Episode: 911
Title: HPR0911: Hobbies
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0911/hpr0911.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 04:49:03

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Hello, welcome Hacker Public Radio audience. My name is Mr. X. Why you Mr. X you ask?
Well, primarily due to lack of imagination on my part.
Today I thought I would give you a briefest of the hobbies I've had over the years.
I hope you find it interesting, and if not, I apologise in advance.
The hobbies I'm going to cover are playing musical instruments, electronics, radio and computing.
Right from an early age I was driven to find out how the things around me worked.
As a small child I was always taking things to bits, quite often not being able to put them back together.
Incidentally, if like me you're fast-tested in finding out how things work,
then I highly recommend the series The Secret Life of Machines by Tim Hunkins.
It was broadcasted here in the UK in the late 1980s on Channel 4.
The videos are now available from Exploratorium.
Interestingly enough, I've heard that the TV series was only aired because the station manager's wife was out of town at the time.
He thought it was exactly what he needed so he would be able to get some washing done while she was away.
I guess he was in for a shock when he found out it was actually about the principles of how a wash machine works.
I find myself driven mostly by things and topics around me which I find interesting.
A friend once told me that the secret to learning anything is to somehow make it interesting.
I guess this is probably true, and indeed isn't good advice.
It's not something I tend to do myself.
I either find something interesting or I don't.
Maybe I'm just lazy.
It's certainly I have been accused of this in the past, as I tend to be rather laid back.
Although these days I tend to find I get grumpy quite a lot.
Perhaps this is an aged thing.
I am a mid-forties you know, and I'm turning into a bit of an old fart.
If you're being forced to learn something which is particularly boring, find some way to make it interesting.
I have a luxury of only following topics I find interesting.
Since at this time of life, I am not being forced into some academic course.
Anything I learn these days is self-taught, and this is by far a more satisfying way to learn.
The first hobby I took up was self-learning to play musical instruments by year.
I gained most enjoyment from the ones which were self-taught.
I never got fantastically good at any of them.
I took them as far as I could until I finally got bored with them and moved onto something else.
I guess again this is either down to laziness on my part, or limitations of talent.
But as I wasn't out to impress anyone, and did it purely for my own enjoyment, it didn't matter.
The first thing I learned to play was the piano.
This I learned as a young toddler.
The instrument in question was a toy piano I had.
The story told numerous things by my mother was that she was sitting with her friend,
who said to my mother that she recognised the tune.
She said you must be imagining things, but when they both listened I was playing Twinkle Twinkle.
A few years after this my mother convinced me to take piano lessons.
This I find extremely frustrating.
Having to go through the discipline of learning the correct fingering and learning ever so slowly to read music.
I thought this was a great waste of time, slowly picking up note by note what was to be played.
The piano teacher only needed to play the piece once, and then to her frustration I could then play it back,
much easier or so I thought.
Of course now in hindsight I can definitely see the advantage of learning how to play properly.
However, would it be as much fun?
Who knows.
I just know I enjoyed playing things by ear and not from musical notation.
Here in chronological order are some of the instruments I learned to play to some limited degree.
Piano, electric red organ, recorder, pipe bandrums, coordinate, mouth organ, ocarina, e-flat horn, flute, synthesiser, accordion.
For the most part this is a hobby I've let fall by the wayside, and it used to be something that I got great enjoyment from and was a big part of my life for many years.
I guess that it's the natural order of things, I just had to get bored with it once I found I could only take it so far,
or maybe more accurately it was just too lazy to take it further.
My earliest memory of being interested in electronics was when I was a young boy.
An angle of mine explained to me about how Christmas lights were wired up in series.
And explained that this was the reason why all the lights go out if one fails.
This had done to an explanation about lights wired up in parallel, and finally onto Ohm's law, I was hooked.
He used a very simple diagram which consisted of an equilateral triangle which was split into three sections.
The top section had a V, which represented volts. The bottom left section had an I, which confusingly represented current.
The bottom right section contained the symbol R, which represented resistance.
He told me that if you know two of the items in the triangle, then you can always find the third.
He uses the diagram by putting your finger over the item you don't know.
Obviously the whole idea of the diagram is a little difficult to appreciate in audio,
but it's a fantastic way to see and understand the relationship between voltage, current and resistance.
Much easier than having to remember three separate formulae, you just remember one diagram.
For many years I self taught myself electronics, dabbling in all sorts of things.
There's nothing like playing around with bulbs, batteries, various switches and resistors,
and a like to truly appreciate the fundamentals of electricity, and how all the components interact with each other.
I always think learning is so much easier and enjoyable when you have a practical application for what you're learning.
Theory is all very well and indeed very important, but for me practical experimentation is much more rewarding.
Like Mr. Gadja, I too had a chemistry set, and a low I played with it a little, it never really caught my attention.
I also had a few electronic sets, these I found much more fun.
Many years later in high school and again in college, I came across Ohm's Law, mostly I found academically boring and uninspiring.
They would take a subject which I loved, and somehow find a way to turn it into something dull and uninspiring,
and if there was a complicated or convoluted way to explain something, they would find it.
All through my childhood, and into early adulthood, I strived to become an electronics engineer.
And what do you know, I did indeed end up, and a job that could loosely be described as being an electronics engineer.
My actual title as a systems engineer.
However, I think this is far too really a description, and when you tell people this, they look at you with blank expressions.
I mean, what kind of system are we talking about? It could be almost anything.
It seems now to be very fast involved to give job titles, and they did companies themselves, fully non-descriptive titles.
I mean, what the hell does insignia mean? For those non-U.K. listeners, this was a name given to what is now the post office.
As you can tell, this name changed with a complete flop, thank goodness.
The name post office is perfect since it's a U.K. wide set of offices, where you go to post letters and parcels.
Recently, I visited the local museum, where they had a demonstration of a simple stout your telephone exchange.
The stout your exchange was a revolutionary breakthrough that was created by a local undertaker in Kansas City, Missouri.
It single-handedly replaced all the telephone operators around the world.
The whole faceting story can be found in the Secret Life of Machines episode about the telephone.
Again, as I mentioned previously, this series is well worth watching.
The exchange in the museum had an old-fashioned dial telephone placed at each end.
You pick up the receiver at one phone and dial a number to make the second phone ring.
One of the members of staff immediately told me of her story when she told the young lad to dial a number on the phone.
The young lad pushed his fingers into each of the holes and turned, waiting an anticipation for the phone to ring.
He had never seen a dial phone before and didn't know that you had to turn the dial.
It was certainly rather funny, but it shows how fast the pace of change has become.
Sadly, this is another one of these hobbies that I've let slip by the wayside,
although sometimes I still find it interesting to dabble and let odd thing,
and I still enjoy taking things to bits.
Hopefully now, I'm more able to put them back together again.
I'm not exactly sure where I got my interest in radio.
My father ran a local sea cadets.
For international listeners, this is a bit like Cubs of Scouts, but with a focus on boats.
I myself was not in the least interested in boats.
Probably much to the noise of my father.
The cadets met in a long thin wooden shed.
I went into the shed with a small room full of wonderful old radio equipment.
Mostly donated X Army stuff.
My father had no knowledge about any of this equipment,
and I think for many years it just lay in the back room, literally gathering dust.
After lots of bleeding and whining, my father grudgingly let me play with equipment.
Now the time and adult I can fully see why he was so reluctant to let me near it.
For one reason, he would be busy looking after the cadets at the other end of the shed
and could not supervise me.
Secondly, I might break something.
Thirdly, the equipment was full of high voltages.
And most of the radios had a flap.
You could simply lift getting direct access to valves.
The valves had lethal voltages on them,
and it wasn't uncommon for bits of the shatters of equipment of this age to become live.
It's really amazing I didn't electrocute myself.
So from time to time I was allowed to turn on the radios,
watch the beautiful glowing valves,
twiddle the plethora of knobs,
while trying to understand what each of them did,
how they interacted with each other.
This was indeed a rare treat,
and was something I only got the chance to do very occasionally,
and for what seemed to me,
a frustratingly short amount of time,
but I was in heaven.
I seem to remember having a bit of a fast nation for intercoms.
Maybe this was because they are a bit like walkie-talkies, but with wires.
The reason I didn't have the real walkie-talkies
was at that point they would have been too expensive,
but I'm not sure if there was any legal frequency allocation available for that sort of thing back then.
I had a pair of toy telephones as well,
which I think I eventually took to bits and broke.
I think with a real intercom,
like the type that was used here by the local doctor,
which led him to buzz through to the reception to ask for the next patient.
Eventually the cable broke,
I took the units to bits and broke them further.
My granny also had an intercom system,
which was strangely part of the BT telephone she had in her house.
Her house was above the shop that she and my grandfather owned,
and it allowed her to talk to the shop down below.
I think both the shop and the phone shared the same phone line,
so any incoming calls made both phone ring.
The intercom phone wasn't really the most fascinating thing my granny had.
What interested me more was the Teak Mahogany radiogram she owned.
This consisted of a record player and radio.
It was a huge big affair,
perhaps half as long as a family car,
or at least it seemed that way to me.
The Teak Mahogany was polished like a mirror,
the whole unit stood on four sturdy legs.
The speakers were at each end and eliminated when the radiogram was switched on.
I presumed the radiogram was full of valves,
as when you initially switched it on, the unit was silent,
but after a few seconds, gradually the sound would appear,
as if someone was inside slowly turning the volume control up.
This was caused by the fact that valves need to heat up before they can operate.
The amazing thing about the radiogram was that never before,
or since, have I heard from any hi-fi,
a sound so rich and mellow,
but maybe I'm recalling it with those tinted ear drums.
The first set of real wireless walkie-talkies I owned operated on 49 megahertz.
They were really just toys and a fairly limited range,
but I still had great fun with them.
The range was about as far as you could shout.
The other limitation they had is that they did not contain squelch circuit,
so every time the talk button was released,
the sets would produce a loud continuous hissing sound.
Around 1981, I got a set of CB walkie-talkies.
These had two whole channels to choose from,
and also had a squelch circuit,
which silenced the receiver when the talk button was released,
and produced a massive 300mW of power on 27 megahertz.
The range of these was many times greater than the toy walkie-talkies I had.
I eventually progressed to a real CB,
and through this made many friends.
From CB, I progressed to amateur radio.
There are so many interesting things you can do with amateur radio,
such as speaking to astronauts on the International Space Station,
bouncing signals of satellites, bouncing signals of the moon,
speaking to people all over the world through internet gateways via RF links,
playing with high-speed microwave data links,
sending TV signals over fast scan and slow scan,
numerous data modes, digital included audio,
talking all over the world using the HF band,
take part in contests,
and many, many more things far too many to cover here.
I had to sit and pass the city and guilds amateur radio examination
in order to allow me to transmit on the amateur radio bands.
I befriended a local TV repairman in the area,
and I think it was him that encouraged me to go for the test.
A magazine at the time was doing a set of articles called
How to Pass the Radio Amateurs Examination.
I think they had an article each month on it Christmas,
a special edition came out that pulled all the articles into one,
and this is exactly the magazine that I purchased.
It was a crash course, and I think I studied for one month and passed the test.
What made it easier for me was that a lot of the course materials related to electronics.
Two levels of amateur radio license existed in the UK at this time.
These were class A and class B licenses.
The class B test mainly consisted of RA and electrical theory.
This allowed you to operate within the VHF and UHF part of the spectrum.
To get the class A license, you also had to study and pass a Morse code test.
This allowed the operation within all parts of the amateur radio spectrum.
I never seriously learned Morse code.
Again mainly due to laziness or lack of interest.
This meant I became a class B amateur,
and was restricted to VHF and UHF operation.
Again after many years, this hobby has lost some of its excitement for me.
However, just when I thought I would lose all interest in it,
the license in the UK changed,
and amateur radio operators were the class B license,
were given a full class A license.
This gave me a bit of a new interest,
but was a bit of a dilemma for me.
I did not have an aerial setup for HF operation.
Setting up an HF antenna can be problematic,
since it can take up quite a bit of space.
This is because the HF part of the band by definition operates at a lower frequency,
and as your frequency goes down, the wavelength goes up.
Incidentally, a triangular diagram just like the voltage current on resistance
can be used to find the wavelength or frequency,
as long as one of these is known.
I won't worry with the actual details.
I had an even bigger problem,
because I had no HF radio equipment.
I started looking at shiny magazines,
and for some strange reason,
I decided to go from ultra-modern, ultra-wide band,
ultra-small, ECU FD817.
I was going to use this as a base station radio.
I must have been mad.
I should have known better, but I didn't.
It was indeed a miracle of modern engineering,
and the technical abilities of this small device was guffsmacking.
It covered all the amateur bands,
and general coverage received capabilities.
I had no problem updating the radio,
but somehow it just wasn't satisfying,
particularly as it was never designed to be used as a base station radio.
All this changed when I swapped it for a much older Kenwood TS940S base station radio.
It was an absolute joy to use,
and in fact still is, as I am still the proud owner of it.
All the controls have a satisfying weight to them.
The front panel is not plastic, but metal.
It just looks a fantastic build quality to it.
It has no rear filters and noise blankers
that can be selected to help remove noise from a signal.
He's actually work, unlike the filters in the Micro 817,
which seem to do nothing.
Almost any device designed to do many things as I compromise,
just think of a Swiss Army knife,
where it's immensely useful in an emergency,
and it's no winner's good as having an array of custom made tools,
made specifically for one job.
To some extent, I personally feel the same way about mobile phones.
For me, a phone is something for phoning.
Once you add an array of functionality to it,
the phone itself becomes a compromise.
It ends up being bigger than it needs to be,
heavier than it needs to be.
It becomes an all-around purer phone.
However, if you want a multi-function device,
then the modern smartphone is immensely useful.
I have a very old Nokia phone.
It has a battery life many times longer than any smartphone.
It is lighter and smaller than its most modern smartphones.
The ringtone uses a pdelectric device,
which is not capable of producing polyphonic ringtones,
but is much, much louder.
A mobile phone, by definition, is most useful
when you are out and about.
It rather defeats the purpose of the phone,
if you can only hear it when you are in a quiet room.
I could go on, but I won't,
and I apologise for my rant.
Remember I am an old fart, and that's what all farts do.
Everyone has different priorities,
and you pay your money and you take your chances.
From time to time, I still very much enjoy my radio hobby,
but it's been far more time-lusting than transmitting these days.
For, for computing.
In the middle of my career, I nearly ended up in IT,
but thanks to a decision made by my boss,
that I suspect was purely selfish,
in which utterly stunned me, I ended up staying in the electronics.
In retrospect, this was probably a good thing,
but I didn't know it at the time.
Our own local site had its own IT staff,
and over the years, I saw that they were not being treated terribly well,
and when our management decided that IT was not part of our core competencies,
IT was outsourced.
At which point I was truly glad I had not switched careers to IT.
The other advantage to not having a career in IT
is it doesn't spoil my love of the hobby.
I am free to follow any area of computing I choose.
The thing I enjoy most about computing is tinkering.
I was never really interested in games.
The first computer I owned was an Amiga 500.
I spent endless hours tinking with it,
especially since its file system was far from robust.
Something I was to learn a few times after I upgraded the computer,
and installed a scusy hard drive.
I'd have the whole thing working nicely,
and then bandwidth would crash,
and the whole file system would be corrupted.
I needed to be rebuilt.
From memory, this only seemed to happen
once I installed external scusy hard drive.
The computer booted from the hard drive,
briefs to this the computer would booted from a 3.5-inch floppy disk.
If you're interested in finding out about early computing,
and enjoy seeing historic footage of early computers,
then check out the Secret Life of Machines episode
about the word processor.
My next computer was an IBM PC clone.
I think it was a 486DX2 with a speedy 66 megahertz processor,
and a massive 4 megabytes of RAM.
I think it ran DOS 3.3 and Windows 3.1.
I enjoyed creating various DOS scripts, known as batch files,
and tinkering with various configuration files,
such as autoexec.bat and config.sus files.
In the middle of this, I came across Linux,
the front cover of a computer magazine.
From my memory, it was Red Hat 5.2.
I was able to install it as a dual boot system,
but it was all a bit of a mystery to me,
and I really never found a use for it,
and at the same time I was still finding Windows interesting.
As time progressed, I slowly began to find
that each successive version of Windows
had more and more of the nuts and bolts hidden from the user.
For straightingly, they would try to automate things.
I'm all for automation, but only when it's fully controllable,
and when in history can be turned off.
By Windows XP, computing started to become boring.
I rediscovered Linux, and was able to tinker again.
It was great.
Like many people in Linux flavor, I chose was Ubuntu.
I read from cover to cover the book,
beginning Ubuntu Linux from novice to professional.
I highly recommend it.
Once I got familiar with Linux, I moved on
and started playing with bash scripting.
I highly recommend the book Linux Pocket Guide.
Reading through the commands give you a real feel
of the power of bash, and how the output of one command
can be picked into the input of another
to construct truly useful functions.
The last few pages of the book got me interested in bash scripting.
I find these bucket books excellent.
Large books are great for reference material,
or for further reading.
But sometimes I think some large books
are just padded out for the sake of it,
with unnecessary clutter,
making it difficult to see the wood for the trees.
I did the very same thing when I started learning
how to create those batch files.
The book I chose for this incidentally
was aptly named the concise book of MS-DOS.
After reading a few tutorials on the net on bash scripting,
I bought the book Wicked Cool Shell Scripts.
This is a great way of exploring real-life useful examples
of bash scripting and action.
It does not take you from novice to expert,
rather it gives you examples of complete scripts,
which you can explore and understand,
so you are able to then modify them
and take them to bits for your own use.
This is what I enjoy so much about Linux.
There is so much hidden depth to it,
so many interesting layers,
it takes the complexity that makes it interesting.
I am all for making things easy.
I myself often use a graphical user interface
to get things done.
This is fine as long as the hidden complexity
is not shut off from the end user.
In a previous version of HPR,
Mr Gadget mentioned about getting things going again.
In Britain we have a similar problem to America.
Like Mr Gadget's,
I don't see the next generation getting the chance
and encouragement that would start them
on the road to gaining a passion and interest
in electronics or computing.
We have indeed all turned into consumers.
Fewer and fewer people have any idea
how everyday objects around them work.
I find this somewhat disturbing,
even pushed by a little scary.
As our world becomes more and more complex,
conversely it becomes less and less robust.
I am led to believe here in the UK
most schools are teaching kids how to operate MS Word
while completely missing the fascinating world of computing.
Many of the kids having absolutely no idea
what programming is.
The project Raspberry Pi is trying to solve this.
I wish them good luck and every success.
If you are interested,
take a look at their website.
Personally, I am very interested in the Raspberry Pi hardware,
purely from a selfish point of view.
I suspect many of you will be too.
The great thing about this hardware is that
they will be selling it at almost unbelievable price
of $25 for the Model A and $35 for the Model B.
From what I understand,
the main difference between the Model A and B
is that the Model B has an Ethernet port.
The board will run Linux.
I'd like to use it to replace my aging Xbox,
which runs XBMC.
But even if I end up not doing this,
that's such a cheap price it doesn't really matter.
You can just have a good tinker with it,
which is exactly what I enjoy doing most.
Their website says that the Raspberry Pi
is a credit card sized computer
that plugs into your TV and keyboard.
It's a capable little PC,
which can be used for many of the things your desktop PC does
like spreadsheets or processing and games.
It also plays high-definition video.
We want to see it being used
by kids all over the world to learn programming.
Competing is something I still very much enjoy,
although I now have a new hobby taking up my time.
Conclusion
My latest hobby seems to be producing podcasts.
Only time will tell how long this will catch my interest and imagination.
But they certainly have a few other ideas for podcasts,
which I'll hopefully share with you at some point.
My hobbies have given me immense happiness
and satisfaction through the years,
but the best thing about them is that they are indeed hobbies,
and I can decide how much attention I want to give them.
I hope you enjoyed this podcast.
I hope I wasn't too boring and didn't ramble too much.
Again, something I've been accused of in the past.
Finally, the club of music at the beginning of the podcast
was part of a song I created many years ago
with the aid of Cakewood studio and a MIDI keyboard.
And I'll close it at the end for your enjoyment.
Hopefully I'll be able to do another show sometime in the future.
If I'm not too lazy, remember it's only a hobby.
I bid you farewell.
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