Episode: 1523
Title: HPR1523: HPR Community News for May 2014
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1523/hpr1523.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 04:36:38

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Thank you very much.
Hello, everyone.
This is Charles in New Jersey with my contribution to the community news for May.
I would listen to all of the shows for May.
For the first time, I've actually done it on time to have contributed to the community
news, but I'm unable to make the live recording because I'm watching my grants on this afternoon.
So I wanted to make some comments on the shows and on other issues that I've noticed that
might be of interest to the community.
I guess I'll go and order.
The first show is one of my own, by the guy named Charles in New Jersey, and that was how
I got into computers.
And I noticed that this show had a comment from Dave Morris, and that brought up a general
issue, that I have to go back and look at my own shows to see if there are comments,
so that I can acknowledge them and thank the people who made the comments for their
feedback.
That's also true of one of my shows from April, episode 1497, that was mentioned in
the April community news.
That had a comment from Peter 64, and I wanted to thank Peter for his comment.
I wonder if there's a way to subscribe to the comments on shows that any host has done
so that you don't have to go back and look at every show to find out if there are comments
so that you can do the polite thing and respond in kind to answer any questions that might
have been posed or to just acknowledge and thank the person who took the time to not
only listen to the show, but give you feedback.
And I'm grateful to the people who have listened and who have left me comments.
So in the meantime, I guess I will continue to pull my old shows for any comments that
might be there.
And I'll be reworking some of my show notes for things that are incomplete and to change
them from plain text to HTML, so they're a little bit easier to read.
But I digress.
The key signing show, episode 1500 by Ahuka was great.
I love that conversation about what's involved with key signing, how it works, why you would
want to do it, and the idea of how to use the signature as a way to make sure that the
person whose key you are trying to use is actually the person you thought it was.
So that was a great show and I'll be referring to that when I set up my own key.
Then 1501, I wanted to mention, I love that show on Auk by Lane Deer.
It was a reminder of a tool that I, it's been there forever and I've really neglected
it.
I think I've, many times, sort of re-implemented the wheel with a Python or Perl program to
munch some data and to clean up text and numbers and such.
When I could have just piped it through a much simpler Auk one liner or something like
that to do the same thing and have finished the job much faster and not had to do as much
programming.
Although since I like programming and consider it a form of play, it's also fun for me
to do but I also like to find neat hacks so Auk would satisfy that desire in me as well.
It would fill the need for some play because finding a neat hack is also good.
And then there's 1502 was part two of the units show on distance and area where I went
over the conversion factors and converting between English and metric units.
1503 is another one of my favorites from the month NY Bill talking about making waves
and the kinds of things that an oscilloscope can teach you about things like, well not
only electricity and AC versus DC but also light and sound because you're looking at
wave forms.
The only thing that one could wish for is sort of an audio output from an oscilloscope.
I don't know how such a thing would be possible to help people who are blind or have low vision
to get the same kind of information.
I think it would be kind of confusing with complex wave forms but for that situation, if
you could at least have it for something like a pure wave, it would be a good teaching
tool for understanding what waves look like and in this case sound like, so you can get
a good mental image of how those things work.
Just a thought, there may be some solution out there.
Then I'm going to skip a couple.
The NELF shows were great but we talked about those in the previous month.
The audiobook club, 1506 was very interesting although I don't have time myself to listen
to the actual audiobooks.
I got sort of a heads up on what the book was like.
The Community News, 1507.
The only thing I would comment on there is that we did make a pitch for filling in the
100 character synopsis of old episodes and maybe fixing up the show notes for some
of the very, very old episodes in the HPR catalog.
I've gone back and listened to a couple of older episodes and some of them are just
this fresh today as they were when they were first released.
I'll be going back to take on a couple of older episodes when I've finished cleaning
up my own and putting out some episodes that I have in the works already.
Let's see.
Going to skip ahead to 1512, John Culp's show on putting together and adopting a public domain textbook.
I was really, really interested in that show because John seems to have done a lot of
work and he had to keep at it and keep trying things to make available the content of in
this case theory of counterpoint for his students without having to make the students
cough up a lot of money for a textbook for content that's essentially the same for
his remain the same for a very long time.
I'm glad when a person who's in the know like a professor, like John, takes the time to
think of the students who already spend a lot of money.
I won't talk about tuition because that's a subject that's not relevant to the discussion
although tuition is rather high especially for students who don't come from wealthy families.
But I just think on the textbook front that if we can make textbooks available in affordable
way that would help students and adult learners as well to access the content without having
to pay a bounty to get it which also suggests another kind of parallel episode of hints
on how to create a college or university student computer workstation using free software
to reduce the cost of it and of course if it's based on Linux or Unix or other free operating
systems, how one might take measures to be able to integrate that workstation into
the university or college networks which are usually set up to accommodate either max or
windows machines. So I think that would be a wonderful episode that would help people.
In fact, you could also use that kind of affordable workstation at home or in your self-education
for preparing for a job in just about any industry because a lot of fields require computer skills.
Just my opinion, I think it would be a great show. I don't know when I would get to it but we have a lot of
very capable hosts who could help us out with that kind of episode.
Okay, off the soapbox on that one. 15, 14, we had Beezah and the show is called Give the Small Guy a Chance.
And I really liked that show because I also go back and I schedule time about once a quarter
or twice a year depending on how much free time I have, usually on the train, to install packages
that are outside of the mainstream from the repositories on whatever Linux system I'm using at the time.
And either install packages or compile a thing from source to try different programs that are maybe not as popular or pre-installed by disros
but which performs some of the same functions in fact which are more targeted to a particular task
and might help me to improve my workflows a little bit when I'm using my computer.
Rather than having something that's a Swiss Army knife, I might use a piece of software that only does one thing but does it very well
and that I could pipe into a workflow in a unix-y kind of style so that I can do one step in one program
that does its job admirably, then do whatever interim manipulations I need and then pipe it into the next program made by the small guy and then so on.
So that was a very welcome show and it was very well done. Thanks Beezah.
15-15 and 15-05 I'll jump back. Those were LibreOffice Calc shows by Ahuka and I'm really enjoying the Calc series as I did the shows on writer and I hope they keep coming.
I would weigh in on some of those issues but mostly I'm agreeing with what Ahuka says so I think he's done a pretty good job.
I will weigh in when it comes to some of the individual functions when we get there because I use some of those things in my work and I might add another perspective to kind of work.
I would round out the content in there and that would seem like fun to do.
Episode 15-17 by Johann V. The set of primes is infinite. I was really tickled by that show. I'm glad it was fairly succinct and it used some very important results from number theory and algebra
without being so technical that it would blow everyone away. I did enjoy the show. I don't know if everyone followed every piece of it but I really liked it so I'm going to thank Johann V for doing that one.
Then I'm going to make a comment on episode 15-18 and 15-16 where Dave Morris went over the podcast I listened to which would be part of the What's On My Player series.
I love that Dave listens to an awful lot of audio content each month. He must have a lot of spare time and I'm sure that he does sort of a speed up on listening because otherwise he would be doing very little in his waking hours besides listening to all the content that he has.
He is available to him as his pod catcher gets all of those different shows and sorts them into the databases that he uses for each of his players.
There are some great show notes there so if you are interested in picking and choosing from among all of the podcasts that Dave listens to, you'll be able to get a nice bit of background on each one and have some sense of what you're going to get when you look at each of these individual shows or types of shows.
The show notes are going to be a great resource for anybody who is looking for new things to listen to.
Show 15-19 and I'm going to murder the host's name in Ken Fallon tradition.
Tosh Sarah did a What's In My Bag which had a great inventory with links to some of the items that are in the bag so you can get more information on each of those things.
I thought that was great. I love those What's In My Bag shows.
Think about things that I would want to put into my kit that I carry around to make sure that I have what I need for doing things.
It reminds me of the episode that NY Bill did on What's In My Bag where he described his mobile laboratory and that really sets how I think of it.
So keep those What's In My Bag shows coming. If you haven't done one, I'd love to hear more of those.
And then 15-20, JWP to be Juliet Whiskey-Papa on the EXT file system, Echo X-ray Tango.
That series of file system types. I really liked that show because we use these file systems on our Linux machines and wonder what's so special about these and what advantages do they have over the ones that we have on proprietary systems like NTFS or HFS on the Mac.
And I think it did give me some perspectives on the file system and what it's doing for me and why I should be glad I have them and the advantages over the formats that I had used, whether I still use it work because I have no choice.
So thanks JWP for doing that. And are there any other notes?
Now apart from the question I had about subscribing to comments on my shows, I think that will do it for this month. Thanks for listening.
And thanks to all the hosts who have contributed in the month of May. And I'd like to hear from new hosts in the month of June, the summer months are coming, be a great month to get your show in quickly because summer is coming.
So thanks and take care. See you next month on Hacker Public Radio. Bye.
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