Episode: 4424
Title: HPR4424: How I use Newsboat for Podcasts and Reddit
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4424/hpr4424.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-26 00:33:31

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This is Hacker Public Radio episode 4,424 for Thursday the 17th of July 2025.
Today's show is entitled, How I Use Newsboat for Podcasts and Reddit.
It is hosted by Archer72 and is about 6 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is, Archer72 talks about how he uses newsboat and podboat together for podcast
listening.
Hello, this is your host Archer72 for another episode of Hacker Public Radio.
In this episode, I talk about how I use newsboat and podboat for a couple of tasks.
I don't always use podboat for podcasts, but it is useful when listening from my laptop.
For my other podcast listening, I use antenna pod on my Android phone.
Newsboat source of feeds is from the URL list until the slash dot config slash newsboat
slash URLs.
To organize the URL list, tags can be used along with the description of the feed.
This only gives an internal description as the main title is determined by the RSS
feed itself.
This can be manually set, for example, in the HPR future feed.
The default feed title is the same as the feed for the two weeks.
To set this manual, you'll use the tilde before the feed title shown in this example.
Tags follow the feed title typed in parentheses with no spaces.
Multiple tags can be used here, and here I give an example as seen in the shown notes.
But everything I have in the URL list is from podcasts.
Some of them are from Reddit and some are YouTube channels.
The first item I go to in the morning is my daily Bible verse.
I heard one of the new hosts mentioned that he reads some and thought it might be interesting
to include this for some.
The next two entries are from Reddit and can be modified to contain the RSS feed in
this way.
Replace the slash R slash command line with slash R slash command line dot RSS and add title
and tag in this example.
The next entry which I included only one is the Lemme instance for lemme dot SDF dot org.
Lemme is part of the Fediverse and became popular after the June 2023 controversy involving
charging a excessive money for Reddit's API.
This in turn caused third party Reddit apps to be no longer viable.
Next we'll start on a tilde slash config slash newsboat slash config file.
When in Curing a podcast for pod boat I changed the default download path to tilde slash
downloads slash podcasts where the download path to those slash downloads slash podcasts
slash percent H H slash percent N where percent H is the host name and percent N is the
podcast name.
The file name is formatted in the following way.
Percent N space dash space percent T period percent U where percent N is the podcast name
percent T is the podcast title and percent U indicates the file extension.
There is a custom line for pod list format which for podcast purposes I won't list out.
This includes a download index to four places percentage of each podcast downloaded and podcast
status.
When I use pod boat after the set of podcasts are unqueued I found a way to monitor the Bluetooth
connection in order to pause a show with the Bluetooth button on an earbud.
The first part of this puzzle is to have Empress proxy which is included in the bluesy
utils found on the wiki for the arch Linux wiki then enable the service with system control
user enable Empress Empress proxy to service and system control dash dash user start Empress
proxy service.
After that get clone the following repo that I'll leave in the show notes and I'll leave
the source to where I found this and then CD to Empress and use the make command with
the resulting Empress dot SO copied to tilde slash dot config slash MPB slash scripts.
So that's all I have for now.
Next time I'll be sure to highlight more things in my URL list for my newsboat config.
Until next time this has been archer 72 for hacker public radio.
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