Episode: 4246
Title: HPR4246: Bytes, Pages and Screens
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4246/hpr4246.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 21:59:42

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4246 from Monday 11th of November 2024.
Today's show is entitled, Bites, Pages and Screens.
It is hosted by Lee and is about 12 minutes long.
It carries an explicit flag.
The summary is, Attract Through Some Podcasts, Books and Television Shows.
Hi I'm Lee.
Today I'm going to run through some of my favourite books, TV shows and podcasts.
I'll try to both describe what each one is about and give some context as to how I got
into it or what it meant to me.
Our start of podcasts and the best one I can think of all time, present podcast accepted,
was Linux Outlaws with Fabian Churchill and Dan Lynch, which ran for seven years starting
in 2007.
Hacker Public Radio Episode 319 even saw Mollochrome C start a series clear in homage
called Linux in-laws.
Linux Outlaws was both a very down-to-earth, informative and then entertaining mix of tech
news and general chat.
Although times have moved on, I think I could still go back and listen to any episode
even today and not be bored.
I'm also a fan of the Twitch or this week in tech network, which hosts a number of video
podcasts.
My favourite Twitch show was called Know How, especially the episodes hosted by ISACTAR
and also those hosted by Father Robert Ballaker.
These would get into some really interesting topics and would be fairly practical.
Another Twitch show, which is still running at the time of this recording, is Security
now featuring Steve Gibson.
It's about both current events in cybersecurity as well as some in-depth dives into certain subjects
and following this show eventually got me into studying cybersecurity at postgraduate
level.
Thirdly, there's Floss Weekly about Open Source Software, which I've followed for some
time with interest.
Twitch is a bit of a funny name for a podcast network and I confess to walking down the
street wearing a Twitch t-shirt, only to be on the receiving end of the comment with
a mixture of typical London humour and possibly some misreading involved, there goes a
twat.
Destination Linux was another American podcast I used to listen to and sometimes watch.
It was characterised by a four-way split screen and the different personalities worked
well together.
I was pleased one of the presenters at the time was a Brit, his name was Seb, who I believe
was associated with Peppamint OS, which I donated my remaining stock of refurbished Ubuntu
laptops to after I realised I couldn't make a profitable business out of selling them.
This podcast is still going strong and it seems as good as ever but I haven't watched
or listened to this for a while.
In some ways Linux has now become a prevalent and perhaps even mundane part of my everyday
life to extend I don't even notice I'm using it anymore.
In which case these podcasts have succeeded in their goal, Linux is no longer a destination
but my home.
Knowing that there is one Linux podcast which most HPR listeners will already be familiar
with that goes into such detail on every episode that I always learn something new.
This is going to be a world order presented by the HPR presenter Kletto, whose podcasts
have influenced my life in diverse ways, ranging from drinking coffee to composting and even
wanting to become an HPR host myself.
Now, best for books I've read and found resonated with me, I probably don't need to go into
too much detail about canonical sci-fi and fantasy novels like The Lord of the Rings
by JRR Tolkien or June by Frank Herbert, both of which I read as a young adult.
I won't mention War and Peace by Leah Tolstoy about the lives of well off Russians during
the time of the invasion by Napoleon.
I read this over 25 years ago but still think about it from time to time.
For example how the character of Pierre finally can stop living in the trap of his own head
after befriending a farmer who later dies while they march together as prisoners.
Or Prince Andrei looking up at the clouds when he's been injured as if he has never even
noticed them before.
Or the observation that those who recount traumatic experiences such as being in a battle really
tell what really happened.
This novel is famous for being long and I only read this once but think it was worth
the effort.
Going from classic literature to comic sci-fi, I have a fondness for the hitch I could
guide to the galaxy series of books by Douglas Adams.
I first got into this watching the BBC TV series and later at high school my maths teacher
lent me the radio series on cassette and I also played the text adventure game, didn't
get too far with it.
While at university when my fellow role-plates encouraged me to join the official hitchhiker's
fan club and that summer I went with her to a weekend event with other fans near Nottingham.
I also liked the Discworld books by Terry Pratchett that these are so numerous I've
only read some of them.
When a particular was mort about a young man who becomes apprentice to a personification
of death who has the catchphrase I could murder a curry.
I read this while on a course in Pershort near Nottingham and later saw a play adaptation
performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
More recently I read a couple of books by Neil Stephenson, recommended to me by someone
who I met a few times while running a meet-up at a local park during the pandemic lockdowns.
The first book was CryptoNomicon, loosely about code breaking both in the Second World
War and also more modern times.
This briefly features a more lighthearted, fictional depiction of Alan Churring which
is refreshing, given the many works about the import of his work and the tragedy of his
later life.
The second book was Anatham, set in a future in a world similar but not the same as ours
about a brother from a monastery of mass philosophy and science who encounters visitors
travelling between parallel universes.
Both of these books have a star that is both high and low-brow, somewhat entertaining
and also absorbing but they are relatively long and omit to sometimes skipping over parts
and then having to go back to reread.
She also recommended I read some high-line novels.
The ones I read were HaveSpaceItWillTravel, DoubleStar and LaterStrangerAndEstrangeLand.
The first, set in a future where space travel is common, is about an enthusiastic young
man who wins a space suit that leads him into adventures in space.
The second is about an actor who has to pretend to be the president of Earth to resolve
a diplomatic situation with Martians.
The third is about a man brought up by Martians who has developed special insight in abilities
and who are returning to Earth ends up founding a religion.
These books are of their time, for example the latter one does delve into the free love
phenomenon as it was emerging in the early 60s which the person who recommended the books
to me found off-putting.
StrangerAndEstrangeLand also introduced the word Grop into the English language, a Martian
concept having no English equivalent but meaning more or less to understand something fully
as opposed to just knowing it as a fact.
A few years previously I'd been recommended Orson Scott Cards Enders Game by someone who
herself had aspirations as a sci-fi author.
At the time this book was soon to be adapted to film.
The book has a number of themes, from the political impact of social media, written well
before social media had even been invented, the practice of training children to be soldiers
and also whether extremely destructive acts legitimised during the war time.
Sometime after reading this book I also read some of the sequels.
These come close in their subject matter to James Cameron's Avatar films and that they
explore the theme of the living organisms of a planet existing as a spiritual hull.
I was also somewhat of a fan of the Harry Potter novels by J.K. Rowling, having discovered
the first book discarded in the dustbin of a psychiatric ward.
I won't go into here what I was doing there while I was looking in dustbin.
For anyone somehow not familiar, it's about an orphan boy with abnormal abilities he
goes to a school that teaches magic.
My favourite of the series is the third one, the Prisoner of Azkaban, which she's the
young protagonist to discover about himself, he's not helpless, and might within himself
be capable of using even lethal force to address the mode of his parents and prevent further
harms.
Finally a series of books that I've got part way through, listening to as audio books
rather than reading are the Frontier Saga by Rick Brown.
I started listening to these as Steve Gibson talked about them on the security now podcast
I mentioned earlier.
They're mainly about interstellar war and borrow a little from Star Trek and Star Wars.
While they're not necessarily high-brow, they're quite entertaining, suspenseful, with plenty
of space warfare action as well as some politics, espionage and core technologies.
Talking of Star Trek, this leads me onto TV shows, and yes, I've watched on my SEVERING
CONNATION of Star Trek, the as-yet, unconcluded one at the time of recording being strange
new worlds.
But here's a TV show that has nothing to do with science fiction.
It's called Prison Cell Block H, setting a women's prison in Australia in the 1980s.
I would almost never fail to watch each episode with my mother as it was aired in the UK
around midnight once a week, even though I'd school the next day.
I'm not sure how or why this became a favourite, but perhaps her experience has been detained
in an institution as a young woman had something to do with why appeal to her.
The lighter side of Australian TV, which would often feature the same actors as the series
mentioned previously, was their soap operas, and these were especially popular in the
80s and 90s, and for some years I would always watch these, neighbors being the one that
preferred over home in a way.
They're absorbing at the time, but I don't think I would rewatch them now.
Coming back to recent years, I'll mention Mr Robot featuring Christians later, Rommie
Malak, and created by Sam Esmel.
This has a very realistic depiction of hacking, down to details of characters discussing whether
they prefer KDE Plasma or Nome as a desktop environment.
At the heart of it though, it's a fantasy, with a character afflicted by some sort of
psychosis or disassociation, trying to understand the world-changing events occurring around
him, of which he, without his knowledge, is the prime re-instigator of.
While I'm tempted now to go back again to talking about TV series of my youth, I think
I'll skip over the ones that come to mind that have since been rebooted, such as Mission
Impossible and Lost in Space, move on to something more contemporary.
The anthology Black Mirror by Charlie Brooker is often about technologies gone wrong.
It's possibly one of the best, though, also most disturbing TV series of recent years.
Some of the episodes were produced in my neck of the woods.
I know someone who has been an extra, and my sister has done work on the series as a
makeup artist.
Some of the humour, if you can call it that, is indeed very dark, and while I would say
watching this might be a cathartic way to deal with trauma, it's perhaps more advisable
to seek help from a psychiatric professional to deal with that than watch a TV programme.
While on a dark theme, I'm mentioning a show called Dexter, it had already been running
some time when it was recommended to me by a friend who was a computer game enthusiast,
who I used to meet at a neurodiversity group in the Puckney Academy Street in Central
London.
Having missed the first couple of series of Dexter, I then had to go back and watch these
to fully understand the backstory, but I was soon hooked.
It was really one of those shows I'd anticipate every new episode of, being about a crime
investigator who has turned vigilante in order to expiate his own demons.
While featuring James Reema, the eponymous star of Dexter is Michael C. Hall, who is
also known for six feet under, where he played a funeral director who has similarly led
a double life, concealing his sexuality prior to his father's death.
So I don't end an adult now, I'll talk about a TV series called Touch by an Angel.
This drama is religious with a smaller, much along the lines of the sci-fi series Quantum
Leap.
Each episode features a new set of characters and a new drama, which the regular protagonist
must help resolve.
The Angel's test and moniker make it contrasting pair, and like the appearance of an ill-fated
officer wearing a red uniform in Star Trek, whenever Andrew, the Angel of Death, aptly
played by John Dye, made an appearance, you knew things were not looking good for those
involved.
John Dye is also known for playing an idealistic soldier in the Vietnam drama Tour of Duty.
Angels of Death aside, Touch by an Angel was something light I'd watch with my mother regularly
for some years, we both liked it.
Well, in conclusion, this has been a somewhat random and not exhaustive list of my favourite
podcast books and TV programmes, none of them are too obscure, but I'll try to include
links to each one in the show notes in case you want to find out more.
That's all from me now, thanks for listening.