Episode: 1028 Title: HPR1028: Jonathan Kulp and NYbill: Goodwill Hunting Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1028/hpr1028.mp3 Transcribed: 2025-10-17 17:40:01 --- and Hello, this is NY Bill. I'm Jonathan Kulp. And this is your first time on HPR? Yes it is. I've heard HPR before, but this is my first time ever to participate in one of the shows. I'm very excited about that. You're another one that we talked about this ages ago, and we never get the ball rolling. But here we are. Yep, about time. Yeah, people may know me who, if they listen to Linux outlaws, they may know a bit of me there because they do speak my name sometimes. I'm the guy who made the classical guitar arrangement of the theme song and also made a version on harmonica, and I got the trumpet guy next door to me to play it on his trumpet. The trumpet guy recruiting everyone. Right, so I'm the resident music professor in the Linux outlaws community. And that's actually how you and I first came together also in the forums at Linux outlaws. Yeah, way back in the beginning of L.O. Yeah, we, a bunch of us just used to hang out in the forums every night. Those were the days. I know, it seems so strange now. When I think about going to the forums now, it just seems like, man, that would be so much trouble. And nobody's going to be there and you don't get that immediate interaction always that you do on the micro blogging and stuff. Yeah, you have to kind of read it every day or you get lost. Yeah. But I have to, well, I don't moderate much because we don't get much spammers anymore, but I still, I read it every day. Check it. Oh, that's cool. I post once about every four to six months. Usually when I prod you and say go over and answer this question. Or it used to be what happened was when identical went down suddenly we would all go back to the forums. Yeah, that's our old standby, I guess. Oh, man, I guess we have wind to go to thank for the title of our main topic. Right. Yeah, he posted the, well, this is a place where you can get technology items that I really know. And you are constantly in good wills. That's right. Good will is like the main place I shop in life. It's your new comp USA. Yeah, you're constantly on it. I just bought this for five bucks. Yeah, it's pretty amazing the stuff that I've been able to find. And you know, you don't always find great stuff at good will. But if you go often enough, then maybe once out of every ten times you'll find something that really makes it all worthwhile. And that's kind of the way I've done. I've been going to thrift stores since I was a teenager. And back then I went mainly so that I could buy a trench coat or some really bad polyester pants to wear just for fun. I think that's how my brother, he goes to Halloween parties every year. That seems to be where they get their get ups. Yeah, good will at least in Austin. It seems like they used to advertise around Halloween. You go to Goodwill and get your costume items here. You can be a disco guy for $18. Right. They don't have as many of the just awesome old polyester pants nowadays as they did back in about 1987. Got to have some parachute pants in there somewhere. Oh man, that would be awesome. Did you have them in high school? I did not ever have them. My mom was prudent enough where she just refused to spend what the 50 bucks or whatever it would cost to buy those stupid things. My mother told me years later she goes you got to pick your battles when you're raising kids. If he wants to wear those silly pants at least he's not doing drugs. There's something to that. My mom was very thrifty herself though and just would not pay that kind of money. And also I was in kind of the skater community. Well, we had a very tiny community and the skaters thought parachute pants were really stupid so we didn't wear those things. So the episode is about The Goodwill and we have wind to go to thank for the title of the episode because he made the joke in a identical about Goodwill haunting. So that's in the show notes. That's right. It's about Goodwill. You often mention that you shop at Goodwill and you get tech buys there. I never think to get that I'd get a computer item in a Goodwill. People wouldn't think so because when you first walk in all you see is racks and racks of crappy clothing. Yeah, but I've managed to find quite a few things there that have enhanced my tech experience quite a lot. I call it my Goodwill cluster. I've bought I think I've bought five or six computers there that for a span of about a month I seemed like every time I went I found another one. And so I bought a couple of Dell dimension desk tops and actually three of those I think one of them right now is my friendika and own cloud server. The my main my first one of these is a box by e-machines that I picked up for seven ninety nine. Yeah, you're always popping into identical saying you bought something awesome and it five bucks. I know that's amazing everybody jealous. The the e-machines box was really the one that started it all because it was actually a pretty decently specced computer for eight bucks. And I initially meant it to be just a backup machine for us to have in case the E-Mac ever went belly up but the E-Mac is still going strong. And when I decided to turn it into a web server was when we first started having problems with identical almost a year ago maybe eight and nine months ago when status net went up to 1.0 remember that. Oh, it started having problems there were database issues and all kinds of things it would be in the unfortunate role that was exactly the rollout for G plus and like exactly. The identical people jump ship. Yeah, a whole bunch of people bailed out and went to G plus size unfortunate. I was there for a while I was on G plus for a while too but it really G plus didn't really suit me the way identical did. And so there were a bunch of people who just bailed out completely and went to G plus and then there were others and some had already been doing this but there were a bunch of others who started saying look this is free stuff let's set up our own instances. So I did it and Jeremy Pope did and Windigo has one. Actually, Windigo and I have an HPR that will be out soon which is all about this like little era of ours when we all set up the status net stuff. Okay, yes that's cool so we don't have to go into that a lot but that was when I decided look if everyone else is doing this I had actually once set up status net over at school on my web server in my office just to use as a... Oh I recall that. Yeah, I have a private instance just to use with my students and we chat back and forth about stuff in my music classes and it's only for my students. And so I had done it before and I knew basically how to do it so I installed Debian stable on this e-machines box and got my status net instance going and it's been going ever since. $10 server. Pretty much. Joked one time that you don't go to Goodwill with more than $10 in your pocket. Right, it's good policy. Normally you don't need to. You don't want to start flashing the cache when you go in there you got to play poor. No, no, you don't want to tip them off. I probably should not go as often as I do they would get a heads up that I keep finding great things. You see it coming down the street quick go get all the tech stuff out of the back room. Yeah, the latest thing that I found there that's maybe my favorite of all of my Goodwill cluster purchases was a Mac Mini for $4.99. That's $5.00 bucks, that's great. For a Mac Mini and it was perfect. I mean it's not like I wanted a Mac or anything but I had been trying to find a way to get a low powered very small quiet server. And I had actually specced out a motherboard and a case and RAM and a hard drive and all that and put it on my Amazon wish list. And it was going to cost over 200 bucks I think for all of that. And then I found this Mac Mini for $5 and brought it home and it worked perfectly. Now these are the ones I'm not like real familiar with Macs but these are the ones that are like the size of like a portable CD drive like maybe twice the height. It's like a square weight thing. Yeah, okay. Yeah, it's basically the size of the optical drive is what makes it have to be as big as it is. It's probably six or eight inches square and then about two inches tall. Yeah, I've seen them online. It's a little bitty. It's got one gig of RAM, a G4, 1.25 gig hertz processor, a 40 gig hard drive. And it's basically perfect for my status net server. Do you think that they don't know that this stuff is worth a bit more than that or they just want the high turnover? It could be both. If they listen to this, is it going to mark everything up on you? Believe me, they won't listen to it. The Mac Mini, I'm not sure they knew it was a computer. Oh right. Because it doesn't really look like a computer unless you already know what it is. But they might not have known. Now, here they just have a policy. Any computer pretty much is priced at $7.99. Wow. And except for the one I bought, I was going to buy this one that was priced at $9.99. That's crazy tall. So, no, no, listen, they had also with it a keyboard and a monitor and a mouse and two speakers. And I said, look, I don't want all that other stuff. I just want the box. And they said, oh, in that case, it'll be $3.99. Oh my goodness. You got them over a barrel, man. Look, I was prepared to pay the 10 bucks and just leave all that other stuff with them. Because I didn't want it. I didn't want that big CRT monitor and all that crap, but I don't want that. Since you started, well, not started, but I mean, for a year now or so. You've been, you know, mentioning when you find a good find. And then all the bikes, you've gotten a lot of bikes through. Yeah, bikes too. I've just started to keep my eye open. And now I know we're like four or five or six of them are in my area. Till then, I just drive right past them and didn't even know they were there. Some of them I knew they were there, but I think of them as old people close or something. I should go take a look. You definitely should. I mean, you're not going to find it something every time. Most times I go there, I don't buy anything. But then as you guys have all heard, I keep finding great things periodically. And that's what kind of keeps you going back. It's like winning a little bit at the lottery every two months or so. This is your scratch off ticket. It really is. Recently you got a, like a fairly recent WRT. Linksist, didn't you? I did. I got a WRT 310N router, which is great. I mean, it's a wireless N router. And I had been wanting one because I actually found one maybe two months earlier at a flea market. It links this 150N router. And I bought that one. That was $6. That's pretty pricey. Yeah, I watched that dent go by as I just spent like about 170 on a router recently. Well, yours is better. Yours is going to have the dual band and all that kind of stuff. I buy tech so infrequently. I just get like get the best one I can just so it'll last me a little bit longer. That's not, I buy crappy quality very frequently. So. Here's this quantity, not quality. Actually, the 150N and the 310N are both pretty nice routers. And now I've got them linked as a, the 150N is a wireless bridge out here in my office. And my e-machines server is plugged into that with a patch cable. And it works great. This was the setup we were just talking about before. Recording how. Yeah. You have your offices detached from your house and you're shooting wireless. Yeah. Exactly. So that was another $25. Yeah, the 310N I got for, I think it was $2.99. But it didn't have a power supply with it. It was just the router. But I had a spare power supply at home that was kind of duct taped together. And so I knew I could at least turn it on and see if it was working and load it with DDWRT if it was working. So I did all that. But then I went to this other goodwill like 15 miles away from the one where I found the router. And I found the power supply. Nice. For 99 cents, it was the Lynxus power supply that clearly went with that router. It just got separated at like the drop off center or something. Oh, really? You think it's D1? Yeah. Yeah, I think it was for the same one. That's awesome. It looked exactly like it. It fit perfectly. It says Lynxus on it. So for 99 cents, I got the power supply. Who was putting all this tech into those bins? Is it? I don't know. I don't know if I'm confusing goodwill with Salvation Army. Is that two different operations? There are two different things, but they do the same thing. That's what we have around here. A lot of Salvation Army is where out in front of the grocery stores, those big bins that people can put, you know, clothes in and stuff. Yeah, it's the same kind of outfit. We also have a Salvation Army here. But they have terrible prices. Like, they had this, like, a compact desktop machine from maybe 10 years ago, and they wanted $169 dollars. Read. It's pure greed. Insane. Like, nope. I mean, you could get a new computer for not much more than that. Yeah. And so, anyway, I hardly ever find anything worthwhile at that one, but I still go just in case. I've got some shoes there one time, you know. I do get clothes periodically, but mostly I'm just adding to my goodwill cluster. What did you recently do with the Mac Mini? Oh, yeah. That's my main web server now. All right. Okay. That one is hosting my main website, JonathanCulp.org, and it's hosting my status net instance. And this is when your name changed on identical recently. Right. I got a new domain name, and I had meant to make this elegant, seamless transition over to the new server and the domain name. The domain name thing is a little bit tricky with status net, because if you change anything, it can break people's subscriptions, and then everyone will have to unsubscribe and re-subscribe on the new one, or something. It's kind of a pain. It's pretty messy. And so, I wanted to do it with giving everyone a heads up, but I did some kind of update on my main server here on the e-machines, and I accidentally had it overwrite a really important config file. And it broke everything. And so, I said, well, you know, here's my opportunity. I just went ahead and switched to the Mac many. And all of a sudden, there was this new guy talking to us, and nobody knew who Jake came up. Right. Yeah. I had a new username, and hopefully when the notification emails came in, saying that I had subscribed to you, you would recognize my domain name and stuff. Yeah. I got figured you out pretty quick. So, I'm not sure if we have goodwills now that... Is this an organization? Or it's just... They're nationwide as far as I'm aware. Because they definitely had them in Austin, and in Nashville, the cities where I've lived. And does the sign actually say, like, goodwill on it? Yep. Oh, okay. So, what I've been scouting around my town is there's a couple of salvation armies, and then there is kind of like a thrift store. Right. There's thrift stores, but... Independent ones. Yeah, I think they must be independent. Yeah. We've got one here that's run by some church lady, kind of lady. I'm not sure. They seem often to be associated with churches. And I don't know necessarily why, I guess, because people donate things to churches, and once they're done giving them to poor people, then they try to sell the rest to raise money to support their programs and whatnot. And what do they want with a Mac mini? I don't know. That's awesome. Yeah, that's cool. You know, sometimes companies will, when they upgrade a bunch of their equipment, they'll just truck everything off to goodwill. And so, like, I've got a, there's a printer over there on the other side of the room from me that I got a goodwill for maybe $12. It's an HP LaserJet 3200 with a built-in facts and stuff. And I remember when I got it home, I printed out the information page, and it told me the name of a corporation that used to own it. So, clearly, they upgraded and just trucked everything off to goodwill. Yeah, that happens here with the state, but it's usually they advertise you have to buy the whole palette. So, you might have to buy, like, 48 Delts, not just one. An email recently where I'm running around in our log-in, like, some of the people were like, well, I'll take three of them if you take four of them, but nothing ever came of it. That's pretty funny. Yeah, that might be a channel house. So, some of this stuff is getting into the goodwills. It could be. I don't know how something like that WRT310N router we get there, unless somebody just upgraded all their networking stuff at once, or somebody mistakenly took it or something. Hmm, that's fairly new, yeah. And I remember you saying, it's kind of overheating, and then the next day you found like a laptop cooler to put under it. Yeah, and other two bucks. Yeah, I just go back and buy whatever else I need. Yeah, the laptop cooler was a pretty fun project. I've got images on my PiWigo image gallery of the laptop cooler, because I took it apart and soldered a USB cable onto it to give it power, because it didn't have a power supply. So now, I've got the laptop cooler plugged by USB into the EMAC that keeps the fans running, and then the router that tends to overheat is just sitting on top of that. You're getting very close to them. Whoa! Getting bad scientists stuff going on. Yeah, it's fun. Now, the one thing I really want to do next is when my wife and I went thrifting a couple days ago, you know, by the way, this is a key for this whole thing to work for me, is my wife really loves to thrift also. Yeah. And when we were in graduate school, like our favorite thing to do was to go out and hit the thrift stores around Austin, Texas, which has some of the best thrift stores in the nation, probably. But she and I were out the other day at the local, the closest goodwill, and there was an Xbox there, one of the classic Xboxes. And I just immediately started posting on the micro blog, what can you do with an old Xbox, and people started saying, well, you can put XBMC, the XB Media Center, or you can put Linux on it. And I almost bought it, but it did not have any controllers. And you need a controller to be able to hack together a cable to hook up, like an SD card or something to it to transfer the Linux image over. And so I'm just going to wait until I find one that's got controllers. And then that's definitely a project I want to do. I want to hack one of those Xboxes and turn it into a server. Yeah, I recall people getting Linux on them. I've never been like a console guy, but I remember reading about it. I've never had a gaming console until, well, we bought a Wii for the kids. I had an Atari 2600, that's my last one. Yeah, actually, we had one of those when I was about 10 or 12, so I don't know. We still have it. If I go to my parents' house, we can get it out and hook it up to a TV and play. It's really funny. I think we're only a couple of months apart in age. And I used to say that we are the first generation that had home computers, but it turns out your dad is a geek too. Yeah, big time. Oh, I can't remember the name of it. It's going to come to me. The Heath Kits, yeah. He built his own computer. The first computer he had was from Heath Kits. And it came in like box after box of little transistors and circuit boards. That is awesome. And he put the whole thing together. And this was in probably 1982 or so. And at that time, he was a professor of mathematics at the Air Force Institute of Technology up in Fairbono, Ohio. Okay. And he's the first person I knew to do this kind of thing. One of my friends had a Commodore 64. Yeah, and I remember him playing these text games on it. But my dad didn't do any games. He learned a program in like Fortran and Coball and all these things. The old school stuff. Yeah. But you had that to hack on right off. That's awesome. Yeah, I didn't, I mean, when I finally got a computer, it was one of his cast off. I think he gave me the Heath Kits once he upgraded. I just kept getting a series of his hand me downs. And all I used him for was to write papers. And I had this DOS-based music notation program called... It was called Music Printer Plus. And it was like more than $400. But it did fairly decent music notation printout. So those are the only things I knew to do with a computer. It was to write my papers and print music. Somehow you found Linux along the way. I'd never asked you how did you come across this. That was much, much later. It's just a question I'm always curious about. Talking with people. We've never talked about it. I first heard about it. I suppose when I was putting together my online music appreciation class here at UL Lafayette in probably the summer of 2004, 2005. It was right around there. And the guy who was helping me with it who was shooting all the videos and he wrote a flash-based interface for my video to appear along with my PowerPoint slides and all that. Anyway, he was a tech guy. And we were wondering how are we going to get these videos to the students? Because at the time we were using Blackboard course management system. Now we use Moodle, thank goodness. It's open source. But Blackboard at the time did not really have a good way to deliver video. And we didn't have space for the files on it. Anyway, we needed our own way to deliver it. So one day he just told me he said, I found it. I got a way to deliver the server, I mean, to the videos. And he pointed at this pile of just crappy old Mac G3s. He said, that's our server right there. I said, what? He said, yep, I found those. They were about to throw them away. So I took it and loaded yellow dog Linux on it. And those are now serving up your lessons. Here, click this link and watch. And so I clicked the link and there was me. And I was like, man, that's amazing, Mark. How'd you do that? And he said, well, you know, put Linux on it. I said, well, what's Linux? And so he told me what it was. The floodgates opened. Yeah, well, not quite yet. What really took hold was about three years later. When I decided I really wanted to have a laptop. But I did not want to have a Windows laptop. And I couldn't afford a Mac. And so one day I was at our... We've got an office on campus where they do hardware repair, like computer hardware repair. And I went over there with our piano professor who was having her computer worked on. And one of the assistants in that workshop there was sitting at a computer and I looked at it and I didn't recognize what it was. I said, man, what is that operating system you're using there? I don't recognize that. And he said, this is Ubuntu. Wow. I said, what's Ubuntu? And he said, well, it's a Linux-based operating system. And I saw that and it looked really nice. And I said, man, that's something I could use right there. And so I started researching it. And then pretty soon my dad got a new laptop and handed me down his old one. And I installed Ubuntu Linux on it. And that's basically where it started. Nice. Yeah. It's a little off track of the Goodwill, but... No, that's okay. Yeah, I always like to find out how people stumbled across it. Yeah, I remember the first episode I heard you do. I think you and... Was it you and Wendigo that told that shared your stories about? Yeah, that was our first one. How we got into Linux, yeah. That's been four years ago now, I think. Four and a half years ago since that happened. Now I'm neck deep in it. Oh, yeah. It's funny. You know, the whole thing, starting with Linux and now running my web server, it feels like I've been getting this kind of slow gradual retraining of myself for a possible alternate career. Because academia, higher education, is kind of in trouble. I mean, there's all kinds of budget problems. And every year we got major budget cuts. We got programs being cut. And people losing jobs in academia. And so I feel like all of this stuff has given me some tools where if suddenly the School of Music went belly up and I was out of a job, I might be able to kind of slide sideways, even right here at the university, and help them out with moodle administration and running the servers here and stuff like that. Yeah, nice. I think. Yeah, so... Sorry, go ahead. No, I think I said, unfortunately I won't be sliding sideways anyway. I'm stuck in a family business. Oh, well. Yeah, I'm hoping that I don't have to do that. I don't want it to come to that. But one of the main points I made in my blog post yesterday about my significant tech purchase, the $8 computer, is that basically for the $8 and for a lot of time and fun for me, I've practically retrained myself as a, you know, a Linux guy who could, if not completely run and at least certainly help run, websites and administer things, you know. Yeah, we've all, I feel like I've had to learn quite a bit about outward facing networks in the last couple of months with all the identical stuff, or the status net stuff. It's something I never really paid attention to, but like our little group of friends are all helping each other out and asking questions and answering, so it's an awesome resource. It's fun, isn't it? Yeah, it is. There's so many nitpicky details that I never would have thought of. I mean, things like name servers and, you know, certificates and self-signed certificates, how to deal with... Yeah, I just accepted one of yours when I got on the mumble. Yeah, you would have to because it's a self-sign. Do you trust me, Bill? Yeah, I did. I did trust you. Better not backstab me if I should. Yeah, I have one certificate that's actually signed by start SSL and I use that for my status net site. And the rest of them are self-signed because I trust myself. And it doesn't really matter to me if other people don't. Oh, man. So, anyway, it's been a huge fun learning experience, all this stuff. And it all really happens because of availability of super cheap hardware that I can play around with. The Goodwill Hardware. That's it, man. I'm going to have to... maybe after the lug sometime. Well, I'll have to scout out where some of these might be and after the lug. Maybe we'll have to stop at a Goodwill one of these times. There you go. Yeah. It seems like you would definitely... as much as you drive around for work, you could stop in for five minutes and see what they got and hop back in the truck. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, I'm just starting to figure out where they are. I think I know... See, these aren't Goodwill's, though. I think they're independent. That's okay. They might have... I mean, even for someone that's... There's a lot of people that are into retro gaming and stuff. I bet you could find old Nintendo and Super Nintendo stuff in these stores. Yeah. I have found all of those kinds of things in the thrift stores I go to. I mean, they had like an Intellivision one time. I mean, I've seen the old PlayStation, original PlayStation's, original Xboxes. Sometimes Xbox 2. I think a friend of mine had an Intellivision and there was a cartridge called Basic and you stick it in and then you can program on the controller like Basic. That's pretty cool. Yeah. Yeah, we had friends with Intellivision also down the street and they seemed to recall playing baseball on it or something. Yeah. See, this... You might get me in trouble, John, because I'll end up with a whole computer room full of old crap. You know, I still have a Commodore 64 in the basement. What else will I have if I bring it home? Well, you have to be discreet about it, I suppose. And well, as I said, the reason this all works is because my wife is on board with it. And so if she weren't, then I'd probably be getting in trouble all the time. But right now I've got like hardware everywhere and I've got bicycles and bicycle parts everywhere. But yeah, she's okay. As long as it doesn't get out of hand. Cool. Okay. The issue. So is that enough? Wrap it up? That is enough. We have to figure out, think for a minute how much information you want to give people about contact. Yeah. Do you do show notes for this? So, goodwills are something I've just drove past all my life and there might be good tech finds in there. It's more than just smelly old clothes, man. Yeah, that's kind of the image it has in my head. There's a lot of that to be sure. You just got to dig through it and get past the blue-haired ladies and get to the good stuff. Yeah, you got to go back to those shelves where they keep all the stuff. You know, go past the clothes back to where there is stuff. Cool. And dig through it too, man, because like when I found the power supply from my router, it was underneath a bunch of crap that I didn't want at all and I almost didn't even look under it. But I did and then I found it. So there's a treasure hunt aspect to this as well? There totally is. That's cool. It's really thrilling to find this stuff. I just pictured you in my head holding up the power supply going, I am mighty. So cool. Contact info. Yeah, JonathanCulp.org. And yeah, it's been fun. I'm NY Bill at gunmonkeynet.net for email, or NY Bill on Identico. We'll have to do another one sometime. That'd be great, man. All right, cool. All right, see you. Okay, bye. You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio where Hacker Public Radio does our own. We are a community podcast network that releases shows every weekday Monday through Friday. Today's show, like all our shows, was contributed by an HPR listener by yourself. 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