Episode: 1139 Title: HPR1139: The missing episode Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1139/hpr1139.mp3 Transcribed: 2025-10-17 19:42:03 --- Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening. This is Mr. Gates. It's once again, and I had something that occurred to me. I got actually several different ideas for some projects coming along, I had a specific idea that came to me this weekend when I was doing some cleanup of things around the house. We've got some things going on where we're going to get some new flooring, and actually we've already bought the flooring and it's sitting in the basement of the house, and it's going to go in the second floor of the house. I need to clear out that safe so the carpet can be pulled up and the hardwood floors can be put down. This involves clearing out adventurous stuff in my man cave, my handshack, my evil scientist lab. I call it the pseudo studios, SUDO studios, pseudo studios. Anyway, even though that's not where I actually think of some, I think of a chef in a Honda, and so if I'm a big names in a Honda suite, well I'm in a Honda suite. I used to have a few broadcasts that I put out there, not just anything serious, but any kind of serious hosting that Mr. Gadget's technological Odyssey was one theoretical contest that I kind of did a few episodes around in various spots, most of which probably are out of this. I can't get to that audio anymore. Not that it was anything really great. Anyway, so I had this idea that I needed to, well I have this idea. I knew that I needed to actually get that area cleared out. Now, amongst these various subsidiary kinds of projects, which my wife is semi-retired and has time and up between doing a consulting job that she has. She still has some time to do these big projects, and then I am caught in the waste of the project, right, and well of the current associated here as to where the priorities lie sometimes. Well, we also had some needs for some storage kinds of issues that were happening in our garage because I haven't been able to park my car in garage for a couple of years now, and so I had some stuff out there that I needed to go through, and then in order to clear out my mancage, my mancage is on the second floor of the house. So theoretically, it's not really a cave because it's more like my wizard's tower. If I'm a techno wizard, which is one of the favorite characters, I think, of mysterious kinds of characters from Babylon 5, one of my favorite television shows of that very target rich high-five television show environment that existed back in the 90s, and 85, that was one of my favorites. In fact, I posted some stuff on Google Plus about some rotations from Babylon 5, and it really reminded me of how much I really like that show. And one of the mysterious kinds of characters that wandered through the Babylon 5 space station was the Texo mages, and they could do amazing kinds of things. They were kind of safely, almost, how to say this. They were kind of safely steamed on only not steamed on, you know, but they had, like, staff that would be a little sick of flattery type of things, but they didn't dress very steamed on me. They mostly dressed like, you know, they just, you know, they had roasts and stuff. Anyway, you'd get to see them very much, so they were a big mystery, that they could do some pretty, you know, amazing things that ostensibly just might maybe go under whatever, but there is technology involved, right? So, I have my wizard's tower up here, and along the wizard's tower, along with an empty room from the main room, that is a tower that leads up above the garage to a big storage area. It's not finished or anything, but it's not flooring. And so I have, between the actual room itself and the storage area out beyond, I have massive, massive piles of carp. It's an anagram. And I need to go through all this stuff, at least the stuff that's in the carpeted area, right? Because I need to move it all out of there, so the carpet can be pulled up from the wood flooring can be put down. If not, that wasn't up there. It's still a condition, but it gets a bit hot on the second floor of the house there, because it's all open. It's like a great room, and so this is kind of just off of a kind of balcony that looks over the living room space. And so all that air just rises up, it's hotter air, and so it gets a bit uncomfortable there, especially in the garage area, so I really can't do any serious work there. But it's a bit on temperatures in the Fahrenheit, the above 100, I can forget exactly what that is in your Celsius, but it's the high number. And not very pleasant, you know, we're talking about temperatures on the regular basis that are above your body temperature, and it's not the most pleasant thing to do. So like a giant sliding puzzle, only in 3D, you know, the slider puzzles you worked on when you were a kid, where there was, it was a grid of nine pieces, usually, although I suppose you could do this with a 16 piece or by four. But I remember the nine pieces was very vividly, maybe they were four before once, also, but there's one piece that isn't there, and that allows you to slide the little squares around. And if it ran a pattern, of course, you slide the squares around, until you arrange whatever the picture's supposed to look like, right? That's how you solve the puzzle. But instead of like pretty good together, like a tensile puzzle, you only have one move that you can make, well, two at any given time, right? Maybe three, depending on where the hole is and what you can slide into that hole. And you've always got to rearranging things, and then that changes the relationships, and eventually if you get that as you can make it into the picture. Well, this is kind of like a sliding puzzle, because there are things that are upstairs in the wizard's tower. There are also some older boxes of stuff that are downstairs in the basement area, and I need that floor space in order to move the stuff that I'm keeping out of the wizard's tower to move it down to the basement, right? So there's a hole that I need to create in the basement. So move the stuff out of the upstairs, but I'm not going to move everything out of the upstairs, because I am going to actually call through this, and very, very strictly barks the stuff. So I'm going to be very, very ruthless at my barding. Barding is a term that has come into youth amongst a certain number of my other piecaps in family. I do a lot of listening to a lot of different piecaps, and there's a kind of group of people that I listen to, and I don't want to say to anybody, but you know, I have a slider, and I use iOS devices and things like that as well as Android and Linux and all these kinds of things, and so there is a mostly Macintosh, in fact, her little catch line for the show is that it's got an ever-so-slite Macintosh bias, Allison Sheridan and the Mozilla cast by cast. It's more than flight, but it's kind of a joke, right, because she has a pair of herself-slite Macintosh bias. Well, she has a pretty, pretty strong Macintosh bias, and one of the people who continue to the show, and it's pretty hot to even the Macintosh industry, especially the international Macintosh piecaps in community, is Bart Bouchot, who is a Belgian, who happens to be living right now in Ireland. And it's a country to plug the internet, because you can have regular kind of communication with some of these people all over the world, and you know, when your piecaps listen, you know, lots about them, because it comes out there in the piecaps, and so you feel like, you know, they're kind of maybe not a friend, but they're at least a acquaintance, right? And Bart refers to, he has been a bit of a turn himself when he's a half-digital photographer. Very interesting digital photography. I would, you should actually try looking at some of those things that he has, because his photography is really quite beautiful. But, you know, when you're a digital photographer, unlike the film days of photography, and I may talk about my film photography past sometime on the project, or on the piecaps here, but the fact that it was still used to really freight everything, because you only have 36 pictures on the standard role of 35 on your film, right? And you can, because you might need to get to, you know, develop. And so, yeah, it was really important, you might bracket that and take, you know, two or three shots, look slightly different exposures to make sure you've got it, because you only have that one chance, right? And you could just take it to brilliant pictures. And now, especially with a large capacity that we have on the memory cards and things like that, you tend to just take the brilliant pictures. And then, what do you do with all those? Well, March 7, and like, thank you for right, I don't do this now, mind you, but I agree with you. If you're in summer here, that you should really, really be very, very critical of those pictures when you're doing that first task on it. And you should throw away all the drops and only keep a tiny percentage of those pictures that are going to be worth any further effort. And then you use whatever best quality you're having. And I'm going to try to teach myself some gem along the way. And other kinds of open source tools. I don't really know Photoshop, so I don't have that disadvantage of having to resort to everything. And so I'm pursuing that from a photographer's perspective. I am not a visual artist, give you any way shape or form, but I can take a half-way view of photographs. Maybe even a pretty good photograph is on my game. And maybe even something that might be artistic in some way, but that's for a vererity. But I can at least participate in the visual arts through photography. So I'm not going to use the gem for actually drawing the any credit images. Even with a image manipulation program, I just, it's not my artistic talent, right? So, anyway, so before you ever do any processing further, you should really look at those hard and throw out a bunch of them. And only 20% of the further effort didn't do things that were really worth being effort. Well, I'm climbing on guarding my personal possessions here. And they mentioned previously on the podcast, but I'm attempting to get rid of a lot of the atoms that are in my life and keep the electrons. So anything that I have as a book, I'm really trying to get electronic copies of the book and magazines. I'm trying to get all electronic versions of the magazines and things like that. And so a lot of the things that are in the piles of cars, which is the panogram, the stairs in the basement area that I try to clear out are older magazines, some older books also. And so I found myself this weekend. Okay, we're coming around right to start a story. I found myself working the first, you know, booth on the slider puzzle to get everything out of my wizard's tower area. And some of that's going to involve guarding some of these things. I've got some projects up there, but I just know I'm never going to complete, you know? And some of them aren't even worth completing anymore. The technology is so old. And it's a funny thing. It's not old enough to really be cool and useful. The thing I love about radios, you probably already heard the amateur radio show. I mean, that got into the queue with all that kind of stuff, it was legible. And I am into the amateur radio and getting radio active again. And that's cool thing. Some of the old equipment in amateur radio is just as functional today as it ever was. And it's still useful, but keep getting equipment not so much, right? So a lot of these things are technological things from years ago that are just set up there in the piles of cars and need to be tossed, right? So I'm going to be throwing away a lot of that stuff. I actually went to a miniature version of this one. I did a move in my workplace to a new cubicle. And I made a conscious decision. I'm not just going to drag all this stuff that I've been carrying around since last millennium and haven't touched since last millennium. I'm actually going to throw this stuff away, or at least a major portion of it. And I did that in the process. We have some new people that are joining our group from another portion of the company where we decided to shut down that software development project. We were going to get into insurance kinds of things. And the decision was made that that didn't make sense from a business aspect to get into the more direct software within insurance business. The company I work for does a lot of work with insurance companies, but that's through a partner. So we'll continue to do that kind of business. But we're going to get much more active into the managing of accounts for insurance companies. And they made some adjustments to the business plans. I decided that that really didn't make sense. So those people then are looking for jobs within the company. Quite a few of them have come into our group because we have quite frankly have open reps and haven't really been able to find people who could fill those reps. If you're going to job a programmer and are in need of the job and want to meet the chance in the area or live with them, you know, job gets the chance of city, you still all have some of the corrects that are going to be coming up here. So one of these guys that's moved here and he's been on my 20 years around the company. I've seen him here and there he's all around the way. Don't really know him or anything. He's got like 15 or 20 boxes that got boxed up in his last place. And I'm thinking really, I mean, this stuff is stuff you've been dragging with you for years. You just need to let it go. You go. And that's kind of the idea here. Just let it go. So I'm going to bark some of that stuff up there, throw that away, combine things into boxes and things like this. So I've actually got three different areas that I've worked on here. I've got this basement area and I've got stuff out in the garage that I'm trying to, you know, get out of there and I've got the second story area. So to start making the hole essentially, I started out with that area down in the basement. And of course, I did this in the stupidest way possible. I didn't stay down in the basement in the night where it was nice and cool. No, I took that stuff out to the garage where it was still very hot. You lifted being 105 degrees outside the garage. It was still pretty dang hot in that garage and I did my sorting in there. Don't ask it. There's literally so little movement area down in that basement area that I'm working in that I literally could even get a trash roll and trash stand in there to throw this stuff away. So it's easier to carry those boxes up and get them there and they'll be more convenient for trash day, etc. etc. I was stupid, okay? Anyway, so here I am and I am going through these magazines and it just so happened that a bunch of these magazines and several of the books were from anywhere from, well, some of the books were definitely from my very early night trash day. So they would have been from back in the 90s. And a lot of the magazines were also from the 90s and in fact, I thought it was kind of funny because most of the magazines that I made no doubt and I was actually looking to see if there's anything worthwhile to try to look at that article or anything in here that was good and you were keeping the magazine because there was something useful for it within it. And most of them were from almost exactly 15 years ago because they were from 97, 98 right in that time frame. So we're talking about just about getting where they're from maybe 14 to 16 years ago. Now, when you think about the dog years that exist for technology, that was that's a huge amount of time. Possibly, you know, a lot of these things, there's just nothing in there that is we're traveling more to justify keeping it around. And so huge amounts of them went straight into the bit of the trash can. And so I'm debating now, I think probably that trash can since it's nothing with paper, I'm actually going to haul it over and stuff all that into the recycle. There's a recycle available here at my city and it'll take a while to get all those things, you know, into the bin. But I think that's probably what I'd have to do with all that to be a little bit more responsible for all this paper going into the system. So some of that were some old books and, you know, quite frankly, I've got a couple of books that I claim were on the bubble, but I know I'm going to eventually just throw them away and they mostly have some dental value that has some significance. You know anything about the history of some of these technologies, but not to be worth a few nutty or something, it's just a notable kind of thing. Early on, there was a particular Macintosh book that was really pivotal at the early days of Macintosh, and I have my copy of that. I'm going to throw it away eventually. You know how you get about these things, and you can't, you know, if there's a stuff like, you gotta let it go. How much technology do you have in your life like this? You just gotta let it go. My friend, Nightwise, is very good about this. Once I have technologies that can be effectively being used in this life, he finds somebody to buy it from him and uses that money to buy the next season technology. He's much better than I am in this regard. So here I am, and I'm looking through these magazines, see if there's anything worth as well. And a few of the magazines that are particularly of note, I was struck by the kind of articles that were in these magazines. Now, some of the magazines I had were nuts and bolts, which is still a magazine that exists, and it's pretty much through the years changed around to being a all about microcontrollers kind of magazine. It's very much into the building your own robots and microcontrollers and those kinds of things. And there were some proto-robotics kind of articles here, you know, the 15 years ago or so. But the other things I thought were of interest that were still in that some holds back then was there was a regular robots kind of oriented column, but you know, the controllers for that weren't as developed as they are now. And it was really in the kind of proto stage of getting into controllers and things like that. And then there was also a regular column about laser experimentation. So you could buy the laser, these would be tube lasers, not semiconductor lasers. And there are guys that were doing experiments with lasers enough about hobbyist kind of level that there was a column on it. There were columns on, there was column on amateur radio kinds of topics and things like that. I noticed that one of the guys that I talked about before, Don Lancaster, who was a major kind of person who was involved in early computers, very, very early computers, he wrote a column called resource bin for nuts and bolts back to it. And Don said interesting character. He was talking about what was his choice of computers at the time and his secondary computer because he had a pretty advanced published on demand kind of thing of his books that he had published in the years. And there's still enough interest in the books that he could still make money to even publish on demand. And he had a Macintosh, some current Macintosh at the time, or maybe not even a absolutely biggest invest, but a Macintosh that he used to or that. But his primary of the computers, the computer that he really loved, was he always had post-cripts. He started attacking post-cript way early. And this is not just music post-cript as a way to produce documents on a laser printer. This is using post-cript the computer language to actually do computation. He would see things into the post-cript because it was the equivalent of in today's world you've got this really cool graphics processor that's capable of all this number crunching. And so now we have programs that take advantage of the number crunching that's available through the graphics processor that is actually related to display graphics on the screen. Right, the holding at home and the study at home projects mostly use your graphics processor capabilities, right? Well, this would be the equivalent of that in the time frame. The graphics boards were not really there with the heavy capabilities of the number crunching, but your post-cript engine could do that in your laser printer. And he would actually do amazing things with post-cripts. I mean, he would end right post-cript stuff. You know, something else that Mark Bouchard always gets mad about is, you know, almost every week in the show, at least every week in the song, they have a security discussion about what's the latest security issues and things like that. And so, of course, since another week or maybe a fortnight has gone by, of course, there are new vulnerabilities that have been discovered in PDF, and Adobe has sent out a new PDF, you know, patch. So that's the vulnerability. And he just gets mad. He keeps on saying, and this is, it's like, it's a document format. Why does it have an aspect of being able to run a string of code like it's a programming language? Well, now, I swear I'm right on this. I haven't looked it up on Google, but I was there, and you know, I'm in an alternate reality or, you know, somebody correct me, but I swear that it's not always stand for portable document format. Initially, it's good for post script document format. It is a way to have a finalized version of a post script generated piece of code to generate your document, but it was a document format where it was all contained within the document format, and interpreting though that document had to include interpreting of the post script code that might be part of the document. Justly, you have a document format that involves, you know, an ability to interpret some code. Now, somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but I remember that it was originally post script document format, and they rebranded it as portable document format so that people understood that it could be used not just on a post script printer, and for whatever reasons. They renamed it. They rebranded it, kind of like notice notes, which is in its fourth or fifth iteration of what it's to be used for. And I've lived through all these different, you know, oh, you use it for this, you use it for that. IBM is a brilliant, that rebranding the letters notes for whatever is the latest thing that they used to be. And so it was like that with the PDF format, the post script document format. So, you know, Lancaster was still writing a thing in there about sourcing parts, and a lot of its resource been in that era. So, you know, looking through the table of content to be kind of reminiscent here, right? And a lot of his things were about where do you get parts, where do you get data sheets, and how do you find out how to use this, that, the other kind of, you know, piece of equipment, or, you know, integrated circuits. Popular electronics and radio electronics, most still existed, okay? And, you know, there aren't any electronics magazines anymore that are independent kind of magazines, those are all gone by the wayside. But popular electronics and radio electronics both existed, admittedly radio electronics you would expect this, but both of them at the time had amateur radio kinds of issues in several of the columns that were involved, as well as various types of electronics. There was actually, it was either in popular or radio, I can't remember which, there was an article I noticed that was, you know, you may not need to use the TTL IC or, you know, any of the popular IC kinds of things you could use transistor logic to do certain types of things. So, there was argue about going back to the RIFOA of actually building transistor IC logic rather than using an IC for things. And there was still a lot of building. There was a lot of projects of, you could get these parts and put them together and get them in useful things. Now, and a lot of it revolved around, you know, some of the higher tech kinds of aspects of, you know, you're geeking this on, which included, you know, the whole aspect of the amateur radio kinds of communications and things like that. Now, turn the, you know, way back machine dial back forward again. And there was kind of an interim time there when that was really kind of the starting point of surface knot kind of things. In fact, I could remember just towards the end of the electronics magazine, there was a little bit of surface knot and they had tried to be some projects. But you know, that's just not as easy for at least normal human beings to get into, you know, it's not as easy to do the surface knot stuff as it is the other types of components. And it got to be a world of electronics that were more and more complex and capable of doing much more miraculous things. So get me wrong, right? To be a technical age, we actually have to have some pretty cool electronics to accomplish, you know, all these magic spells. And you can't just use transistors logic to do this anymore, right? It would be the size of your truck of your car or the boot of your car or whatever is your, you know, term for that thing that you can put, you know, luggage in, usually the back of the car, right? So all of these types of things were acquiring smaller and smaller and more and more miniaturized and we got away from the things that we could bake with our hands. And then about eight years ago or so, right? So we're talking 14, 13 years ago, we started less and less to have any kind of thing that we could bake with our own hands. A few guys got heavily into putting together parts to build their own computers, right? Some still to this day, right? Put together those parts for computers, but that's really a board that has all of that kind of stuff and you're just basically plugging in modules, right? To give it all work, right? Yeah, you're gluing down the cooler on the CPU and something like that, but it's not the same thing as really building it, you know, getting together with the parts and slaughtering and everything and all that kind of stuff. And I think people found that there was a sense of missing something there and mostly when I rarely came out with make magazine and the microcontroller started getting to be more and more capable that movement, I think comes out of that wanting to create something that I built this myself, right? Kind of aspect, that kind of joy that you get when you turn it on and you don't get the smoke, right? Because you can't let the magic smoke out of the other time. Sorry, the magic goes away. And that particular device does whatever it is that it's supposed to do. And gives you a feeling of accomplishment and gives you a rush and that was gone and I think that's what the maker kind of thing has brought back. And I encourage you to find something that you're interested in that allows you to have that kind of hands on with your electronics. There are a lot of the amateur radio guys talk about how it's too much of an appliance driven black box kind of thing and the newer radios are all just no one. I mean if you're lucky you might have a high level understanding of how the block diagram makes it be a functional radio. But you could no more get in there and repair it if anything went wrong because it's all a little tiny, you know, surface mountain kinds of electronics and things like that. And so that's why they like building these small radios that are maybe transmitters or even transmitters and receivers that they understand it and they can take it apart and put it back together and they can modify it and things like that. And but there's that, there's the micro-censualers that you can use for robotics or other kinds of things. The whole maker movement is rampant with all kinds of interesting ideas. There's some dyes here in town that are doing that will have this one really kind of crazy maker idea. I meant to talk about it from the maker fair. I met them when I was working at the maker fair here in Kansas City that we had and I'll send them so we can include them to show you how it's this. They're called the Kansas City air pirates. I think Casey air pirates is what they call their group and you know these quadcopters, okay? These little drone kinds of cocktails that had the four propellers. Well they were going to take AR as a company that commercially makes those, although at least a couple of the guys in the local NKC group make their own quadcopters, right? But the AR is a quadcopter that's commercially available and I have one myself that I buy a little bit. It's cheap problem is that it's got a limited size for the battery and so there's it's the constant thing with air craft, right? The constant thing is the size of the battery compared with the weight of the battery and it's a constant thing back and forth. And so they found a very interesting way to circumvent that and it's got application well beyond what just having a little model aircraft got a quad helicopter flying for a long period of time, right? In fact I think probably I will go ahead and just tease that as something that I will talk about in the future podcast because it's a fascinating aspect and kind of relates to the whole get off this rock thing that I've talked about before. So find yourself something that allows you to get down into the electronics board. If the ball is actually soldering parts to a board, that's a good idea. I think you should try that at least to get a feeling for what it's like. And you can make some pretty interesting kinds of things with that capability, maybe not as complex as that computer that you have that's sitting on your desk, but you can build your own MP3 player. Did you know that? You can actually put together the parts you have an MP3 player to listen to things like this podcast and I think probably it would advocate the abilities of MP3 as well as other kinds of formats, right? It won't be as small as that little MP3 player that you can buy from a commercial entity, but you can build it yourself and you can modify it. You can get it to do different things in different ways. And that's really something that I've always, it's always been a big interest of mine electronics. It's what got me on this path of pursuing things for public electronics, which has then led me to my career in technology all these years. And it's still a fast-made kind of thing. And in reality, there's all the possibilities you ever had before, back when people were building these kinds of things, plus new possibilities here in the modern day. And so this is just kind of a tour down the relay. Where we were 15 years ago, think about this. It was still PowerPC, rather slow PowerPC based Macintosh machines. This was still a time frame when, and I can remember this from some other things that were happening in my professional career. Also, we were still talking about hard drives that were in the megabytes range, more typically than the terabytes range. In fact, I think about 98 or so was when I went out to one insurance customer on the west coast. I don't go to the west coast of the US nearly as much as I go to the east coast just by the nature of where my clients usually are. But I was visiting a customer out in the LA area, and they told me that they were not going to use the archival service that most of our clients at the time would use, which involved a laser optical drive for permanent storage. Oh no, they had a terabytes server, and they would just keep on adding drives to their terabytes server and would never have to have any other type of archival service. They were just going to save everything on that server. I walk around with the terabytes of data in two or three USB sticks on me every day of my life. Think about it. In 15 years, how far we come. It was just kind of a tour down River Elaine, and got to be thinking about it, and it has some time to record this. If you're doing something like this, or you've got something that you remember of the history of technology here, take us on your own, you know, technology discussion here. What do you find when you hook around them, some of that old stuff that you really should throw away? And let us know what it was that got you interested in computers and in electronics and all that type of thing. And what kind of things you're trying to do to revive some of that rekindle, so that initial interest that you had in those kinds of procedures. So until then, this is a list of gadgets kind of digging themselves out of the giant positive carp, and getting nostalgic a bit along the way about some of these things that have passed by the wayside and how far we come. And I look forward to talking to you next time about something else, maybe about the quadcopters and more ideas on how to get off this rock. But until then, be careful out there on the technological front here, because you never know when that big pile of stuff next to you might just topple over if you try to just move one thing, and we'll talk to you later by now. 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