Episode: 3577
Title: HPR3577: Hello and how I got into tech
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3577/hpr3577.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 01:38:47

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3577 for Tuesday the 19th of April 2022.
Today's show is entitled, Hello and How I Got Into Tech.
It is part of the series How I Got Into Tech.
It is the first show by Newhost Sarah and is about 7 minutes long.
It carries an explicit flag.
The summary is, Hi, I'm Sarah and this is How I Got Into Tech.
Hello, I'm Sarah.
And after years of listening to HPR, I figured it was probably time to contribute.
I really don't like talking about myself, but it was mentioned in episode HPR 3546.
The community news for February 2022, that introducing yourself is the neighborly thing
to do.
So here I am.
I've gone through many handles in my online life, but I'm back to my original, which
is just my name.
I think it's kind of like hiding in plain sight.
So I thought I would talk a little bit about my geek history.
I've been messing with computers since my dad brought home a candy one day.
I have absolutely no recollection of how old I was.
I do remember reading the DOS manual that came with it, though.
So I know I could at least read.
Now the reason for why I was reading the DOS manual was because my mom did, and I constantly
stole all of the books that she was reading because I wanted to read them.
Eventually we upgraded computers over the years, and so I still remember when we got our
first Windows computer and having to type boot into DOS and then type WiN to get in.
During this time, my mom also started calling into local BBSs because she had started playing
diplomacy with folks on one of the local BBS's plus on NewsNet.
She even had the physical board game set up in her office that I was under orders to never
touch.
And naturally, along with everything else, I also wanted to call into the BBSs too.
So my mom got me an account on both of them that were only two in our hometown.
And that's how my online life got started.
I was probably about 9 or 10.
I played far too many doorgames that were way too old for me, like Legend of the Red
Dragon anyone, and I remember every day waiting for the twice-daily download of the
NewsNet groups.
I also remember that because there were two of us constantly going online that we actually
installed a second phone line in our house, which was very exciting.
My mom eventually found IRC, and naturally, because I always wanted to do what she was
doing, I followed.
And that's where I learned a ton.
I survived the early IRC wars, and I started playing around with Linux at this time.
Eventually, though, I went to university.
And I decided that part of it was peer pressure, if I'm completely honest, because people
were always giving me a hard time for, quote, playing with computers.
So what I did in university was I bought an Apple product.
I bought an iBook G4.
And while it was the easiest computer I've ever had to set up, I found it super frustrating
to get anything done on it.
I'm not sure if it was because of my time in Windows, or my time in Linux, but I do remember
being super frustrated and not being able to figure out how I uninstall a program.
It just wasn't intuitive for me.
And I still remember somebody's shocked face when they told me just drag the program
to the trash can.
And I was like, no, that's just ridiculous.
So anyway, I did like my iBook, but I soon realized that terminal was the fastest way
for me to get things done.
I found it much faster and much easier and more intuitive than the GUI.
Now unfortunately, iBook G4s had this little problem where one of the chips on the motherboard
would heat up and crack, which would give you lovely stripes on your screen and completely
render your iBook completely unusable.
So this actually happened to me three days before my warranty ended, and Apple refused
to do anything about it.
I remember standing in the genius bar and they said, well, there's new ones over there.
So I was left with an iBook that had probably about $800 of paid for MP3s with DRM because
this was like before Apple had decided to go DRM free.
So I was like, great, everything's now locked away.
I was trying to be against citizen, everything's now locked away.
So I quite literally cracked open my iBook, liberated my data, uncoupled together a computer
with various parts I had lying around, because you know, university.
So it was at that point that I started using Linux exclusively, mainly because I was
just so angry at Apple.
I actually ran Debbie and said, because I liked the challenge of everything constantly
breaking and having to figure out how to fix it.
It was like having a who done it mystery after every single update, like, oops, suddenly
my printer's not working.
So eventually I went on to get my master's in library science, and it turned out that
my penchant for playing around on computers was handy in this field.
And I ended up in charge of a Red Hat server and an Oracle database, a large-ish library
system.
So at this point, I figured, okay, I'd better step up my Linux game.
I'd better learn everything I possibly can.
So I did a stage one install of Gen 2.
It took two weeks and much swearing, along with much compiling, but eventually I figured
things out.
I really loved my time as a citizen.
It was fabulous and great, and any time I logged into the server, it said, Sarah's happy
place.
During this time, I also floated around many Linux projects, getting involved with Linux
Mint in Ubuntu, but my true Linux love will always be WN.
At my current work, I am regularly given things to break or break into, which is something
I've always been good at.
I like figuring out how things work, I like figuring out how things break, and how they
can be fixed.
I played Minecraft, an addiction that started mainly because it was one of the few games
that ran on Linux.
I don't mind as much as I used to, thanks to work, but I still try to.
I knit and I sew, and I'm interested in combining those with technology.
I mean, when you think about it, knitting is the original binary code.
So I'm hoping to contribute some shows on knitting, maybe some on information security,
hiking hacks that I figured out, sewing, messing around with many spare netbooks that I
currently have lying around the house, messing with the pile of Android phones that I seem
to have accumulated, and maybe I'll do one talking about stripping PDFs of digital
watermarks.
I've gotten also pretty good with Shotcut, the open source video at Indic Software, and
maybe I'll talk about some mysteries with my systems breaking.
Like right now, my Windows machine crashes anytime I try to access the document or video
directly in Windows Explorer, which is kind of annoying.
I might also do a few car repairs, depending on how my car holds up, so we'll see how that
works.
That kind of stuff.
Anyway, that's it for now.
Thanks for listening.
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