Episode: 1549
Title: HPR1549: Cool Stuff Pt.1
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1549/hpr1549.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 04:56:48

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you
Hey everyone, this is Seapont North Carolina for Hacker Public Radio.
I'd like to thank everyone at Hacker Public Radio for the service that they offer and
allowing the community the freedom to report on tips, tricks, news, apps, and everything.
A Hacker would find interesting.
Today, I'd like to share with you a few things that I've found here lately and have been
using, and I think you might find interesting as well.
The first thing is an Android app that I use.
It is how I listen to podcasts and subscribe to podcasts, and it's called BeyondPod.
And it is Android only, so if there's any iPhone users out there, then sorry, you're just
going to find something else.
So BeyondPod is a great pod catcher, and I listened to all my podcasts on my phone, so
this was a kind of a no-brainer.
Prior to this, I was using G-Podder to download my podcasts and then syncing it with my phone
that was hooked up as USB.
Prior to that, I was using an LG phone, and when an LG phone is mounted on Linux, then
it is mounted as an extra on-drive, so it was, the G-Podder had no problem syncing to
it.
However now I have a Samsung Galaxy, and whenever the Samsung Galaxy mounts on Linux, it
mounts as a media device, and G-Podder can't figure out how to sync to it.
So this was actually a lot easier, and I don't have to worry about syncing anything, it
just automatically aggregates and downloads everything for me.
A few of the features it has, when you first started up, along the top there is a menu,
it has all your feeds that you're subscribed to, there's an episodes list, and then there's
a playlist, and I kind of go over some of those on the bottom.
There is an option to add a feed, and to add a feed, we can do this a few different ways
when you hit the add feed button.
At the top there's a menu that pops up that has some recommended podcasts, some training
podcasts, like trending, it's like this is really popular according to, I guess, their
database, and then there's some collections, and then the collections, there's things like
TED Talks and NPR, there might be a large section of shows pertaining to one subject, and
they're all built together.
There's also a section for region, and those are based on, say, Canadian podcasts, or Korean,
or there's German France, Germany and France, and etc., there's podcasts more pertaining
to those regions.
Then there's the obvious stuff like the news, and the business, and comedy, and tech, and
that kind of thing.
There's also a really nice feature that at the top where you can search for podcasts, so
you can search for just linux, and then everything that might pertain to linux or games or PlayStation
or whatever, have you.
But right beside that magnifying glass at the top of the add feed, there is kind of a square
with an arrow pointing.
If you touch that, it's going to have a way for you to import feeds, and you can import
feeds either by adding a feed address and RSS feed.
You can also import them from a SD card or a folder that's already on your phone.
You can import an OPM-L-O-P-M-L file, and they can also import from feedly the RSS aggregator
that kind of took over after Google Reader bit it.
That's some ways you can add feeds.
The way that I have mine set up, there's some settings, there's lots of settings that
you can do with this, but some of the most important ones would be when it downloads feeds
or new episodes rather.
You can download episodes in a particular time, say I had mine set at midnight or one
o'clock every morning, it updates all the feeds and pulls down the latest episode, and
it only does it over Wi-Fi, so I don't have to worry about using to get my data plan
to download new episodes.
You can't force it to do it.
If you have it set this way, you can't force it to go ahead and update over your data
plan if you want.
It'll warn you and say the charges will apply and that kind of thing, but you can also set
it up to where you have so many episodes in a feed that remain.
So after I have mine mostly set up on say three, I think, three or four episodes per feed,
so I can hack a public radius since it comes out Monday through Friday.
I might not get to all the shows through the feed until the next one comes out and if
it's setting it lower than I might miss an episode or whatnot, and it just removed
from the playlist completely.
So once we go back out of that, there is a little bit of a weirdness that took me a second
to kind of figure out.
There is, at the top where it says all feeds and it shows you all your feeds that you've
prescribed to.
Then you have a button that says episodes.
You can change this to where it shows you all your episodes that are downloaded already
from each of your feeds.
You view it from audio only, some video only that are fully downloaded, some that have
been listened to but are unfinished and some that are completely unplayed.
So what you have to do is once your feeds are updated and your shows are in the section
of the all episodes, if you go to the all episodes tab at the top and you go to the episode
that you want to add, then you hold it down and you're going to get a menu, says you delete
episode, remove from playlist or add to playlist, toggle if it's been played or not.
You can lock the episode so that if it's downloaded and if you go past the three episode
marker or whatever you have your player set to, then it will lock the episode and it
will not delete.
So if you do that and hold down that episode and then say add to playlist, up at the top
right beside where it has all your episodes, there is a number that says either 1, 2, 3,
4, 5 or 6 or 0 or whatever.
That's how many episodes you have in your playlist.
So whenever you're listening to your shows, you're actually adding them to your playlist
so it doesn't play from your episodes tab, it actually plays from your playlist tab.
And you can hold these down in your playlist and move them up and down.
So if you want to shuffle around, say I don't want to listen to that when it's two hours
and I've only got 15 minutes on my bus ride or whatnot so I need to move it up that way
and I can go ahead and listen to that, you're more than welcome, you're able to do that
easily enough.
And of course down at the very bottom of the playlist section, it has the normal fast
word rewind, skip, play, stop, that kind of thing.
You can also, whenever you do subscribe to a feed, you can put them in different categories.
So entertainment, science and technology, you can make your own categories if you want.
I don't really put those in categories I guess but I don't really necessarily have
a need for it.
I just have my player set to download the episodes and then I add them to the playlist as they
come down and I'll listen to them in order of date.
So, but it's a great little pod catcher for Android only.
So it's not a free app, there is a trial that you can download from the Play Store and
give it a shot after I think it's 15 days maybe, maybe longer, it'll tell you that you
need to purchase the key and it's at six bucks.
I don't really buy a whole lot of apps for the phone, I don't really have a whole lot
of need for them at any rate but that was one of them that I really found a great need
for and I need to have a way to get my shows downloaded easily enough and not have to worry
about it and that really fit the bill.
So if you're looking for a pod catcher and you're using Android on your phone and that's
how you listen to your podcasts is on your phone, I can't recommend it high enough, it's
a great app, go to shop.
Okay, so the next thing I like to talk about is a really cool website that I'm sure
of love y'all will have either heard of or would really find interesting and this is
a website called youarelistening.to.
What this is is a mashup of police scanners or weather station scanners, there's airport
scanners, those kind of things and they are mashed up with soundcloud bites that are
ambient music from soundcloud.
So if you go to that website youarelistening.to, typically the first time that I ever go to
it fresh, it will always default to go to San Francisco police.
So you hear the police scanners from San Francisco while mashed up with it is some real
nice ambient music but at the top of it the puddle or if you go over to where the map is
and it's the icon of the world, if you click on that you are going to get a big huge
map of north and well the world, so you are going to get a big map and there's all these
little icons, some of them are like blue with shields and those are police scanners, there
are some that are red with like an ambulance has little red cross shield on I guess, those
are EMS feeds, there are lots of airports, there's actually one that is NASA soundclips
which is really cool but there's also one that's over in the UK somewhere and it is
a number station so I don't know if you ever really listen to those number stations where
they just spout out the numbers and if you really want to check that stuff out it's really
pretty cool, there's just this person spouting off numbers, I don't know, I never really
have found a really good explanation as to what they're actually doing but it's interesting
to listen to and there's other cities that you can go to for those and if you go to there's
a little eye like information, there's a section there where it says currently listening
to and there's typical cities like lots of people listen to Los Angeles and there's
Atlanta, there's Philadelphia, San Francisco which are lots of places in the US, people
listen to this stuff a lot I guess, there's a lot more of those feeds that they kind of tie
into but I like to listen to it late at night, wife will go to sleep early or something and
it's Friday night and I just want to hang out for a while and I'll stay up and have a cocktail
or three and either give around on the website, it's poking around here and there or maybe
doing a little programming or something, I don't like to listen to music necessarily with
words whenever I'm just reading on websites and whatnot, I find it distracting to listen
to something that has words but the police scanners don't bother me and the ambient music
is really nice, it's really great to program to find it really kind of relaxes me a bit,
that's really all there is to it, if you sometimes I'll just pull up a new window for Firefox
and just put it on a different workspace in the background and let it fly and then on
my other desktop I'll do whatever surfing or program hacking or whatever I'm doing and
let it go with that.
If you are into any of that, check it out, I think it's a lot of great fun, it's very
addictive, I think, it's for whatever reason, it's very relaxing if you listen to some
of the airport codes and that kind of thing, the number station, check that out, so when
you go to the world map, if you go over to where the UK is, right there between Ireland
and Denmark, it looks like it's the United Kingdom and there's a radio tower with a little
parenthesis, it looks like sound waves, that's the number station, so check, click on that
and let it play through some of the music for you, don't know if you're really into ambient
music, I'm not really into it, but with this it's actually, it fits really well, this
is really cool stuff, so check that out, all right, a little gadget that I came across,
I subscribed to a website where they had like a deal of the day type of thing, maybe
I'll talk about that one day, it's a pretty cool website, I don't know if it's global,
international or not, but there's a lot of stuff in this area where I live in North Carolina,
but in the right they had a pop up, came through on the email for a update on it and it was
something that was called the Wallet Ninja and it was, it was like ten bucks and it is a piece
of steel that is the size of the credit card and it will fit into the standard wallet credit card
slot and this is, it has all kinds of little gadgets, like a ruler, two inch ruler, there's
multiple screwdrivers, there are, is a letter opener, a box opener, there's a section where
the cutouts for the screwdrivers actually make hex wrenches, there's a bottle opener,
a can opener and there's a really cool little slit that's cut out and down the bottom of it
and what you do, you can slide a credit, it says insert card, so like a credit card or
I'll probably use something like a, one of those, what they call them like a VIP card or something
from a grocery store or a convenient store or something, or it's a frequent participant,
I don't know what you call those things, it's like you get this little card and if you have
this card then you get the deal of the day or whatever, two for five dollars or whatever with
your discount, what they call, but I would probably use one of those, not certainly a credit card or
something like that, but you can, anyway, so what you do is you slide this, slide a card
into that little slot and so it pokes out a little bit on one side and it makes a little
stand and you can put your cell phone right there on it, which that would really come in handy
I think for, well, I guess it would come in handy, you could stand it up and you know
watch YouTube videos or something like that while you're at work,
but it's pretty cool looking, I haven't gotten it yet obviously, but it's made of steel and it's,
looks like it's pretty durable, there's only ten bucks so what the hey, and it'll certainly be
something that I'm gonna put into the daily bag that I carry around and it'll go really nicely
with my land throwing star, something really funny when I saw it, it came up and it said that it was
TSA approved approved for carry on during flight, so just to make sure that you can carry this
thing on the plane with you, you're good to go, so, anyway, if you're looking for something like
a little gadget that has a bunch of little screwdrivers and little gimmicks and stuff like that,
it's pretty small looking, obviously it fits into a wallet credit card slot, so it's not huge,
so it should be about this exact size of a credit card, so, hey, right, give it a shot, look at,
take a peek at the link in the show notes and see what you think. All right, the last thing I want
to tell you about is a band, and this is a friend of mine's band, even though he has a friend of mine
and he has been for a very long time, I would still love to tell you about this band, they are called Dream
the Electric Sleep, they are based out of Lexington, Lexington, Kentucky and the US,
but they do play out quite often into other venues outside of that area, they just released their
second album and I have to say this album is fantastic, even though he's been a friend of mine for
a very long time, I would still highly recommend this album to people of this, the list is kind of
music, they play progressive rock, it's not real heavy, it's actually pretty mellow, very thought
provoking lyrics, very well written music, so if you're into something kind of like maybe like
porcupine tree style, maybe something like a really good meridian for those in the UK, they might
know that band, I don't know, you'd have to take a listen to it, if you go to the website and
it's, I'll put a link to their site in the show notes of course, but if you go to their site, there
is a section over on the left hand side where you can listen to the tracks of their new new album,
there's a few of the tracks that you can buy as singles, but there's also a link at the top
to the shop where you can buy their, both of their albums, their first album, if I'm not mistaken,
when it first came out they just gave it away, but I think that they remastered it or something
and they put it out for sale or whatnot, I might be mistaken, but this one, it goes through band
camp, so the band gets quite a bit of the revenue from the direct sale, I think I had a
a deal on their site where you can get a t-shirt and a copy of the CD, and then you also got a
link to a direct download for file formats of, I think it's Og and Flack and MP3 and there might
have been a few others in there, I can't remember, but if you're into that kind of music like
progressive rock style music, give them a shot, just go to the website and just listen to some of it,
I think you would really like it if you're into rock music at all, they've had a few write-ups
in some progressive rock magazines, everybody's been saying how great it is, so it's been really
well received, they mostly play live in the US in Lexington, Tukki where they are
originating from, of course, but they do play quite a few times, I think they play there just about
every year at a, it's called the Ride of Spring Festival, but I can't remember where that is,
for some reason Colorado is springing in a bell, but that might be wrong, it looks like from their
website in July, they're playing at a place called the Night of the Prague Festival in Germany,
and if you're in the area and you know of this festival, this venue looks amazing,
the pictures that they have on the website for where the festival is going to be held,
looks fantastic, it looks right over the Rhine area, Rhine River, yeah, well,
this is, there's a picture of it, it says this venue in the area of the
Lorele with the river Rhine, and there's this, this looks great, I'll just like to go there,
even without the festival, so if you're into, like I said, progressive rock, and I want to check
them out, go over to the website, and hopefully you will purchase a CD, and maybe their last CD,
as well as a T-shirt or whatnot to support the band, and if you are into it, please let me know
what you think of it, I'm sure that my friend would love to hear the feedback,
again the name of the band is called Dream the Electric Sheep, and their new album is called Heretics,
so give them a listen, thanks, all right, well that's about all I got for you today,
a really cool app, pod catcher for the Android Beyond Pod, awesome website, you're listening to
kind of chill out, gadget, the wallet ninja, and some other really cool music as you're,
when you're not listening to your podcast, the Beyond Pod, you can check out Dream the Electric Sheep,
thank you all for listening, and if you have not yet, please consider going over to
HackerPublicRadio.org and contributing a show, thanks a lot, have a great day, bye bye.
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