means where it's
retransmitter or whatever. There's no guarantee anyone actually listens to that number of shows.
If it gets for any reason involved in some sort of spam thing, there is no way of knowing
if that's the case or not. So you're constantly I think to me it opens to kind of worms. Why did
Dave shows get more hits than my shows? Does that mean that Dave shows a better show than mine? I
would have the point of view that if a show, if everybody except one person deletes it and that
one person was able to benefit, change their life significantly or change the course of direction
of their life, then the quality of that show is as good if not better than any other shows that
have been out there. That's just how I feel about it. I don't think how good or bad your show is
is going to be indicated by the download stats. There's a new factor that's come into the
equation low-can. Since we're putting shows up on archive.org, they certainly do indicate
download can't per show. And that's fair enough, I suppose. So this is something people
on the people listening to this chime in. I'm rigidly opposed to as a HPR listener,
but I am not opposed to obviously doing whatever it is that people want us to do.
But in that vein, as I was looking around the interweb for articles related to news articles
related to HPR, I came across the G-Potter subscriber list, which I think was a, they had one page,
just give me one second while I find it. I'll try and put a link in the show notes as Dave writes
on this pencil. They have a nice list of the tech podcasts that people subscribe to. And in there,
we were probably about three quarters of the way down on the list, but still respectable numbers
seemed to match what I think has gone on. No such thing as bad publicity. Yeah, but what there
is such a thing as is me getting an email from some angry host who is cheesed off because somebody
else is getting more hits than they have. And wants to know why I why their show is not getting
as many hits because it was posted on or whenever. And I do not want to be spending my life gone
through Apache logs figuring out what's going on. Because to me, it's irrelevant. The number of
people who listen to the shows are the number of people who listen to the shows. You can spread
the word about HPR and then more people will listen to HPR. Great boss. I've never actually looked at
any of my download statistics. I know from the people I talk to that someone out there is listening
to my shows. Yeah, there you go. But anyway, again, I have strong feelings on this. So I would like
very much to be able to separate this if the feeling of the community is that we we should put
downloads there that we should have them available. Then feel free to do so. And I know from
listening to legal report that they have the same issue that they only give the number of actual
downloads in the 24 hour period from any particular IP address, whereas other podcasters who other
other enterprises who are into podcasting will give the number of hits. And if I look at the number
of hits that we get for an episode, you're going to get thousands more because every show every
pod catcher will make so many requests. Give me the first 100 bytes. Okay, give me the next 100 bytes,
give me the next ones. And for any particular episode from particular IP address, you get thousands.
And even some cases I have I see the same IP address downloading over and over and over again,
the same shows over and over and over again. Why? Maybe there's a reason for that. I don't know.
Well, bear in mind that Leo Laporte has an issue that you don't have and that's that he is selling
advertising. So the numbers that he reports on downloads justify the bills that he sends.
Yeah, exactly. And fair, fair effects to him that he does it that way and makes it, you know,
he turns out a lot of revenue as a result of that. So yeah, more powder to him for doing that. But
again, this is information that is not my information. It is the information that belongs to
their community as a whole. So the community as a whole should decide what to do.
Well, as I my reading of all of the comments on the mailing list was that it looked to me like most
people were saying just leave the data there. You know, it's on the website. Leave it.
So this is the just one of the reports that I have from May 2014, which is what I did.
The average RSS subscriber checking is about is 2500 and 62, which I think is about right and
this seems to match up what it's a little bit more than what the g-patter number is showing,
but then g-patter is only a portion of what we download. So that sounds about right.
The average episode download is 1,420, which I think is a bit low. The average daily download for
all shows about 2,410, which doesn't seem to match the 2,562 RSS subscribers because you'd
imagine if an RSS feed checks in that it would download the show, perhaps, perhaps not.
Depends on the RSS reader, I guess, some people just read it in a blog client and then click on the
episode. So the May downloads was 74,778 and the average downloads, why is there an
ostrich next to that? The average download since episode 1519 was 3,600, sorry, 3,664,122.
Actual downloads since 2010, 2009, 25 was 3,000,000, 3.5 million, as I can estimate.
And if I extrapolate that up to before we had log files, that's about 6.1 million downloads in total.
And that extrapolates to about 4,000 downloads per day. So that extrapolates to about 4,000 people
listening to any given show and any given day. Which is about 1 and a half thousand more people
and check the RSS feed, but that seems about right to me, I don't know. And then my point is,
depending on your point of view, you could go, oh my god, shows are being downloaded over 6 million
times, or you could say we get 75,000 downloads a month, which is, you know, pretty good by any
estimation. And you could say most of our shows get downloaded about 4,000 times, or you could say
that our show gets downloaded 1,400 times, but there's no guarantee that anyone's listening to it.
So my fear is that, you know, somebody would look at a particular download number and then decide
not to subscribe to HPR or not to contribute to HPR when in actual fact the one thing that they
have that to contribute to HPR might be one thing that could, you know, change the course of somebody's
life. Have I gone on too much? I think we probably beat this horse to death.
Oh, okay then, emergency queue. The emergency queue is something that I don't agree with either,
but it's running low on shows and we have agreed as a community that there should be about
10 shows in there. So the people who agree with the emergency show queue should get their act
together and send in some shows, please. Thank you. Lots of stuff about the comment feed.
Is there anything in there that is of importance? No, I think it's just technical stuff.
I don't think so. I think comment feed sorted pretty much, isn't it? Certainly is in my mind.
Okay, if anyone's having any problems with the comment feed, send that in please.
51.50. Send, in a link with the dimension airxxxxxx, recordings from archive.org, which I
have been enjoying... I thought I was going to enjoy it in my basement, but they're too scary,
so I enjoyed them as I go on on the train and to work. Yep. Then Mr. Morris, who is doing all
some work on archive.org! Just for everybody's information, Dave please tell us what you're doing.
Well I'm taking the shows, working backwards from the current one and forwards as they go forward
one per day, and putting them up onto archive.org as individual shows,
emphasizing that because a whole lot were put up back in time several years ago
they were done in batches of tin. And that was on my request to a cold cruncher who was doing
them manually at the time, Alc, and like to thank again cold cruncher for her fantastic work.
And that's because as Dave knows the whole archive.org thing really pulled my hair out, I just
cannot get a handle on that, it's something, but since then they've done some work on it.
They do seem to be improving their interface. The documentation is pretty grim,
but the interface I think is coming along quite nicely. Anyway they're going up, we're back to
show 1400 so far, so just keep choking away putting them up as their time allows and the
movement of these files around happens and so on. And these are the web files and a lot of
the and the flag files, but obviously we don't have all the shows in that format, so eventually we're
going to have to put them back to put up the original MP3 files from the original shows.
And we also were, so this is the whole period when we started, when I started doing that when
put in the script that we knew intentionally that we were going to be putting shows up to archive.org,
so I have been keeping a backup of the good quality, the highest quality one that was sent in.
And prior to that, I have the original files as part of the generic backup, but I would
need to re-edit them to add the intro and outro and add the, you know, fix any of the details
in the title and the show notes and change the artist's name and the HPR and the comments and
all that stuff, so it will be slow going. It's a fair bit of work. Part of the process that I've
been doing barely lengthy because getting the show notes into a state that archive.org will accept them,
proved to be more difficult than you would have thought. So I've written a tool to help me
clean things up on the way. I've corrected a few spelling mistakes and that type of thing, so
just sorted out some of the HTML oddities, some of which I've managed to produce I was
delighted to find. That's to write some really bad HTML at one point.
Yeah, and there's a, I've managed to produce quite a bit of that as well myself.
But again, I'd like to stress to people the importance of having
show notes and I'm not just talking about the show summary. I'm talking about actual show notes,
about what your show is about because to this point only the NSA probably have tools that are
able to index audio files. So the only way search engines and by search engines we mean other people
are going to be able to find the stuff is if you give a short detailed paragraph on what your show is
about. If you've got a full complete where you're reading your show off a script like I sometimes do
and a hooker does, then also include that because that will get sent what you show. It'll get indexed
and people will know to come and get the information and for deaf people who can't listen to the
show, so they will be able to gather that information and use it. So I can't begin to express
how useful the show notes are in this whole thing. And I need people, we need people to go back and
listen to all the original episodes to see if they're still of use and the ones that I've listened
to so far have been. If we can have everybody listening to this take 10 episodes and just listen to
them and then just send in the show notes, check that the links are working, check for name changes
in projects or whatever or where the projects have evolved to that sort of thing that really helps
as well. And it also gives some love to the old episodes and believe me if you haven't come back and
listen to the old episodes, up until now 99% of the episodes that I've listened to the old ones
are still as valid today as they were back then. Then we had HP or Wishlist topic from Deep Geek who
wanted to have a request to Tomic alternative usage for Byzantine email classifiers. It's
Bayesian. Bayesian fine. What's Bayesantine then? Any, doesn't matter. Well, Byzantine would be a
reference to the successor to the Roman Empire in the East. And that's not what he's talking about.
Bayes is the person who created a very famous theorem in statistics that is used for analyzing
data. So Bayesian means it uses Bayes theorem and those kinds of mathematics. Excellent. Two things
that comes out of that conversation. One is you need to do a show on that. And the other is
that I'm dyslexic. So all this stuff comes out, especially when I'm more tired.
Shows in Arkham.org. Anything you want to say about that, David? No. I think we've probably
not a huge lot to say. I just put out a request asking people to go and have a look at their own
shows on Arkham.org. Just to check that the way I was putting them together, we met their
needs and mangled them. I don't think I've mangled any. I've looked quite carefully, but
won't be giving that prizes for spotting errors, but so make me look a full.
Do you have, I was just thinking, do you, you have a table about the ones that you sent up,
then maybe I can use that to put in a link also available on Arkham.org? What are you reckon?
I have, I have a, yep, yep. Do you have a very thing? I'm a pencil, pen and pencil, Dave.
Arsenal of Interest, Kevin O'Brien, our man of the moment openshorses.com,
like congratulations, Kevin, well done. Well, thank you very much, but really that was semiotic
robotic who approached me and said, hey, you know, I'd like to do an interview with you for
OpenSource.com and sent me some questions and I answered them. So that I wanted to bring it to
the people's attention because it was about really HPR. He had heard some of my shows on HPR
and wanted to know a little bit about, you know, how did you get into doing this and why are you on
HPR and things like that? I was a really enjoyable interview, I must say, very well done to both of you.
Just in today was Arkham 14, a request if anybody is going and unfortunately I will not be able to
make it due to financial issues on this side, but last year in my bill through Dave Morris,
Timothy, were at the HPR table and Benny is asking if anyone else is going.
Dave Lee has replied saying, yes, he's gone with the family, but he won't be able to host with
the table. So if anyone is going to HPR, the kit's boot kit is already over there. So,
sorry, Arkham, anyone going to Arkham willing to do the HPR table, then I need to obviously,
I also need to get in touch with the people as Arkham to make sure that we get a table.
And then the community news, for some reason, the Mumble server we normally use is down,
so we're using one at roseindal.net for this. And you will be thrilled to know folks listening
to this. Well done, that the last one is an email that I got from Montana, ethical hackers,
who's got a four-year-old hackerspace in Helen MT. They're setting up a radio station, a natural FM
radio station 107.9 FM hacker radio. And apparently it's a very conservative political town, so
they're looking for content. They wish to use our shows, which I replied, of course, that's
under Creative Commons license, and that the RSS feed will give them advice on what the specific
terms of the licenses are. And they're also looking for, they also need to transmit her and then
EAS, whatever that is. We are there on a budget of $0, but have a radio tower, a radio room,
and computers, and an ideal plot of land. If there's anyone who could give them a hand,
this is something that I think would be awesome to have here, actually, on a radio station.
Indeed, I note that you also were very careful to mention that we tag our shows as to whether
they are explicit or not, since some of them could be, and that might be something they'd want to
know before they put it out on the radio. Yep, and even that explicit tag is down to the particular
host. Sorry, the clean tag, it will, by default, get explicit. If the clean tag is on there,
then the host is saying that it's clean. So bearing in mind that if this project goes ahead,
or others like it, that are broadcasting, you, the host, are taking responsibility for giving
guidance, but always, always, if you re-roll cast in HBR content, in an area, you take the
responsibility of making sure that it is suitable for your environment, whatever that environment
be. The nation's state or region that you may be in may not like coffee and may have banned it
as a foreign substance, so you need to make sure that even though the coffee episodes are marked
as clean on HBR, that they are appropriate for your audience on your headbeats. Is it on your headbeats?
Yeah, a couple of weeks ago, I recorded a bunch of shows, and in one of them, I realized,
oh, I just said something that does not normally go on a clean. So I stopped audacity and went back
and re-recorded to get rid of the four-letter word that had somehow crept in. Okay, fair enough.
I, of course, mark all my explicit as, I can't trust myself not to be here.
Well, generally, for things like Libra Office, I want those to be something that everyone is
going to listen to, because I've had people say, hey, I'm giving these shows to my friends and
things like that, so I don't want any issues. No, you're dead, right? And for some of the shows
that I do, I will try and avoid it, but I can't guarantee it. So it's just easier for me not to
do that. Some other stuff that came to me, in general, was a deep geek sent in a email about
our A record request for server.hackupoperated.org is not filtered correctly. I forwarded on to
Josh, who is the administrator, the actual administrator, who does the actual admin work,
and let's see if we can get that sorted. I got a nice email from Mike Ray about many,
too many relationships in the database, and Mike, I would, as well as appreciating your
choice of music, because the reference he gave was a database with bands in it.
I would suggest you send an initial on the topic. I have had discussions with Dave Morris here
on this. Actually, if Mike Ray and Dave Morris and myself want to get together to prove how Dave
Morris is wrong about many relationships, and that he should accept my hack of just having
come a separated list in one field, then that would be a good episode, I think.
And I have another email from Mike Ray, as well, about putting the duration,
podcast duration into the show notes, or into the shows, and they're also in the OHS
feed now, and they're in the show notes. So it actually adds a little bit to their whole experience.
And with that, I have run out of stuff to say.
And a good thing, too. It's almost two hours.
Yeah, we're running into the links link text show, or a kernel panic outcast,
territory. Yeah, I think we've done it for another month. So probably a good time to wrap things
up. Yes, indeed. And again, if anybody has any comments on this stuff, send it into the mail
list, send it to adminatech.com, we still need shows, we're two free slots for the next month,
but then it's looking pretty spotty after that. So make it happen, you owe me a show.
You know, if you listen to HBO, you owe us a show.
What the man said. Anything else, Dave? Nothing for me, no.
I've cheesed you off there about the Dave and I have had many discussions lately about
different approaches to databases and stuff.
No, you haven't cheesed me off at all. It's an amazing bit of jousting.
I'll win in the end, you know, I will, I will win.
Every so often, I do fire off a mail going, yeah, you know, I've been thinking about that
in your right. We should do it. So if you just wait long enough, I'll come around to your
way of thinking. I can wait. Okay, with us, folks. Tune in tomorrow for another
exaging episode of Hacker Public Radio. Hacker Public Radio.
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