Episode: 83
Title: HPR0083: Flock
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0083/hpr0083.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 11:12:32

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Welcome again to one of my Ramblinger Insightful shows, with me Zoak as your host. I use
as you can come for me children, then we'll begin.
A long time ago in a galaxy country far far away, or maybe not so far away depending
on where you're listening to this, there were a group of people. These people made
something and it was let out into the world for all to enjoy. They started to worry though
that if they let people enjoy what they'd made over and over again, then the world wouldn't
need anything new. So they put a rule out. People could enjoy their stuff, but only for
a little while. Then you had to put it away and store it in a really big building and
not touch it ever again. At first everything they had ever made was stored in this building,
but in time the building became 2 and 3. Until in the entire city you had to be used
to store these things that no one would ever be allowed to see again. This made no sense,
so someone decided to talk to the buildings so they didn't have to store any other things
ever again. Well okay, that isn't quite what happened, but that's roughly what happened
to Doctor Who. The people were the actors in the actors guild. The actors were worried
that once the BBC had a certain amount of shows done, they would just show nothing
but repeats or mostly repeats and most of them would be out of work. So the actors union
only allowed a certain number of repeats of each programme. The BBC then had a huge
amount of film of old shows they couldn't do anything with. As the film increased, someone
finally decided to wipe it all because there was no reason the BBC wouldn't want to keep
any of it. They couldn't do any of it. They ended up reusing some of the film if they
could, but they didn't need any of it. It was trashed, it was all gone. It just means
a huge amount of shows from the 60s were wiped. I mean not just the BBC but everyone did
it. Lots of the BBC episodes were lost and are known as the Lost Episodes. This reminds
me of all the rubbish going on with DRM nowadays, with the RIA and the MPAA telling you what
you can and can't do with the recordings. The good thing for Doctor Who though was because
it was such a big hit. It was sent out by lots of other countries and some of them still
had copies. After the actors union dropped their stupid rule, the BBC could then get the
episodes back and air them again. And of course once they aired them, the actors then
got some money. I'm sure it wasn't as much, but they still got some money for airing
it again. So they went back to all the different countries and tried to get all the episodes
and they got a lot from Australia for example, some from America. There was even one story
about there was a guy he'd been a guard or something at the BBC and he'd actually borrowed
some of these roles of film because no one was using them. They were going to destroy
them and he'd taken them home and stuff to Melizzatic and he'd left there and he'd died many
years later because this is in the 60s and he died sort of in the 90s and his kids were
going through and they found this and didn't quite know what it was, had the BBC logo
on it so took it to the BBC and said, hey what's this? Turned out to be a Doctor Who episode.
There was another one, an old episode. For some reason they had the black and white
copy but they didn't have the colour copy but it was a high quality black and white copy.
Now they'd shown it in colour and someone had taped it illegally of course but they taped
it in America. Now that caused issues because it was the whole different PAL, NTSC and everything
and it was a fairly naft quality but it had the colour in it so what they did is they
warped and twisted the colour image to make it match the black and white and took the
colour and put it over the black and white to get the quality from the black and white
and the colour from the cassette tape. That was fixed and that was released a few years
back. Yet more episodes have been kept as audio recording's only and they've actually
been animated back in to have the episodes. So this is a terrible loss and so down to
the actor's seat guild being worried about, she's being repeated too much. When of course
they do get their repeat showing fees. I'm sure it's not as much as if you're in work
full-time but let's face it, you don't have to do any work for it, you just get sent
to check every month. The same thing's happening with CDs, everyone's expected to buy the
new CDs and we're now expected to upgrade from DVD to Blu-Ray and all that. We never
own this stuff, it's just a license and it just bugs the hell out of me and if you look
at what happened with Doctor Who it just, there is a possibility we could lose a lot of
this music because you don't have any rights to it anymore. There was a story recently
about how our IAA had sent out a ton of demo discs. The demo discs weren't wanted and
they were thrown in the trash, someone took them out of the trash and sold them and he
was being sued for pirating this or covering it in front of whatever the hell they want
to call it because they hadn't allowed him to sell it even though they thrown it away
in the trash. I mean so it's a bunch of stuff that really bugs me and I'm surprised that
we haven't lost more music and more things like some of these older episodes Doctor Who.
But it is good news that some of the artists do seem to be getting the hang of it now and
you've got more and more of them are rejecting their record labels and releasing stuff on
their own or even simply letting everyone download it for themselves. I mean this is a good
plan for any new bands because piracy isn't the problem, it's obscurity, it's the big
problem. Anyway, enough writing about that, I'm going to go on to what the main topic
of today is going to be, which is flock. Now flock is a web browser, it's based on
the Firefox code, you can get it from flock.com, it's available for Linux, Windows, Mac, it's
on version 1.1 currently and as I said it's based on Firefox, they took the source code
and they've changed a few things, it's also open source which is good. But the main difference
between flock is they actually taglines flock for social web browser.
They hook you into everything. I'm going to assume you've got flock, you're looking at it
on the page, it looks a little different, they've tweaked a few bits here and there but they have
various different things, you get this extra light coloured icon bar below the back folder,
reload and home and all that. The first one is about my world and it's all your stuff basically
so it's got a list of Twitter feeds, any media you have, any RSS feeds, anything like that,
you can actually organise this quite a lot. Next one is the people cyber which actually
happens on the site bit like all in one cyber for Firefox. You have a list of all these people
here, in this case I've got my YouTube, I've got Twitter and I can go and see what comments
I've got my latest comment there, let's say on recording an hkl episode, exclamation mark,
bump and that's gone and sent the message out to everyone and I've got all the other people
here, will we since replying to someone saying the cake is a lie and stuff like that. We've got all
the lists down here. We also have my Flickr, not that I actually have anything down there, I've got
the Linux action shown, no master yoder on there but I can click on no master yoder there and it
will take me to his Flickr site and we can see what images he has there and he has some funny
ones, he's got one of Bill Gates recommending Ubuntu and things, there's picture of tux here, big
sand tux which is cool but I can go down there and if I go from there and click on what is the
final icon there, the photo uploader, I can click on that and it loads up, it's a photo uploader
and what I can actually do is simply drag my photos over into there or in this case drag over
this image of tux although it doesn't, although Flickr does something odd, you can't just drag its
rate over you, I actually have to click on it to get the image itself and not the weird random
JavaScript stuff and click on that and drag it over into the photo uploader and it puts it in there
and then you can upload it to wherever you want and this is some going to rename the file, put a
description in and I can put tags and then I can upload it to wherever I want, this case I'm going
upload it to Picasso and if we go to my Picasso site then we can find it alternatively, if we go to
the third icon and the open the media bar what it actually does is the top part now drops down
and we have media streams that defaults are going to Flickr and looking at something called
interestingness, whatever that is but I can go down there to my accounts and go to my Picasso
such as Picasso and loads up my pictures and there we go, we have all the images I have but one
of them in particular the one I just uploaded which is the picture of tux and the comments, it's
all of them, no mastery odour, I know it's no mastery odour, I just felt like breaking it out
differently and there we go, awesome this media stream we can go to YouTube and say what have
got top raiders, if we want it does a quick search and brings all that up but that's pretty cool
you can get these things going on, top 10 Jackie Chan Stunts, I'll be in the chief one of her
and that bloke whose name escapes me but he was doing the Wii remote stuff, Jason Lee or something,
something is like the MIT got the did all the stuff for that but we can have a look at all that,
that's pretty cool, the next icon is the A for Feeds so bar which we get all the feeds now,
I don't use that, I actually have, I use Google for my feed reader, my RSS reader, so I use Google
reader for that, we then have my inbox for Google Mail and Yahoo and stuff, apparently I've got
one I'm really emailing there but I don't check that myself, I followed chest griffins,
description on how to run an iMap server and I'm actually running an iMap server to grab and
collate all my emails, we can also open favorite side bars the next icon, we have at the top
the local favourites and at the bottom the online favourites that hooks and delicious
and you can copy from one stuff to another, the next one is picture of a key, it's all your accounts
and you can see my youtube delicious my personal blog, scout stuff twitter, flicker, Picasso,
jimmo and zoke.org remember droople, more on that in a moment, we'll click on the next one,
it's a clipboard, we can drag anything down, text, links, images, anything really,
drag them down to the side and we can put them into folders and organize them, save them a bit
for later if we want to look at stuff later, which is pretty cool, next one is open blog editor,
now this is a really cool one, what we can do here is we can go and actually type something in,
you have a little, almost looks like an email and you can type stuff in there and if I type
something in, what should we do, blogging for dummies and actually I've got a better idea,
what we can do, don't say that, what we can do if we go back to the flicker page
and back to the image that we had there, what we can do on this, if we can actually right click
on the comments sound, just sound blah blah blah, right click and say blog this and it automatically
brings it up with a link to it and everything, so we change the title for blogging for dummies
and we can put any tags we wanted to publish and oh look, I've just got a new email
or anywhere that's from, we can post it to whichever blog we want, in this case we can put
Zoke under story, we can pick the categories, now that doesn't seem to work in Drupal but it does
work in WordPress, publishes a new post or a place existing post, that seems to have some issues,
it knows what it's posted but if you haven't posted a three, it doesn't seem to pick it up always,
ad blogged with, ad blogged with flock to the end of your post, I never bother with that and
visit blog after publishing, that one doesn't always work because it has issues with Zoke.org for
example, but we can do that, if I post that and send that and if we go to Zoke.org,
we press that and then we get blogging for dummies, there we go, it's just appeared, of course if
anyone is actually checking the timestamps on this, yes I am choosing, I did do that blog post
earlier, I did rerecord this because I screwed up and lost some of it in the sound of crap and
I wanted to read it, anyway so that's most of it on the side, the social stuff anyway,
most of the rest of it's just very similar standard sort of Firefox stuff basically,
pretty much every Firefox extension works under flock, but it's just if you're doing any blogging
or in stuff like that, it's a lot easier because in this case I can go simply go to hack a
public radio for example, when this episode gets posted, right click on that and blog about it
and then instantly get a blog up and ready and don't have to worry about any of the links and
stuff they're there automatically, apart from that, as I said everything's pretty much the same,
I just love the way you can upload stuff and drag images and still pictures of, I mean,
share images, quite easily using Flickr and Picasso or any of the other things, I mean if I
get back to accounts and have a look at the list, it supports Facebook Flickr Twitter YouTube,
Photobucket Picasso, Pixo, Blogger, Blogs and live journal typepad WordPress.com, Zanga or
Self-hosted blog, that one you can just add and say this is my blog and it tries to figure out what
it is, delicious Magnolia and Gmail and Yahoo Mel and they're adding more all the time,
so that's a basic overview, I think it's really cool, if you do anything social at all on the
internet, which is pretty much everyone now, because everyone's got their own blog, everyone puts
pictures on Picasso or whatever, so you can do that and it's just really cool that it's just
got all on the side and all there ready for you and whatever you want, it's there, I think it's
really cool, it's also all open source, you can go and download it, play around with it and
whatever you want, so there's no problem with anything there, I think that's about it really,
thank you very much for listening and we'll catch you all later.