Episode: 3512
Title: HPR3512: Auld Acquaintance
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3512/hpr3512.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 00:46:29

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This is Haka Public Radio Episode 3512 for Tuesday 18th of January 2022.
Today's show is entitled, All the Twentons.
It is hosted by Jezre and is about 11 minutes long and carries a clean flag.
The summer is, flap incomes of Utold hardware and how I use it.
hahaha
Should all the quaintons be
I've never got a never powered on no they should not be forgotten and they should be powered
on.
Hello HPR listeners my name is Jezre and today I'm recording an HPR episode on an old
piece of hardware and this episode in fact will be about that old piece of hardware.
The hardware that I am recording on is a Toshiba satellite L445-S5000.
This computer is a laptop, was released in 2009, it has 250GB hard drive, amazingly huge
yes I know.
A 15.6 inch screen which I absolutely love, I mean it's huge, it is a big screen, it's
probably why I still continue to use this piece of hardware.
There is two gigabytes of RAM and a DVD drive, by no means is this a fast machine, especially
compared to contemporary standards of what one thinks of as a fast machine.
Nor can it do two things it wants, I can do one thing at a time.
For example right now I am recording on this computer using Audacity and I could probably
open up Firefox at the same time, it would not be ideal and it would take a couple seconds
for the Firefox app to load but that's okay because I don't need to use this computer
to do multiple things at a time, really I need it to do one thing at a time.
For example right now I am recording an HPR episode using this 12 year old laptop.
To be honest I am not using just the laptop to record this episode, I also have a USB headset
that is recording the audio and I need to use this USB headset because I have disassembled
this laptop a few times, multiple times.
Using the disassemble, reassemble process one of the speaker wires got ripped out and
the microphone wire got ripped out so what I have is a fairly weak laptop with an amazing
screen that has a single speaker, no microphone, limited RAM, slow processor, oh that would
be a single core Intel 2.2 GHz processor by the way.
This laptop is the last device I purchased where I had to pay the Microsoft tax.
That is to say I purchased a laptop that had Microsoft Windows pre-installed and I replaced
that installation with Linux and therefore I should get a refund for that licensing fee
for Microsoft which of course OEMs are not very fond of providing and I never got a refund
for it.
But that is okay.
Currently this device is running Arch Linux using kernel 5.15.12 which was compiled
Wednesday December 29th 2021 so it is still fairly recent kernel and because I am running
Arch which is a rolling release all of my software is currently up to date.
This is a computer that is over a decade old running the latest and greatest version
of Audacity and Firefox and Terminal and it does exactly what I needed to do which isn't
really much.
What I primarily use this laptop for is transferring images off of my digital camera onto
a computer so that I can then manipulate the images, crop them that sort of thing.
And the process goes something like this.
It's morning time.
I've made some coffee.
I'm sipping that coffee.
I'm looking out the window where I live there is a pond so it's quite frequent that when
I look out the window there's going to be an interesting critter near the pond that
I want to take a picture of and I will put down my cup of coffee and I will pick up my
digital camera.
It is a Canon OES77D and I will go outside and click it click click click click click click
click some pictures of well mostly it's been waterfowl ducks, herons well I guess herons
aren't exactly waterfowl.
So waterfowl and still chickens so the long-legged birds and ducks and geese that sort of thing
the occasional American river otter and whatever else happens to be around.
So I'll take those pictures and I will come back inside connect my camera to this laptop
with a USB cable and then I will run a very basic shell script that I wrote that I call
Get Photos.
Yeah how boring is that?
And what Get Photos will do it is a wrapper for the gphoto2 library if you don't know
what the gphoto2 library is.
The basic description from Wikipedia is this.
Gphoto is a set of software applications and libraries for use in digital photography.
Gphoto supports not just retrieving of images from camera devices but also upload and remote
controlled configuration and capture depending on whether the camera supports those features
released under the GNU lesser general public license.
Gphoto is free software.
The script I use is written in bash and has six commands that do the following.
Termin the name of a target directory and the target directory for me is home slash
user which is me slash photos slash a formatted date which is in the YYYY-MM-DD underscore
hm format basically.
So it will be the full year dash the month zero padded dash the day zero padded underscore
the hour and minute which are also zero padded.
And that creates a unique directory every single time I run this script.
So I will take a bunch of pictures and then I'll come inside and transfer the pictures
onto the computer and it will put all of those pictures in a directory named for now basically
whenever I run the script.
Once the directory name is determined make der creates that directory then the script
CDs into that directory and at that point I run pkill dash f gphoto to just end all
instances of gphoto to when the camera is plugged into the laptop and powered on the desktop
environment which for me is LXDE starts running some gphoto to determine whether or not
I want to mount the device as a drive or some such.
And so I just have the script kill that because that means absolutely nothing for me.
I don't want that.
The fifth line or I should say the fifth command is gphoto to dash dash get dash all dash
files which unsurprisingly gets all files from the camera and saves them to the directory.
After that the script runs gphoto to dash capital D cash capital R which will delete recursively
all of the files on the camera.
So to recap make a directory based on the date and time now CD into that directory kill
all instances of gphoto to get all photos from the camera into the directory and then
delete all photos on the camera.
At that point the script is done.
So the camera is turned off and unplugged from the laptop.
Then I open up the images in no max which is a lightweight qt based image viewer and editor
that runs much more smoothly on this computer than the gimp.
To be honest for what I need to do the gimp is going to be way overpowered.
It is an incredibly powerful software that I love but when I just need to crop an image
or resize an image especially on a low power computer I'm going to use different piece
of software.
As I go through the images using no max I will delete the images that are out of focus,
blurry, don't show what I want to see.
And then start finding certain images that I really want to crop and save and that's
what I do.
I'll crop it and save it and then upload it somewhere and make some witty comment about
there was a merganser or there was a barking water skunk.
That would be a river hunter by the way.
Really a stilt chicken comment about an eagre or heron and makes me laugh so it's good.
And then eventually I finally will record an hbr episode about the entire process and
upload that as well.
So there you have it folks my old acquaintance and how I use this old acquaintance.
Do you by chance have an old piece of hardware lying around that you still use because for
whatever reason you just can't get rid of it?
Cool!
I want to hear about it please record a show so that I can and on that note have yourself
a wonderful day.
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