Episode: 3708
Title: HPR3708: Insomnia as a Hobby
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3708/hpr3708.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 04:26:14

---

This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3708 for Wednesday the 19th of October 2022.
Today's show is entitled Insomnia as a Hobby.
It is hosted by Trump at John and is about 8 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is fighting Insomnia.
Enjoy it with a few tricks.
Well hello Hacker Public Radio, it's Trump at John and it's been a while.
Last time I talked to you, I talked about my personal life hack of the Saturday morning routine,
what I do to keep up my car and every Saturday I take my car,
which by the way I'm recording this on a Saturday and after I do that,
I probably need to do my Saturday morning routine on my cars.
But today I wanted to talk about something very interesting.
As a middle-aged man, I have finally developed a habit or a lifestyle that I've had all my life really.
And that's Insomnia.
My Insomnia is not horrible, but it's there.
It's ever-present and I'll get about two or three good nights of sleep every week, maybe two or three.
That's it.
The other nights sometimes can be a pain.
So I've kind of made Insomnia a hobby and I'm going to share with you what I do for that.
And maybe those of you who suffer from it can get some inspiration from Insomnia as a hobby.
First of all, I was listening to a podcast and it was this sleep study expert who basically said,
listen, if you have Insomnia, the worst thing you can do is worry about it.
And I kind of think that's true.
He said, you'll get the sleep that you need when you need it.
And I know there's a lot of studies out there that say that it all links to this and this and this,
but you know what, live life and enjoy yourself.
But Insomnia is a hobby.
I know that's what you're kind of wondering about the title.
So whenever my head hits the pillow after saying my good nights and everything like that,
I put in my earbuds with a really cheap MP3 player.
It's a Sandisk MP3 player that I bought probably seven years ago and it still works great.
It's just that it actually does have a radio side to it.
So and that kind of comes in useful too.
But what I do is typically this is my opportunity as an Insomnia hobbyist to listen to some things
that I typically wouldn't listen to.
First of all, it was through my Insomnia hobby that I actually learned about hacker public radio
because I go to archive.org a lot of times to get material for my Insomnia hobby.
I'll get MP3s of old radio shows, especially old mysteries that they're fun to listen to.
I love the commercials more than anything, but they're fun to listen to.
But then I found hacker public radio.
So often times I'll download those.
I'll download these different old radio shows.
I download also I go to Libravox.org and I find all sorts of old classics that I get to listen to
at one or two o'clock in the morning.
I'll just lay there and listen to it and I'll doze a little bit.
But the key is not worrying about it.
You know if I sleep, I sleep and if I don't, well I get to listen to some great classics.
So I'll go to Libravox.org and I'll download things on that MP3 player as well.
Another thing that I'll listen to is sleep with me podcast.
Now sometimes in the opening statements, he gets a little political which you know I can take it or leave it.
But by and large, this guy who does sleep with me podcast, he has a real gift of being able to drone on and on and on about nothing for about an hour, 15 minutes.
But you have to get past the opening 10 minutes and 15 minutes and I can't begrudge him for that because this is a free podcast that he does twice a week.
And his first 15 minutes, he's shilling for supporting that sort of thing and I think it's great.
It's not a problem sometimes.
I go right to sleep before that.
I also on archive.org, I've been able to download some really actually interesting music.
I'm being a church music person.
I enjoy the music filter guard von Bingen and there's a lot of free music of hers and she was a 10th century mystic composer but some really good stuff there.
And then also I'm able to download some other things on archive.org that are just worth listening.
And so in this insomnia hobby that I have, oh and I did want to get to one other thing, is the fact that my little MP3 player has a radio side to it.
Well, that's really enjoyable as well because I can always find no matter where I am, I can always find a radio station that has coast to coast AM all night long and you get to hear some really interesting.
And fantastical stories on that as well.
So when you're given lemons, make lemonade and I'm telling you, just using an MP3 player and making insomnia your hobby can actually make it pretty enjoyable to go to bed instead of dreading trying to go to sleep and tossing and turning.
Just get yourself relaxed. So let me wrap this up by just kind of bullet pointing what you need to do.
First of all, don't use your smartphone because you're going to get on there and scroll and you're going to have all of the blue screen issues and stuff like that.
Do this on a cheap MP3 player that you can buy on Amazon. I mean, there's scads of them. They don't cost hardly anything.
And then, now this is the thing, because you're using an MP3 player that's cheap, it's not going to really download stuff as easily as if you had an aggregator or podcast aggregator.
So, but it kind of forces you to be a little more choosy in a lot of ways. So you go to your PC, you go to your Mac, you go to someplace like archive.org or sleep with me podcast.
Start downloading those kind of things to your MP3 player. Also download maybe some challenging music, something that you wouldn't typically listen to.
And then, of course, you need to be on to Librevox, l-i-b-r-i-v-o-x.org. I think it's.org.
And you have all of these public domain books available at your fingertips and you can listen to classics all night long.
And so, oh, and another thing that'll help is, of course, having a good set of earbuds or even one of those wraparound headbands that have ear buds in them so you can sleep or lay that really, really comfortably and listen.
And so, what you can do, really, is you can make insomnia a hobby. A hobby that can be enjoyed and then the byproduct of that is that maybe you'll get a little sleep.
And who knows? Maybe you've tried this, you're on hacker public radio and maybe me droning on and on has put you to sleep.
Enjoy yourself. This is trumpet john sleep well.
You have been listening to hacker public radio at hackerpublicradio.org. Today's show was contributed by a HBR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording podcasts, then click on our contribute link to find out how easy it really is.
Hosting for HBR has been kindly provided by an honesthost.com, the internet archive and our sings.net.
On this advice status, today's show is released under Creative Commons, Attribution 4.0 International License.