Episode: 1001
Title: HPR1001: HPR Community News May 2012
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1001/hpr1001.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-17 17:12:22

---

Hi everybody, this is Ken here with episode 1001 of Hacker Public Radio, which is the
monthly review show for last month, May 2001.
It's just me today and if you're not familiar with this show, we try to give a rundown on
what's been happening in and around the community of Hacker Public Radio, what's been going
on the mailing list and on the social networks as well as any news that's been going on
in the background that you might not be aware of.
First thing we like to do is introduce new hosts and we've had one host to come forward
this month.
Big Rider Clock and I apologise for butchering your name handle but you're very welcome
to Hacker Public Radio.
And in the first segment we'll go through the shows that have been put on in the last
month.
After the community news show last year, we had Frank Bell with the second in his series
on how to set up a WordPress blog and finding these very interesting as we're about to move
to our WordPress backend here on Hacker Public Radio in the coming months.
The following day was the HPR Audio Book Club, Clat 2, Resno and I think Polki reviewed
Dead Hunt and it was an interesting show where the author actually gives some feedback
in some of the show notes.
They, I didn't read this book myself as I am not a big fan of the genre to be honest
but I did enjoy listening to the episode.
The next book will be Space Casey, podibooks.com for such title, for such space, dash Casey
and I've already listened to this book so hopefully I'll be able to give some feedback
for the next Audio Book Club.
The following day was our syndicated Thursdays, first Thursday of the month, Sunday morning
Linux Review Episode 29.
And following that was an interview I did with Chris Condor of the Broadband for Rural
North and I must say I was very excited to do this as this is a fine example of the
community and the true sense of the word coming together to do something that will benefit
all the community even though they might not understand it or whatever.
This has actually the makings of a good movie if not a documentary and I'm glad to say
two things I'll be going to our camp and our camp there will be a presentation hopefully
by one of the team technical presentation by one of the team on broadband for Rural
North so hopefully we'll be hearing more from them and I'm trying to figure out how
I can get up to them from Liverpool on the Monday to actually plug into the network
and perhaps upload some shows from there.
As a side note in the interview I suggested that it would be a good idea for people to
be able to sponsor a meter of cable.
Well Chris took that idea back to the committee and I'm thrilled to see that if you go to
barn.org.uk that's b4 the number 4 red.org.uk4-sponsor-a-meter and you can get your name
written on a meter of cable for 5 pounds or you can get the whole family's name for
mere 20 pounds and this is if you're going right now you'll get your name on one of the
big fat backbone and you'll have satisfaction in knowing that you're at least able to contribute
to gigabit speeds if you're not actually able to get them yourself and as I said before
anybody who donates to this project just send me a link to the flicker photograph that's
on the bar on website and I'll make sure that we send you some HPR Shwag for supporting
this endeavor.
The day after that we had Ahushka with the review of the Indiana Linux Fest and I think this
is actually an area where HPR is carving out a fantastic niche in our niche or whatever
niche in for itself being the backroom reporters for Fest and giving people an excellent
rundown of the Fest and the feeling about it and what went on at the show and thanks very
much for enabling us who are not able to get to these shows to have a sense of what it's
like and what the community feels like.
The following day we had episode 5 of Linux in the Shell PMOt command which I had not
been aware of and Dan claims that I don't listen to Dils but that's not true.
He claims he listed it there but to be honest I'd never heard about it before, probably
didn't have a lot of need for it but has with a lot of things in Linux sometimes things
just turn up at the right time.
And again we had Ahushka with Ahuka, I'm sorry, murdering people's handles I do apologize
it's become a tradition as I said before, freedom is not free episode 5 getting involved
and I couldn't really agree more.
This is also a fantastic episode and I'm glad that he took the time to put that together.
And we had on syndicate of Thursday's a specially edited show by the going Linux podcast
Larry Bushy and Tom Schwadwar which I butchered again, I do seriously miss Poki for being able
to pronounce these names unfortunately, he couldn't be here with us today and they gave
a rundown of what they used to produce their podcast and it's all quite nicely laid
out in the show notes with links to and to what they were talking about.
The following day was Lynx Fest Northwest, a short talk with Thomas Stover by Dan Whitman
Dan was up at that festival and did a HPR booth for us and more ideas and initiatives
from David will be forthcoming later in the show.
Again he also did excellent coverage of the show and I really had a sense of what the atmosphere
was like at the event and far from the interesting audio, detracting from the episodes they
gave it a sense of somebody having a conversation with the participants so I'd like to thank
David for doing that for us and putting the time in to get these shows out and as has already
been discussed I think last year on the mailing list we have a priority given for people
who go to events so that we can reserve a block of shows for them when and as they edit them
so that they're more timely around the time of the event and that's why this whole week has
been given over two interviews that David recorded from the show.
The following day was an interview with Scott Newland from the Mintcast and given an interesting
insight into the Mintcast community.
Larry Carr failure role was a crunch bang die and he had the interview the following day
and then we had Dawn McKenna of McKenna interpreting services.
Now David sent an email to me which I just for one reason another has been very busy on
the mailing list I only picked up on and it was about whether the show was truncated or
not.
Now I tend to download all the shows, well once I post the shows I open them and be able
to see and make sure that I can listen to the front, middle and end of the shows so that
they're all three so that they're posted and I also download the MP3 and org version
as well on my own feed which I get during the day and the evening on the train home which
I then list that's actually when I listen to the shows.
He claimed that when he downloaded it was only partially downloaded for him so if anyone
ever comes across partially downloaded shows, especially with this one, could they immediately
get in contact with admin at hackappublicradio.org or nip into the IRC channel and contact
Polki or Cloutu or 5150 or any of the guys there so that we can get it sorted ASAP.
This turned out to be quite an interesting show as my wife is also interested in becoming
silent on which interpreter.
The following day was a syndicated Thursday, juiced penguin went episode 79 early spring
and this one was, if you don't know what juiced penguin is it's kind of like a hackappublic
radio for pod safe music.
It was done by ToryF this particular episode but if you're interested in putting a music
show together, strictly music you can do that and release your shows over there on
juiced penguin which is an excellent resource again, like hackappublic radio it's a life
slacker box chocolates you never know what you get when we could might be all country
or mastering and then next week, next time it might be all metal but as with anything
else it is interesting what people listen to and through the joys of the fast forward
button you can always skip ahead.
So 990 was the portable apps episode by JWP where he run down a lot of the portable applications
that are available on windows on the website portableapps.com this is a fantastic resource
especially if you're working on servers or you're working on lockdown machines where
you need some utilities like potty or secure copy or a win-md5 sum or a win-dur stat which
is a utility for displaying win-d files graphical view of the what files are take how big
your files are on your hard disk, win-diff, wait, compare two files then you have of course
the Firefox and the Office applications. So an excellent, excellent view at this resource
that even though you might live on Linux from time to time if you have to admin Windows
servers or you have a Windows machine these are useful utilities for virtually doing anything
and usually doing it a lot better. I'd reason to defragment a Windows disk with the
view to turning it into a to shrink it down to be a dual boot situation and ultra-defrag
actually gets around a lot of the limitations that commercial defragmentors have on windows
so be sure and consider these applications if you're on Windows. The following day was
a new contribution making a music sampler with MIDI and Pi game and I listened to this
one while I was on my vacation at a week camping up in Fleeland in the north of the Netherlands.
Very very beautiful area if you're ever over it's a nice unspoiled area but I happened
to my back doesn't like very much sleeping in a tent so I was in a bit of agony while
I was listening to that and yet I thoroughly enjoyed the show. The following day we had
Linux in the shell 007 with my attempt to be to be funny on the show notes I don't know
if anyone picked up on that but anyway again Dan giving us some fantastic information
here and these again I'm going to be playing for our sort of Friday Linux sessions to explain
the changement command to a lot of people this is he has an ability to take command and just
nail it getting rid of all confusion about the command explainingly clearly and putting it to bed
and in the future if anyone ever asked me a question about the changement command I will hand them
the link to his website video the text description and the audio description so no matter how you learn
best there's something there Dan's covered it so well done Dan I really am so thrilled that you're
sharing this knowledge with us the following day again Frank Bell setting up a WordPress blog tweaking
the appearance and Frank is surprisingly with this WordPress series because he is obviously very
experienced at that and Frank has been promoted to be the main WordPress admin on the Hacker
Public Radio website which will be news for him but there you go that's how you get jobs here
in Hacker Public Radio you become an expert at it then we had the Northeast Linux Fest John
Mad Dog Hall talking about talking about free software and this was an interview taken John
is a regular speaker as events I haven't had the opportunity to catch any of his talks live but
I'm very glad that the guys recorded this and put it on to syndicate the Thursdays just remember
that back in episode seven six seven tattoo did an interview with Mad Dog on super dumb computer
terminals which you might want to catch as well links are in the show notes yes the following day
episode nine nine five do the four freedoms extend to stand beyond software and this one had me a
little bit razzled I must say because when I heard the feedback on when I was listening to
Linux for the rest of us somebody claimed that the four freedoms only cover programming and not
the code it is not it is only the code that is covered in the four freedoms and you know from
the outset that's ridiculous because of the whole ice weasel Firefox thing and in Debian where
they can't release the trademark names so obviously right there it goes beyond the code releasing
an application goes beyond code the fact that cento s has to strip off the red hat logos and the name
and they can't reuse that obviously if nobody else was able to come out with logos or names for
cento s then you know it's if it's more than the application
however I didn't need to do that because right on the free software definition it says at the
bottom of the page it's it clearly states that the definition of free software has been extended
to the definition of free kosher works applicable tiny kind of work so if you are worried that you're
not contributing back to the four freedoms and that you're stealing software from the free software
community which again is impossible to do because it's there to be stolen as such you are in fact
doing so because the creative commons attribution share like three unported license which
I could probably really always release to under is a copy left license and has been approved by
nobody less than Bradley Kuhn from the free as in freedom podcast who when we transferred over to
that license said that we could syndicate any of his shows because it was a free license so take
whatever it was that said that the following day we had JWP with a command line cheat sheet which
is released under a creative commons license you should print this off and put it onto a t-shirt
and he runs through some of the common commands that you can use on the command line and this
actually encouraged me to get a silent PC running here in the house and I had everything going but
for some reason I can't get the audio to be anything more than a quiet whisper in the background
it's a known reporter problem but all the fixes that I've tried don't resolve it so Alas
Pindicass I've just been able to month of evenings trying to get this thing working
I can't it's failing to do what I wanted to do which was play podcasts and music and delivering
so Alas I'll wait for my Raspberry Pi to come on then we'll see what we go there the following day
we had poorly recorded thoughts on rural computing by lost and Bronx and I think we should all
focus our attention on considering are we going to have a digital divide with people where people
assume that you can get Netflix streaming or love film or you can download torrents and yet
there are people who are working a little more than dialogue connections so I wonder is it time
to like the electrification of the nation that a fiber optic cable is laid to every house home
in the land is it time for that and yes this would be a good incentive for these troubled times
where we might want to get people back to work get them skills in IT yeah it's something to consider
which is why I was so interested in what the people in the broadband for rural north were doing
with their cables now obviously their situation is different that's it's a different place
than the Arizona desert so but interesting solutions and good internet connectivity is becoming
very very important for animation the following day we had Viva Lefederation in my bill in Windigo
explaining how they set up status dot net and seemed like a very
complicated thing to do at the beginning of the episode I was thinking of doing of myself but then
was thinking I couldn't decide against that seems far far too complex I think I'll wait for version
one or her version two to come out the next day episode 999 was Simon Fipps on open source software
and Simon Fipps is now director I don't know or headhunt you at the open source OSI open source initiative
and I found the talk interesting it was given that odd camp but as I was in the booth at odd camp
I didn't get to hear any of the talks and I found that his approach was quite free software
foundation-ish for freedoms as opposed to what the OSI would be more about the availability of
the open code but again thank you to Robin for putting that show together for us and I know
there's a few more in the queue and finally the last episode was episode 1000 5150's mammoth
task of editing all the various different clips and greetings and various different formats and
various different levels put them together into cohesive and I must say touching
and show and when I listen to it I've listened to it a few times since then and as Poki says he feels
I was a little bit touched and really feel part of a very worldwide community where we had people
from at least I think three or four different continents calling people from many different countries
people from obviously many different backgrounds calling in and really gave me an
excellent sense of community but again don't forget that this is episode 1000 and as a Lord
Dragonbloth pointed out correctly that there are 300 episodes of TWAT radio today with a techy
radio out there on twattech.org and to be honest we should be consider ourselves an episode 1000
and 1,300 and one today obviously and with that I bring you to an email message that I
received from 5150 who not satisfied with putting episode 1000 together he's putting
and I'll just read the announcement here. Hackle Public Radio is inviting the participants
in the podcast and organizations that preceded HPR and led to its creation to join a recording
panel discussion on HPR's origins and history. We are reaching out to TWAT tech, bin rev radio,
radio freak america, pod fret and the infonomicom computer club and contributors for the first 12
months of HPR. The discussion will be recorded via linux basics mumble server which is mumble.openspeak.cc
and the port is 64747 and it will be reached as HPR episode 1024 stankdog's idea.
Episode 1024 should fall on the 5th of July and we would like to wish shoes for recording the panel
about two weeks beforehand. In case of a technical or other unforeseen problems on the primary
recording date a two week lead will give us time to regroup and make a second attempt.
The date and time will be set up to make it convenient for the greatest number of people who are
willing to participate to join us. Connections over Skype and zip telephone via asterix will be
possible but it will be simplest if everybody would try to use the open source mumble client.
If you decide to join in and we hope you do please include the time zone where you will be in
in mid-June especially if you are outside the continental United States.
If there are dates days of the week or times that you would like to avoid scheduling
the panel i will be gone on june 19th to the 21st. I could only do it on a weekend only after
3pm only after 10pm. Editors note please include your time zone. He would like to know as well
and you can contact the organizers at ep1k at hackupublicradio.org. Also he has been trying to contact
some of the original hosts from the track tech era. So if you're Adam, coder 365, Darkshadow,
D-Raven, Cartrine, Lunar Sphere, Mystery, Space Out, Faustfreaker, Killer Smurf, Dominic,
Urlando, Livindead, J-Hood, Skire, Kitches, Pixie, Skade, Williamson, Piezone, Operator,
Black Ratchet, Merck or Doctor Zigman. Could you please contact 5150 or if you know these people,
can you please send them a message to let them know what we're trying to do and that we're trying
to get back in touch. Okay that was it from 5150. Now some other things that have been going on
in the background. There has been a question about swearing and whether you should put a safe
for Rulerk or not say for work message on the front of your podcast and as always hacker public
radio just again to let you know that no editing has been done and on the show it will be posted
as is sorry editing will be done on the format of the show but no editing will be done on the
the content. We don't listen to the shows beforehand other than to make sure that not spam.
So if you want to include warnings or that sort of thing at the beginning of your show feel
free to do so if you choose not to do so as well people should be aware of when listening to
hacker public radio that it is intended to be an open forum and it has an explicit tag iTunes so
whether you choose to have episodes played without parental supervision or played elsewhere
in the public is risky so you should be sure to take appropriate action against that.
For a while the colon line was down in the US due largely to the fact that Mr. Gadgets would
ring in once a month with a show and because he took some time off to learn Python and I hope
that was not due to the conversation with the person and the pub we lost the phone line and K5
talks who graciously is running that service first. Gadgets a new number and saw the new numbers on
the website as well. There was a heated discussion on the mailing list not heated in a bad way he
did in a lot of people were contributing to it about whether we should have a dedicated news day
no discussion was taken on that because I wanted to make sure that as many people as possible
including people who listen to the show were involved in the conversation and it basically goes
down like this. We get quite a lot we're now getting quite a lot of contributions from the community
so that the queue is quite full we have about a month of shows left in the calendar.
I had put a calendar up where we included shows for the coming times the syndicated Thursday
show queue and I expanded out that if syndicated Thursdays came in I added a week in and if that
happened to be there would be a Friday show because we have DeepGeek coming in on a Friday
and if it was the first show of the month will be a HPR episode so it looked like our schedule was
pretty full. In actual fact our schedule is pretty yeah we got 20 shows in the queue at the moment
however I wouldn't be going around jumping around very much about that because if we look at it
we see that Ahuka has contributed about half of the shows and I have contributed three or
four other shows along with Frank Bell so again it is falling on certain people contributing
shows and pretty much everybody else is sitting back not contributing shows. Now people should be
contributing shows it's as simple as that and the more people who do the better. It looked like
we had loads and loads of shows because there are quite a few shows following the festival events
that contributed to us having a schedule that was pushed out into the coming months but in our
two effects that's not the case. But getting back to the point here about the discussion.
The discussion centers around the fact should we have a dedicated news day. DeepGeek releases
to us an edited version of this today with a techie news show which he releases every week
or I think three times, three weeks every month. He's been off on a sabbatical for a month or two
so during that time it's this discussion is a bit mute. Boss he edits out the political stuff
and puts in the technical news show and releases it to hacker public radio and as such we have
then only four days in the week of shows left. It also happened that the dev random guys uploaded
the show and because it just entered the queue as normal it arrived quite late and a lot of the
new stories that they were covering were out of date so I put forward the idea that we would on
Fridays have that as a new show so operating on a first end for a stout basis so that people
who submitted a new show would be able to get it out on the Thursday and that will be something
like the Sunday morning Linux review will go in their deep geeks show will go in there and
dev random would also go in there. There was much discussion about that and a lot of people
you really would like to read the email list about what's going on and before we take any
decisions and I'd like more people to get involved in the discussion so I will be posting a link
to the conversation so far about this. Then we had the Linux Fest north west there was David
sent in a report on what it was like at the booth which was a fantastic read and I think
everybody was very impressed with his with his feedback. He also offered to pay for a you know
like a big human sized banner which would stand on a next to the table you know free standing
on a wireframe and had put together a design for that a design which I think he had worked on and
then plateau went to work in it and then RF querying got hold of the fact that we were designing it
and designed a very nice banner with the one of the new HPR logos the atomic logo and then there
was quite a bit of discussion about you know where things should be and there was also a bit of
discussion about what the tagline should be should it be hackers for hackers or internet radio from
the community by the community for the community that sort of thing because I found myself the one
I was manning tables that people didn't know what hacker public radio was and I think a lot of
people were a bit nervous of the whole hacker word and while I don't want in any way to take
away from the fact that hack public radio is about hacking and we are all hackers as such
for people who are not familiar with the correct use of the word they they focus
for the tagline is important to give them a sense that hacker is not in the illegal sense here
that it's more about taking something extending it beyond its initial design intentions
so somebody I think was Richard come up with the tagline community driven internet radio
which also actually I think is a good description but it also describes what a podcast is and
and I know that some people were confused about thinking that we were a shortwave or FM lowband
F low power FM radio station so that was that's in the making and I must say I like the design
and I like the idea and I'm scouring to see if we can have one printed out over here for the
European booth kit on the development side we have the github site is up and running some I've
done some work on the queuing system which is going quite well but it struck me on the train that
what we should do really is simplify the whole thing and just have as many ways to upload a
file as possible where the metadata is stored in RSS file and that RSS file is also uploaded as part
of the audio that drop loading so regardless of whether you're uploading a flack a WAV MP3
everything encoded file that the RSS format of the file that you upload would be the show notes
associated with that now this is important because I had a look at the amount of
background work that goes on here at HPR towers and it's mostly me the pin biggest pain for me
is not the posting of the show I can do that in my sleep but I actually have written a little
script yet to do that and the transcoding is really a problem cold cruncher has written a
transcoding thing which we've also I just put another edit in to do some audio normalization so that
I had certain people complaining that the intro allowed to blast in their ears so hopefully that
will go somewhere to fixing that although we can never really go a full way to fixing that but
now it does that but meanwhile back to the point most of the time that is taken up with posting
shows is where I need to gather show notes together links images somebody uploaded something in
text I need to convert it to HTML I need to have their bullet points correct I need to link back
to the websites or for the syndicated shows just essentially gathering all the information
for talking to me I need to take the website and strip out the HTML make a series of links
at the bottom for linux and the shell it's kind of complicated I need to give
than the ideas that are going to be used then he needs to post the show then I need to go
over to him take an extract of his website podla on hours and then do the linking back so
on a week like where we have it's the second Tuesday it's the first day of the month where there's
syndicated Thursday and where there's a deep deep episode on I end up having been responsible for
four of the being the person responsible for four of the episodes put them together
show notes sorry for the episode put them together and then you know quite often somebody will
send in a contribution or if it's a dialing contribution for instance then there's no show notes
at all and the only thing that I can do there is just listen to the show and extract the show note
and that's fine it's not a problem but a lot of people do have show notes and those people that
do have show notes if I can get them into a standard RSS XML file easily then on the back end I can
write a script that will take that XML file out of the passage and put it into the correct place
and do all the nicely things with it so the call went out to the development mailing list to
basically have as many ways of writing that as possible so if you're on a command line
when you want to upload your show via the command line that you would run I don't know make show
and I just ask you questions and you fill in the text and it creates the HTML for you or if you're
on a you know javascript cool website with flashbang fail-in fail-design or whether it's you know
part of a just a simple um a simple GUI program for windows or whatever as many ways to upload
to fill out these notes as possible is would be ideal because even for a regular podcaster who's
doing their own show then it fills out all the fields from that that would be absolutely super
fantastic and nobody replied to me or so I thought um until today I was going through my mail we
had quite a lot of mail this month and I saw that David Morris sent in a not only sent in a show
which I haven't posted because I didn't know about it but also sending a um a
portal application that will do this first so David first of all sorry Dave first of all thank
you very much for doing that second of all apologies again for um completely missing your
submission and again apologies for missing your um your program and getting back to you about it
so that's it um I thought it was going to be a short episode turned out to be quite a long one
and I hope that I have pressed the record button or I will be bait my head against the wall
anyway with that um I want to thank everybody again who took the time to send in greetings for
episodes one thousand it brought a cheer to my I must say and I'm looking forward to
episode one thousand and twenty four and what I've decided to do in my own infinite wisdom
is over the coming um weeks or so I may be playing some uh classic episodes from radio freak
america infanomacan bin rev radio to attack some of the original hpr episodes some some stuff
like that might come into the queue between now and one or two four okay with that I'll uh close up
and just invite you all again to remember that uh hpr is about the community
community driven internet radio as we say and uh I'd like all hackers out there to pick up the mic
those of you who sent in a greeting and have them sent in a show uh thank you very much for
doing that but uh also realize how easy it was to do you know we have the phone line there
you can pick up the phone down one of the phone lines say you're sure it doesn't have to be a
three-hour extravaganza like this it can be just a simple this is what I found I found this cool
website it does this and it solved my problem it might be of use to somebody else da da da da da da da
you have been listening to hacker public radio or takeer public radio does our we are a community
podcast network the release of shows every weekday Monday through Friday today's show like all our
shows was contributed by a hpr listener by yourself if you ever considered recording a podcast then
visit our website to find out how easy it really is hacker public radio was founded by the digital
dog pound and the infonomicum computer club hpr is funded by the binary revolution at binref.com
all binref projects are crowd-responsive by lunar pages from shared hosting to custom private
clouds go to lunar pages.com for all your hosting needs unless otherwise stasis today's show is
released under a creative comments attribution share a line he does our license