Episode: 2156
Title: HPR2156: HPR Community News for October 2016
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2156/hpr2156.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 15:06:32

---

This episode of HBR is brought to you by An Honest Host.com, get 15% discount on all shared
hosting with the offer code HBR15. That's HBR15. Better web hosting that's
honest and fair at An Honest Host.com.
Hi everybody, my name is Ken Fallon and you're listening to another episode of Hacker
Public Radio Community News for October 2016. For those of you who are new to Hacker Public
Radio or community broadcast, network, podcast network, where the shows are crowdsourced
from the community. This show is a once a month review of what's been going on in the
previous month and you're very welcome to join us. Joining me tonight is Dave Morris,
I do. Hi there. I just want to say that tonight is November the 5th. I didn't remember until
I suddenly heard a bang out. So this is the the British evening where people go mad and let off
fireworks. So there may be a few noises off. Nearly a problem, no problem whatsoever. And I still
need to fix the Gravatar HBR logo, which I tried to do in fairness, but I got at the time the
admin email isn't working. So I couldn't reset the password in order to get in, blah, blah, blah.
It's a shame. Anyway, it's on the list. Josh is going to move us over to a new server and that
should fix some of the background issues which we're having at the minute with the admin email
address. It does work if you send stuff to admin.hpr. It does get to us, but you do get a bounce back
saying the mail has not been delivered, which is not true. It has been delivered.
In addition to that, the I was thinking of changing the admin mailing list name, Dave,
to janitors at HPR in order to better reflect our function here. We are not in any way. I think
the word admin conjures up a level of authority that actually we do not possess. So janitor at HPR
will be a better thing. I think that yes. So you should have a mop and bucket logo somewhere along
the line. Excellent. In fact, just one of the things this month was that the Twitter feed
service that we were using to redirect our website to Twitter went away and it'll come up in the
news. So I registered on LinkedIn that as a Henry Patrick Riley, our good friend and colleague
or living over there in the state has set up a lot of social media presences and has
graciously allowed us to use his name for these services. So he is down as a janitor
as part of the network on LinkedIn. I like that. Very nice. Anyways, so you're going to welcome
our new hosts. It's an easy one this month. But if I do it this month, then I'll have to
have to do it next month. So you better do it. Okay. So this month's new host is the vision.
Excellent. Excellent name and welcome to the show. So the first show was HPR Community News for
September, oddly enough, as it happened. And we did not have any comments on that. Dave, we need
to send say more controversial stuff. I'm afraid every month. We've been trying. We've been trying
to do that. But obviously not need to try harder. I think. Or perhaps people are spending more time
doing delivered responses and uploading them as a show, which is absolutely fine by me.
So the first real show of the month was the Gloom Tabletop game, which was reviewed by
Tlatu. And I think since he's moved to New Zealand, he's just appeared to have as much internet
access so as relying on a lot more board games and is doing a lot of board games reviews, which I
think now merits a series by itself, actually. Oh, I agree. I agree. It's on my to-do list, but
I was going to contact you about it. But yeah, we'll get that sorted.
So the Gloom is a sad and benignated place. The sky is gray. The tea is cold. And new tragedy lies
around every quarter, death, disease, heartache. Not exactly the most uplifting of games,
I would have thought was pretty cool. Didn't know it existed. This is the one where they had
a plastic see-through cards. I must say I've never seen it myself. No, I don't know anything about
these things, but that sounds amazingly unpleasant. There are, yeah, although it seems to be a thing
that people are doing now. Don't know if it's this new hipster culture. Get out of my lawn. But I
know quite a few guys in the work are into gaming. So nice. Yeah, yeah, I think I said my daughter's
a student and she's very heavily into, you know, sorts of tabletop games with her pals. So it
does seem to be a trend. Yes, cool. There was quite a bit of that in college, but I never
dungeons and dragons and that sort of thing, but I never had the patience to get into it.
All was also a bit concerned that if I did, I wouldn't, you know, it would be a dark
dark road. I wouldn't be able to make my way back from, you know, we come addicted to games.
Yes, yes, yes, I think that's probably true. Okay, and the Bishop's first show was an introduction
to data reduction methods run length encoding compression technology part one. Could this be a
series I really hope it is? I think so. Well, it's, it's Dan as part one, so I'm hoping they're
going to be many, many more of these very interesting. I think we can safely say he owes us a show.
If you promise a show, then you owe a show, you say, but actually this one was very, very well
explained the whole concept of encoding and data reduction and with a rather nice example as well.
So I was, I just remember coming getting off the train gone. That was a fascinating episode
and even not a smile commuter. Yeah, yeah, I was quite absorbed by as well. I have to say it was
it's I sort of had picked up a few hints around this area, but really hadn't, you know,
how you do and quite joined them together. I can see this is joining all the all the disparate bits
together in my head in due course. So looking forward to more. Absolutely. Cool. So the following day
we had. Yes, there was. Go, go, go, you read it. So it was from RTSN who said, good episode.
I just wanted to say it's sad, but never mind. It's hard to correct typos in this comment system.
I wanted to say that I really enjoyed this episode. I love the light technical episodes with
the good balance between hand, wavy explanations and preciseness. It gets, it gets me interested.
I think he meant and makes me want to learn more. So keep it up. Excellent. Thank you very much.
And Dave, you must remember that not all people's first language is English and spelling
mistakes do happen, especially if the comments are done on a mobile phone. So absolutely.
Absolutely. Please put some slack, Dave. I was, I did a lot of proofreading at one in one job
and once you get into that mindset, it's really, really, really hard to get your head out of it again.
I don't think I could not proofread. Well, I proof, listen, do a lot of text to speech,
especially for long specifications that we get in work. I'll just kind of have them on the screen
and just listen to them and I can pick. I could read something 15 times and miss it and just hear
the mispronunciation or spell something missing when they, when it's done in via text to speech.
Sorry, I'm wrong. That's quite cool. That's very cool. Okay.
Glad to demonstrate how sequence system D shutdown process should down system D. And you know,
I've been using system D now for about a year and a half and I really was, I was between two minds
about it. I, you know, I'm familiar with Solaris having something like this and that I can understand
that it's necessary, but I think it is the greatest pile of fraud that has ever been introduced.
It is just, I've had a problem right where system D, where I unmounted my proc file system
and I couldn't mount my proc file system because system D prevented me from doing it and then it
wouldn't allow me to do anything more because system D was running. So it prevented me from mounting
it. It was a greatest pile of do-do. I had to actually have, I had to get somebody to go down to the
server room and physically reboot the server that I did this on. Whereas another system you just
be able to proc or do an eight in it one and then you switch to, you know, do rebooting,
nothing worked and you, because there was no logs, cause system D,
clobbered the log file system, it was just a mess. Just, oh, just overly complicated and just
a mess and this episode here shows that it's a mess that you need to put in a dummy service in order
to get it to run. Sorry, I just think it's, it's overkill. Yeah, yeah, I, I haven't had many
dealings with it. The only one I got caught by was because I had a lot of NFS mount points.
So I use NFS for, for sharing files around the house. I, I was, system D didn't like the way I
did my NFS mats. I had to redo them and it took a while to work out what it was that system D wanted.
This was a company, a year or 80 months ago, maybe. I've got notes of how to fix it, but I can't
remember the details now. But other than that, I have heard people saying that some operating
systems are trying to do away with cron because system D will do the job. I'll tell you, no, if that
happens, I'm just going to not use those systems, this is, it's a mess. I couldn't quite see how
system D could run cron, but run the crew on it cron. And why the hell you'd need to, you know,
throw away some, it's been tried and tested for so long and replace it with something else. I don't
know. Yeah, no, I don't, I think, I think there are people who get it and like this monolithic
approach to everything, but say, no, I don't, I, I've given us, you know, two years of service,
and I was on the fence about it, but now I'm just, this is really enough, is enough. Anyway,
enough about that. Let's move on to the next show. Thanks a lot to you for doing this because,
what would have been a relatively simple make a script do a simlink in, before, you know,
have to do fake services and all the rest. And I get the need for services, yes, I do, but it
doesn't have to take over your system. Now, the service type interface has been is quite nice
in many ways, but yeah, yeah, I think I probably agree with you. Okay. And if you don't agree with
us, then feel free to leave a comment and to this episode at or better yet and do some shows
about why we're wrong. Anyway, the following day, you did stole my software with your audio
speakers. You got a credit. Yes. That's all you want. Yes. CCYSA. And yes, nice. I think I might
actually, but did you have the script? Of course, of course, you did. Yes, yes, it's, it's in the,
it's in, it's attached to the, to the show. And it's in the links at the bottom. Yeah, there's
also, so it's also on GitHub, I should say. Cool. There's the YouTube player now also supports
playing, playing faster, as does the Firefox media player. All right, I knew about YouTube.
But yeah, yeah, I didn't know about Firefox. That's great. If you right click on, if you go to the
website of all of HPR, for instance, and you right click on any of the play widgets that we have
there, and then you have play speed, slow motion, normal speed, high speed, 1.5, and ludicrous speed
2.x. So pretty cool. Very, very good. Yes. But needless to say, nice episode. And if you're not
speeding up your podcasts, then you're not listening to enough podcasts. So we had a tattoo
reviewing the car game, a pirate flux. And he has links to the game. Yeah, it's another, another
car, another car game I don't know anything about. I keep telling myself I'm just finding out more
about these things. And because I have a certain reluctance to get into these things, I'm not
really sure why, but I should push myself a bit. You need friends. That's the problem.
Oh, thank you. No worries. This is a, this is flux car game. And it's the one where you can change
the rules as you're playing along. And there was one comment from John, flux synchronicity.
Amazing flux synchronicity. I purchased flux Firefly car game about a month ago. I agree with how
the game is set up. It's good, but you can burn through cards fast. It's fun to get started.
And they have a lot of different flux games, but the concept is the same across all of them.
Again, love the card game perspective. Yeah. So the next day, Paul's all things Sega Genesis,
learn how to create hardware. Paul's switch with the Sega Genesis from Siegflop. Did you have a
Sega Genesis, David? No, I didn't. No, I was never into gaming machines. I had a BBC
micro, which did all I, all I wanted to do gaming wise. So with this, I was, I was strangely,
there was one thing in the first, she said, one way electricity. And I was, what is? And she,
the micro controller correction to the episode, the micro controller would have to watch the vertical
sync. So she must spoke about that. And in the diagrams on the website, it shows you the
controller M1 with the outpin, which is pin 11 and M2, which is pin 10 and 11. Don't know what
pin it is, it's marked there. And then you have the I.O. card, which is eight two. And the one way,
I was a bit confused about that it needed to be a one way system between the switch. So she had
a diode in place, which actually made clarify that. So yes, it took me a while to differentiate between
arrows and tie. It's the head for a second. That's just me being thick. No, I'm just learning
the symbols and stuff, not having done electronics and wanting to do my ham radio. Yes,
I'm still chugging along with that, but I keep getting distracted because it's very, very interesting.
And, but, yes, watching big live videos really does help for that. And great Scott actually,
as well. Yes, yes, big clive is definitely a channel. You should watch if you're into electronics
regardless of the way. If you're not, if you want to find out where you're killing yourself.
Yes, yes. And making things blow up. The ones that say with flames on the end are like,
seven fire to a room, you know, one of these, these things that sprays,
scented stuff in the room. You put a flame to it to show what would happen.
I, yeah, I like to travel adapters that are, you know, you plug them in and all the other prongs
are completely live as well. Yes, I'll be talking about that next month or actually a month after,
perhaps I've done a soldering episode and I just threw that up there. So we've got hack the box
with Bandit and my bill talks about the Linux war game called Bandit. And if anyone who hasn't
used this, it is excellent. It's an excellent game. I'm in the process of doing it myself. And
although I keep forgetting to go back and finish it off because I, I get stuck and then I forget
about it and then somebody else tells me about it and then I do it, play it again. And so it,
but it's, it's excellent. The challenge of the game is just doing proper, proper old Unix commands
and, and little tips and tricks that you are going to come across if you're dealing with files
and permissions and stuff. So that's pretty cool. Yeah, I haven't looked at this yet. It sounded
really good. And then my bill sounded very enthusiastic about it. So I must have a shot. My son's
quite keen on getting more into Linux and stuff. So I maybe point him in that direction. And I've,
I've tried not to look at the each website, each page that you go to has got some clues for the
next one. And I try not to use those. And sometimes I've, I've gotten the answer,
but not with the clues that they've used. And then I go back and look at the clues and go,
ah, right. Oh, okay. Oh, that would have been a lot easier. Why didn't I do that? So
very nice. Yeah. Great, right to learn. So crayon, um, do you want to read the this one? We're
going to have to know we're going to have it. Thanks for the episode. I always love these little
games. This one is indeed focused on beginners. But it can still be a bit fun. I only just
started trying it out. So I'm up to level 16. I haven't come across any challenges yet,
except the constant password typing. I've created an extremely over-engineered little
bash or see to ease typing a bit with it. Once you've got the password, you simply type
SSH next and then paste the password. It copies each level to ensure only people of your level
can screw with your stuff and to give you a working directory if you need one. One need only
as bandit zero. Choose a base name for the directories. Change me here and create a directory
temp change me bandit zero on the file temp change me on score bandit zero dot bash or see containing
and there's a script which does create say rot 13 rot 13 to your alias. This makes great
radio now when you try to figure out a bash script. Yeah, I was going to skip that if I was reading
this one and say you really need to go look at this. I think crayon should actually do a show
explaining his bash script. I would actually like this one because this rot 13 is quite an
nice idea. He's shifting the alphabet by rotating it by that number of characters. I guess.
Yeah, which is very neat using TR. So yes, there is. Yes, crayon, come on. Get your finger out,
dude. So the next day we had Clinton Roy from org mode to latex beamer to pdf and this was about
yeah, basically org mode from in emax to latex beamer to pdf, which is just what it says explaining
how one would do this. I am not a emax person, Dave. Strangely enough, neither am I. However,
positive is. Yeah, yeah. I used to work with a guy who was very much into emax and he was always
saying you should learn all about it's brilliant and I say yeah, yeah, yeah, but I'm trying to learn
them just now. So I'll give it a miss. Oh, you never stop. So do you want to read Platoon's
comment? Yes. Platoon says cool. Wow, this is really slick. I'm going to have to give it a try
or at least something close to it. I know nothing of latex or latex. It's people like to call it.
So I might skip that part. It makes for the show. So yeah, the latex latex thing has enormous
power for making very cool looking documents and slides and everything. It's definitely something
to be in if you can, I think, but I've lost. I used to use it all the time, but I've lost. I've
forgotten everything about it. I think we have a standing request for people to do some shores
on this because I must say that any of the documents that I've ever seen produced with it are
just a level of quality, you know, just very classic, well-produced documents. And even
even the word processing has come on, I can still you can still look at a latex document and think,
wow, that's done in latex because it's far better than anything else I've seen up until then.
Well, it's also programmable. That's one of the things I looked. I had the task of writing a document
at work years and years ago and I actually used tech, in fact, because I could write my own little
macros in it to enable me to do cool stuff in it, you know. So a thing, a type setting language that's
also a language language, what could be more cool than that? Yes. So the following day we had
your good friend be easy. Vim plugins I use. In this episode I talk about Vim plugins as I drive home
from very glad he did and but be careful, hands on the wheel, eyes on the road. So some of the plugins,
Dave, have you commented on this show? Do you want to? Well, yeah. I thought there were actually quite a
lot of them that I would like to try out myself. Yeah, I do use a number of them. I don't use
pathogen for managing plugins. I use something else's name I've forgotten just now, but I use a lot of
the plugins here. But there were a few I hadn't hadn't used and I've gone and researched and installed
in some cases. So this is a really good get you started type of type of set of things actually.
And the things he was saying about them are well worth listening to to get a good idea of
how you could use some of these and why you would want to. I think it's surround, for example,
that contains the capability to if you select a word, you can do capital S and then type in quotes
and stuff. But it's also let's you put HTML tags around things. Yes, I think that's the
one. So impressive. That is wonderful. It's absolutely brilliant. And I use that all the time.
Oh, I still use case, but just what I use. Do you want to read your comments or shall I?
I am. I'll read it if you like. So I said very interesting show. Great episode. I've
found you can always learn something from a fellow VIM users list of plugins. There were several
here I hadn't used before, but I'm trying them now. You mentioned an AC plugin, but it wasn't
on the list in your notes. Did you mean and I gave a URL of an AC thingy? Or is there another one
you use? Because AC is the tool. I think he mentioned himself, which was a sort of
grip replacement written in pearl, I believe. And so it's actually got some potential for use in
VIM. So I'd like to know which one is recommended. So that's cool. The following day, Klatu,
make web Python with flask, which is a Python based web micro framework, which is all the
rage right now. And we had quite a few comments on that. So short, fast, bold guy.
I don't know if that's descriptive or whatever. Great podcast, Latu. Thanks. Your episode were all
thanks. Your episodes are always solid. And this one gave me 10 new things to go and explore.
I may have helped. It may have helped that it lined up with something I'm currently playing with,
home automation and tool for my wife's co-workers. So that makes it much better for me. Thanks,
Scott. And Jonathan Culp said, no thanks. Zero, thanks for introducing yet another tool.
I'd like to learn to have no time. Maybe next vacation, smiley face. Then he comes back with
another comment, which I just add onto this one, saying, seriously, though, fantastic showman,
I'm very intrigued by this thing. Be easy says, give bottle a try. Great episode. If you like flask,
you may also, you may want to also try a bottle for smaller projects. Or if you just want
to make a rest API, they're very similar calls like app.root. And it's default templating engine
is pretty similar to Jenga 2. You can use a Jenga 2 if you wish with bottle as well.
Platoon replies.
Attu says, cheers. Glad the app is appreciated. As I say in the show, the only reason I ended up
using flask was because it's what we had installed at the day job. Bottle, web to pie and Jenga,
or all other similar projects, which I probably should have mentioned in the show notes,
so people can click on links and read up on each to see what they're interested in. Either way,
it's pretty fun to mess around with. And a great way to stay immersed in Python, if that's what
you already know, or a busy learning and or perfecting. So very cool. I looked at this one
properly yet. I did have a need to use web framework when I was working some years ago now. And I
used a pearl one called catalyst, which was horrendously complicated. It's one other MVC web framework
thing. I got it to work, but I'd like to look at these sort of guys to see if they're
a lot more straightforward to use. I think the world has moved fair bit in the past six years.
So yeah, very cool. Okay, the following day we had some book reviews by MirrorShade and two books.
People may find of interest. The first being Hacker Culture by Douglas Thomas. And the other
is a history of modern computing by Paul E. Cruzezi. Do you want to correct those names? Number one,
and have you read either of these? I would pronounce the second chap's name as
Saru, sitting perhaps, Karuti. But no, I haven't, haven't read either of these. They look,
they look pretty good actually. Yeah. I've not, I've seemed to have had a rather busy month,
so I haven't delved into these yet. Normally I go and follow up links and check them out. I haven't
done so yet, but I will do. I will do. Yeah, it's always interesting to get a, you know, links to
some, some books and stuff on, on book reviews. So continue sending those in.
Yeah, it's a good show. It's a lovely show for me. I certainly appreciate more personally.
Yep. And the following day we had GNU Ock Part Three, making us an official series. So
this is a, in this episode, advanced topics of the Ock tool. Ock is a text manipulation
language. It comes in various forms called Ock, Nock, Mock and Gock, but the standard version
is GNU Ock Gock. It's programming language optimized for the manipulation or delimited text.
So we do replace the Grape logical operators using the next command, which is excellent,
and the end command, which I've used, but never understood what was about the beginning command,
which I've used and never understood what it was about. And now I do. Thank you very much, guys.
Yes. Yeah, great show. Great show. So yes, I see. How are you two dipping these out? Did you?
Well, we're sort of just sort of playing it by ear. I'm trying to map, map it out a little bit more
clearly, saying, well, maybe we should do this chunk next and deciding who's going to do it.
Because at the moment, what's happened is Be Easy's done some quite nice, here's some stuff you
can do with Ork. And then I've come in as the boring bugger, who then talks about, well, the syntax
of this is that. And, you know, I'm wearing my anorect, which probably American listeners don't get.
But, you know, so, but it's a nice combination of both. It's working well.
Well, whatever you're doing is working well. Okay, well, the next episode's going to be doing
just that very thing. Actually, it's going to be, be drilling down into some of the concepts here,
and talking about them in a bit more detail. Also, the show notes are playing along. So,
this one you might want to read the show notes for just as a by the by.
We're going to try and make some PDFs or ePub to something from each of the notes. I haven't
got around to doing them on the previous shows yet. But the next one coming up has got notes with it.
But the problem is getting a really good format that uses, that, you know, doesn't mangle up the
text, because they all have their idiosyncrasies to represent things. So, but that's what we would
like to do. I'm getting a bit worried as well about that. Well, I'm in producing eBooks is
something that's going to be in my future very shortly. Well, not very shortly. Whenever my wife
is finishing a book, just I think I mentioned it here before. My wife is writing a book on autism,
which is going to be released under Creative Commons license. And she's going to give it away
basically under CCBISA. And we'll try and get her printed as well. But so, as far as part of that,
I need to convert it to, to, yeah, eBook formats. So, I'm interested in this whole publishing thing
and stuff like that. I'm sure there's a lot of advice available out there if you search. One
of our hosts is written a book using markdown and I'm not quite sure what that back end was,
but to produce an eBook, which you can buy on Amazon. That's McNalloo. McNalloo.
And because I was thinking when you were saying that, lost on blogs, there's also done that.
Yes. I'm sure there are many more that we maybe don't know about. Well, I guess McNalloo
didn't show about it. Yeah, we should talk to him about it. Anyway, Bambiicker says, I coupled
together what I learned from part two, maybe there's an easier way and them and he's expanding out
a shell with Grep- or I double quotes TPL header, asterix piping that into Oc with a min minus F
quotes colon, quote print dollar one, quote close expansion. So if I'm not correct, he's
grabbing everything for TPL headers. He's using a colon as a delimiter and printing the first header
and then editing bills in VIM. It opens every file found in VIM and grabs to find the text
without quotes in the text in VIM. Use colon BN to hop to the next file and edit as you like.
The Grep- or I looks through every file and directly under the current directory,
disregarding the case of the search text and matches all files. I'm in Bash, so it may work
differently in other shells. To which Dave Morris replies. I said, I skipped the Oc part here,
which is very bad given this as an Oc show, but my solution would be VIM and I quite like using
the dollar bracket format, because it's more flexible in the back tick one. So dollar open
parenthesis, you can indeed. Grep space minus RIL, space and then in quotes TPL underscore header,
whatever else you're doing, space asterisk, close parenthesis. So the minus L option is to Grep
lines. I put an E's in there that wasn't there. The minus L option to Grep just returns a
file name where a match occurred. So there's no need to use Oc to separate it out from what Grep
returns, because if you didn't do that, you'd get the line as well as the file name.
That's what the Oc was doing. It was pulling just the file name out. So Grep will do it for you
already. In my case, I usually keep VIM backup files in the same directory, so I'd change
the asterisk to asterisk square brackets, circumflex tilde, closed square brackets, and that
strange expression will emit the backups across the end with a tilde. So all files which
don't have a tilde at the end is what that will do. And as an insider prefer the dollar parenthesis
to backdick since they're more visible and I think nest better. There are times when Grep is
unnecessary because Oc can do the same job, but this isn't one quite the reverse.
There's another advantage to use in the dash L in so far as it will also just stop at the first
and give you the line. So the first match. That is true, yes. And doing both of you are doing VIM
gripping there. Actually, the first command, if there's more than one TPL header in a file,
probably not, but there could be, then you will get each of those instances with the file named.
Whereas with the dash L, you will only get one instance because it's already stopped,
which is a nice way to do that. That's a very good point. Yes, indeed.
Not that I've suffered from that in the past, speaking from my experience. You can also use
in Oc in the print there. Before the first quote mark, you can use slash and then TPL header slash
space print dollar one, which is something you taught me about. Actually, Dave, if I recall.
You can indeed. Yes, yes. You've got no doubt you'll get to that pattern.
June in for the next exciting episode in Gnu. Yes, yes, we will try and convert these things.
Yes. Okay, speaking of people who put me to shame and interview at the all-called Manchester bar
camp, an interview with Josh. And he's been busy since the last interview. You know, I was listening
to the first interview, thinking, you know, this guy, he's young, he's inexperienced. And then
you just interview him and he's continued to improve and continued to do more cool stuff. So
more power to my, I am, of course, speaking in jest. He's, yeah, he's a very impressive young fella.
He's really forging ahead with this Python library he's producing. And it sounds really good.
I've not actually looked at it yet, but yeah, well, yeah, pretty good.
More power to him. Yeah, more power to him, exactly. Keep up the good work, that's what I say.
Daily notes and to do list with markdown, I use markdown and guess to keep up with what I do.
And this would be by Norst, Norst. That's how I say it. Yeah. So first of all, what's wrong with
this episode is he's using markdown? Oh, that's going to hurt. I'm poking him, Dave. I'm poking him.
Yes. But no, it's actually a good episode. And I was thinking, you know, I really should do this,
but I have so many to do ways of keeping track of what I have to do that I probably need a way
of keeping track of all the things that I want to do to do lists. Yeah, I know I've tried the various
getting things done methods and always sort of failed a bit in doing them. I just have lots of lists
a bit to paper, but the the journaling aspects of it is very good. The to do, I don't know, I'm just
I don't work that way, but the journal stuff is fantastic. I love that. And I do, I'm joking about
the markup thing for stuff like this. I actually would recommend markup. I was thinking after
listening to this episode, you know, the way you do or at least I do, I was thinking, you know,
they shouldn't actually be teaching word processing in schools. They should, yeah, you know,
here's some word processing. Now we're going to stop using that and we're actually going to do
markup so that, you know, you can understand the difference between having a small amount of
structure in your text and then using the, you know, converting that into rendering, you know,
making us focusing on the writing as opposed to spending the 14 hours, you know, formatting
the case and changing the line spacing and all that good stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I agree. I
agree. I come from the year before word processes, so I prefer the plain text, which you can then
convert into something more more usable. And I actually, I have been thinking about using this for
two reasons. One is the A spell, which I completely agree with. As you know, Dave, I need it constantly.
I haven't used it, but it actually seems like a good idea to use that on the command line.
And the second thing is tracking. I think that's what, sorry, sorry to interrupt.
It's some, if you use VIM as your editor, then you can turn on spell. And I think it defaults to
A spell, actually. Certainly it uses one of the standard spelling packages that's available on
your system. And A spell is usually, usually the one. So, you know, you get things highlighted as
spell that wrong. And I also notes grammar, certain number of grammar things. And then you can
hover in a GUI interface to VIM. You can hover over a word, which has been read underline,
and get a right mouse click will bring you up a list of potential corrections, which is all A spell,
I believe. Interesting. And the other thing is that tracking walk-ups is actually the thing that
kills me and mark the number of people that just end up on my desk. And I don't track that as much
as I should. Yeah, I know. I worked in an environment where me and a help desk and the help desk
could forward things. But then I sleep my office door open. I had my own office. And just because I
wanted to be a friendly manager. And, of course, everybody in the department would then walk in
and say, hey, Dave, if you experienced this, could you know, do you know how to fix this? I'd
colleague walk-ins all the time, which I didn't mind. But, you know, it's hard to hide away.
Yeah, sure enough. Be easy says. Love this idea. Thanks for the show. I agree with the reasons
for using Markdown. I don't. It gets out of the way so you can write, no, that's true, it does.
I also find the idea of using quite interesting, but I will be concerned about privacy. I guess
you can host your own and GitLab. Can't wait for my next show. Well, you don't actually need GitLab
at all. You just set up a repository on your own server, SSH into a remote Raspberry Pi at home,
and just that's what I do. Yeah, me too. I've got a, my Pi 3 is my Git repository, which is
backed up, nod out, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's got an SSD on it, and yeah, yeah, it's like a
possibly get around. Yeah, SSD's last over, don't they? So, do you want to read a fenns reply?
Yes, I will. Nice, license, nice show, sweet script. Is it up on a public Git repo somewhere?
CLDR, would you mind it? Would you mind it? Too long, didn't read. Yes, I know. I never know
if you're supposed to, it's too long to read that out. So, I just did the, the, the, the, the
mnemonic. Would you mind adding a license? You might think a bit as just a little personal
convenience script that doesn't mean much, but anyone can, that anyone can adapt if they please,
right? But technically speaking, you've got the copyright by default, and I can't legally use
this code. You may consider it open-source by being on a web page that's covered by the CC by
ASA license, but they advise against it's use for software as it doesn't explicitly cover
distribution of source code. C, and there's, there's a FAQ on the Creative Commons site,
which will read out. I ask you to consider adding a license to make it clear what people can do with
your script. I sure love to use it, but if I make changes and want to share it, we're in a gray area,
which is an excellent point, and I am just, I'm, I'm, I'm as, I'm as wicked. I, I'm as bad at doing
this have been anyway in the past. So, you know, maybe we should do a thing where, where
Annie Code uploaded automatically gets a license by HPL. Yeah. That would be interesting.
Don't, there is a, there is a question here. Okay, they, NorthSt says the copyright notice,
feedback. Here's a link with the script with the ISC license header in there, so that's,
that's sorted. However, not everything's copyrighted automatically. Yes, it is, but if it's,
It's not, if it's trivial, I'm not saying this is trivial, but for quite a few of the scripts
that I've written, they would be considered trivial, and that was proven in the, at least
in the first round of the Java case where you wrote an interface.
There's only so many ways of writing something, so if you write it, then, yeah, then it's
written.
It's, you know, you make a lock file, okay, fine, you make a daily file, so that's fine.
You run a spell checker, so there's only certain number of ways of writing that.
So yes, copyright means that there's some element of creative work involved, so I would
push back on that, which is criticizing Norse's script, but that is not the intention.
It's, I'm just trying to highlight the fact that we are describing the tendency not to
ascribe copyright to bash scripts is probably okay, because they're so obvious, if you
know what I mean.
On the other hand, though, there's probably is a good argument for sort of keeping a repository
of these types of things.
I mean, I do that, I say that because that's what I do now, and I have a get repository where
I just drop on my HPR related scripts, you know, they sort of throw away things that I
would write, and they're all covered by the license I used when I set it up.
So it's probably something to be said for that, don't you?
Yeah, no, I personally, when I publish anything, it's, I put the license in, and usually if
it's a script like this, I just put it as, you know, public domain CC, zero, whatever,
because it's, well, there you go, yeah, cool, okay, fine, following the cards against
humanity, plateau, and I think this actually in the circles in which we operate is the
one that has triggered lots of people to, to get into these tabletop card gaming things.
It's certainly the one that's probably most widely known, isn't it, because even I, even
I've heard of it, so it must be so.
And Spaceman says, lulls, I didn't know it was creative commons.
The game is a joke in terms of shocking humor, I guess, for chance, slash be destroyed
my humanity before destroyed my humanity, okay?
Yes, yes, I think the fact that it was creative commons gave it a lot of publicity in the community
as such.
Windigo says, bees, I've had many fun games card against humanity since my partner
introduced it to me, I see it as a little bit of a social litmus test, a quick way to
judge the humor people in a group.
This tabletop gaming series has been fantastic, thanks for all of the work put in, agreed,
couldn't agree with you more, clatoon tends to come out with some interesting topics.
Yeah, very original stuff, yeah, absolutely.
Glass-cutting bottles by operator, and he just went and basically caught a bottle and
showed us the diamond tech craft due to bottle totter that he used.
Interesting, sure.
Don't know if I ever ever need to cut bottles.
No, I've known people to get into this sort of thing to make sort of vases and containers
and that sort of thing.
There's something, you know, if you're into making and reusing stuff, then the throwing
away of a really nicely made bottle, it goes against the grain.
You'd think, oh, it'd be nice to make something out of it.
So I can fully sympathise with the idea.
Absolutely.
I couldn't not do my objection or my reason for not doing it as purely lack of any sense
of aesthetics on my own, aesthetic ability at least on my own part.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I know, I've never done this myself, but if I've looked at bottles and thought, well,
it'd be nice to make something out of that.
OK, following up, so in my bill talks about finishing up their DSO 138 oscilloscope kit
which he wasn't able to get running in the last episode, but he got a new kit from the
original, built that and as he was building that, was able to debug the other one.
So very nice.
Yeah, it's a good, good follow.
I'm glad we heard the end of the story.
That was very good.
And he put up some great pictures of what he was doing and everything which I was
found completely fascinating to look at.
So quite a desirable little device, actually, he wants it to be built and put in a case.
It's really quite nice.
And he says that the real JYE tech kit, he just played around with the real one and he's
got the splash screen of it booting up and you can see the splash screen.
They're pretty cool.
Yes, which basically says, don't clone this software and run it on a, on a,
a cloud board, I think that will stop all that loading board people, I'm sure.
Yeah, no.
So operator again, with goes over the items that he uses in his pen testing bag, which
I, a lot of this was very, very interesting from the, you know, kind of obvious, get a
laptop stand.
So you're not scrunching over your laptop like caveman, I thought that was, that was
pretty cool, the description there.
But some of the other stuff was a lot, you know, quite, quite practical.
You wouldn't, you wouldn't associate with your least pen testers having a good umbrella,
you know.
No, these are, these are all very practical things, but also it's a purpose, isn't it?
I was impressed by the, the Wi-Fi pineapple, what's it called, what's the called, is it
the router bag, which is, it's just a quite cool name, actually.
So yes.
You can go and hack into, into Wi-Fi, from passing people and so forth.
Custom mode, earboard rounds up, a little keyboard, these are all links, no umbrella jacket.
Sorry, we're browsing at stuff there now, following the links again.
So very nice, the following day, I interviewed Francois with a 50 year old hacking computer,
did you get a chance to look at the video, Dave?
I haven't looked at the video, no, no, I'm afraid not.
I did listen to the show, I'm very late, catching up with things this week, this month.
A wonderful, wonderful show, brilliant interview, by the way.
And what, what a thing to be doing, it's just astonishing.
And I, I learnt quite a bit here from about rope memory, I didn't realise,
didn't realise what they, no, I did not know anything about this.
I, I have, I had some core memory, I donated it to the, the archive of the university,
when I left, and that was quite impressive, you know, those were sort of semi hand made.
But the concept of building what's effectively a ROM, as I think you said,
like a, like a USB stick, knitting it, by turning wires in or out of a core,
was just a strategy, I had no concept that such a thing existed, very, very good.
And his, you know, his setup is just fascinating, fascinating.
A lot of people on the IRC were commented about it.
We had also comments from Michele saying,
grid interview, very fascinating, couldn't agree with you more.
I, you know, just, I don't normally really listen to my shows, I do myself.
And in this one, I was just going, why didn't I ask this?
I could just have continued doing that interview for another hour or two,
but he is available to come back to us to do more shows.
A fascinating fellow.
Yeah, yeah.
Windigo says superb interview.
I've been like this episode to be playing on the computer history museum.
It's unbelievable to see how much work you took to get us to space
and how far we've come with computing.
And Kevin says, Kevin or Brian, fantastic interview, love this interview.
It was fantastic to hear about how we worked at the inner workings of these computers.
And yeah, it's just a complete mystery.
And you, you know, if you see the photo of the stuff that he hacked together,
caught him caught, hacked together, it's just awesome.
The video itself of it really gone to each of the bits.
And you can see them coming up in the oscilloscope and then over on the other side
on a, on a spectrum analyzer for what it looks like here.
Yeah, it's an impressive looking device, too,
with the bazillion relays and stuff all over it looks like.
Yeah, absolutely.
It got me looking at some of the links there,
and the reading the Wikipedia page about the Apollo Gardens computers,
quite worth doing.
Because it goes into details of the, the actual CPU architecture and stuff,
which was amazingly, you know, very, very lightweight,
very few instructions, three bit instructions and various other things of that sort.
And, but it's, it's absolutely fascinating when you consider what they could actually do with it, you know.
In fact, they've made, made this also so robust, mechanically robust,
and, you know, robust against all manner,
other, other potential problems as they took it to the moon.
It's just unbelievable.
Yeah, and they had a concept of a verb and a noun for entering a launch time,
and then how long since or something.
So you were able to do a lot of combinations just by punching in the chords.
Very, very interesting.
You can actually get the code now, isn't it?
During this year, during the summertime,
somebody had put up the, a listing of the, the assembler code for some of the modules in the,
in the, the, the, the, the gardens computer,
haven't had a brief look at them. Of course you need to know so much about what the
architecture was and everything. Take a lot of study to work out what it's doing, but it's
amazing. It's there. It's on GitHub, I think, isn't it?
So the next and final one was Bar Camp Manchester Part 2 and Tony interviewed Claire Dodd,
who was the organiser and Damian from Lair Shift Hosting, one of the sponsors.
Yeah, it sounds quite a, quite a meeting. It's a bit far to go to one of these.
Far to go, Dave. It's a long way to go. Quite far. It's only the far on the map.
So, yeah. Actually, you know, cost wise, I'm probably closer than you.
So, yeah. Yeah, you probably fly to Manchester cheaper than you could get to
Lua Poulin plays in that probably, can you? Yeah, there's sums around with the world,
and that's the case. Yeah, anyways, good stuff, anyway, thank you.
Should we go over the comments that were outside of the pool?
Yes, yes. So, there are 10 comments on seven previous shows.
The first one was, as usual, I have not lined these up.
I have, Dave, I have. So, I'll do the first one. It was related to my podcast list by Jane
Doc, the podcast listened to, and the comment was just subscribed to rejoice. Thank you
by Muzlo, and that's something that I was tempted to do myself, so put that on my list.
But I have to put all of these into a OPML file, anyway, at some point, that's on my list as well.
Yeah, I know, I know. So, the experiencing with an experience with a neighbourhood cat,
and this was a show by Brian, where he describes the passing of one of the cats in the neighborhood
by another Frank touching. I usually listen to podcasts late in bed,
basically, to relax the eyes and eventually fall asleep. This one always brought a tear to my eye
when your tail came to the point of departure. I grew up with quite some cats, and from those
two actually grew old in our household, and the last one was blind for her last year and a half
to two years. She was mostly outside mind you poor thing. Cats can be very sociable. They feel
when you're ill, and there's even been stories of a retirement home cat in England that
sensed when a person was dying. Then it went into the room, sat on the bed, and spent cozy company
until I was all over. So nice comment there. Thank you. Be caught up, Dave. I am, yes.
So, the next one was to, yeah, the Dark Coats, and it was a comment by RTSN, again, I think.
It was before that, actually. It was a tattoos comment on Tejou.
I've got too many windows here in the show. I'll do tattoos comment, you can do the show itself
was about the Dark Coats tabletop game. Was that not enough? And Jo had said,
Jo had made a comment that there were like yesterday's history and I think like eating
music, they're going to return. Tlatu, who had done the show says, thanks, Jo, I wish I had
no high moral ground, a good claim that I've always supported and a lot of gaming, but the truth
is I'm only discovering it myself. So up until now, I reckon I've been part of the problem.
That said, it really does seem like we're more or less in the golden age of tabletop gaming.
Granted, the RPG systems from and since the 80s have always been ahead of their time,
but it feels a little to me like the board game and car game systems that have been popping up
are truly clever, stepping in equal parts solid game theory and imagination and they have now
something for everyone. If ever there's been a time to get in town while gaming, I think it's
right now in capitals. That's interesting. I hadn't quite absorbed that comment before. That was
very similar to what we were speculating on about the state of tabletop games, isn't it?
Which is interesting. So anyway, RTSN says excellent. Good stuff. Be honest, I was stupid enough
to think that I was too cool for RPGs and tabletop games when I was young. So I never got into them
back then and this is something I've regretted ever since. Dark occult sounds pretty interesting.
I think I'll look into it. Thanks for a great episode. Okay, and the next comment was on my mobile
recording solution, which was done by Paul from 32, which had a record decent audio in my
creeper van, which alpha 32 says, because we had commented about that, what a creeper van was,
and he says creeper van is the name I gave my work van. It's a windalous black in the back white
van. It's not very glamorous, but it holds a lot of computer parts. So it's your basic white van,
I guess. Yes, yes, I'm glad that was translated. I'm not sure whether it's a it's a
a Britain versus USA terminology thing or quite what it was, but glad to have that.
So the next one was a comment by Kendall, who said cool to the alpha 32 episode, how we got an
old Tabrat from the LG G Pad 7's one where he got a per dollar and struggled to put on a new flash
on it. So yes, I agree with that comment entirely. And then tabletop gaming, John had commented
last month on takes time to play a good analog game. And Tlatu replies to his comment gone,
there's something comforting and sublimely satisfying about sitting down with a good game and
a good cup of coffee and waiting through the different rules and exceptions to the rules.
It must be a similar to the thrill that a lawyer gets when going to a legal library
or less repulsively when a programmer reviews an API. Lawyers don't have to be repulsive.
We all love Karen. Yes, yes, yes. So the last one, my problem is I've got two tabs and you're
forgetting to put those press to talk button as well. Just last last the push to talk button.
Just yeah, those these are all comments on the episode about pushing to to get repositories
at once. And which was the I figured was clacky. Is that the first one in this bunch?
Yeah, yes. And the show was from Tlatu last month. Yes, yes. And do you want to do that one
and I'll do the next. Okay. Tlatu, I figured, smiley face, I thought, hey, this is probably useful
if you want to hold something in GitLab and have an unofficial clone as one minute later. Yep.
And then he followed up with explicit push. Very cool discovery. I never even considered
the idea that you could have several URLs for a remote. As you mentioned that this kind of
mixed remote would make it impossible without adding remote to push to only one of the URLs.
I thought I should mention something that probably not everyone knows. You don't need to set up
a remote to fetch or push. You can use an explicit URL instead of a remote name.
So git push and then a URL, SSH blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, head colon master.
In fact, because I forget what the various options are for managing references and branches,
I often use this to remove a reference in the local repository. So it does git push dot colon
slash, head slash, whatever branch. And then Tlatu replies explicit push.
Pony should mention the explicit push. I knew about it or at least I knew about explicit push
because I use it when migrating Git repositories are work. But only with local URLs never
dorm to me that it could be done with non local URLs. Thanks for the tip to which you replied.
Well, strictly, I shouldn't be saying this because I replied in November,
which is in the wrong list. I will. I said, I listened to this and thought, yeah, yeah, great.
But why? Who would ever want to use this? I probably even said it when you reviewed the show.
And I wrote, thought I'd never use this. This was interesting, but I thought I'd never use it.
However, I had an instance recently where making a GitHub copy of a repository on a git lab
instance was desirable. It was straightforward to set up and work flawlessly.
Thanks for explaining the process. I'm thinking this is very complex.
That's what I'm saying. It is, yes, yes. I think an entire series wouldn't be out the window
either now that we're getting used to people doing fully fledged entire series. So somebody wants to
step up to the old plate that will be awesome. Yes, it is hard. I started learning Git by taking
the Git manual away and trying to read it. That was a mistake. It's hard work. It's really hard
working. You don't know, well, I didn't really learn much. You just need to have a problem and
try and solve it. I've found that sometimes other people have the same thing and share what they did
which is brilliant. So there was a, well, most of the mailing list and there was an announcement
that the Ohio Linux test was on. We'll be talking more about that next month. Then I had a
question to see how on the communities discussed we are awesome. Get asked how popular the
community is and a way to calculate that. So the discussion basically continued with the
DOSMAN, Hong Kong Mugu and Clinton Roy, give me feedback. But it basically breaks down to
was more of the question from my point of view was how do I measure that based on the download,
Apache download logs that we have? Yes, yes. To which I haven't actually gotten,
I haven't got time to look at that as such, yes, but I do plan to. But I also haven't got enough
question, excuse me, haven't got enough things that people want to know. So people need to tell me
if I had the log files, what would I like to know? Yeah, difficult one. I guess, unless you know
what you could have. Well, some Apache log. The Apache log with the Apache log stats. So there's a
date, an IP address, a URL that they went to and they use a agent. So that's the stuff that we have.
We don't have it from the beginning of time and there are major gaps in it, but that's the stuff
that we have. So what should I be looking for in those in those files? What would be of interest
to people to know? This question is like how many unique downloads per day or something like that,
isn't it? Yeah, yeah. Those are the sort of questions. And there are tools that will do the unique
unique information for you as well. That's not the question. That's how I do know that is fine,
but what I want to know is like people asking questions so that I can ask, okay, so as you say,
unique downloads, do I then consider, what do I consider as a unique download? Do I consider
every request? So if somebody's fast forwarding through the file, do I consider that each one
unique download or do I do all of these permutations and that people decide? So that's the sort of
questions that I'd like to know, or maybe I should just because I had it, I had one I do want to do
a show on this and it would be nice to get a bunch of questions from people what they would
consider to be useful information to extract from that. Or better yes, would be somebody
find a way that I can sanitize log files so it would be impossible to derive people's personal
information from, but that would also be impossible because people can do that, so that's that would be
a privacy issue. Yes, yes, complicated. Yeah, exactly. So Martin, the bishop sent in some questions
about multi-file extras and you can always do that. That sort of question we normally tend to get
on the admin mailing list, which is why I don't actually check to see if it's going to the
HPR mailing list, so normally I would just keep that sort of stuff out of the admin mailing list,
but because the admin mailing list appears not to be working, I think people have been falling
back to their general mail list. On the other hand, I thought we might be quite useful for people
who maybe haven't included other things with the, with the shows who might want to, that you know,
that discussion might be something that might be useful to a few people. Yeah, so it's it is possible
to how we have tended to do it in the past as you can upload your show notes and then if you put
multiple images on it, you can you're not restricted when you upload your audio file, you can
upload multiple things at the same time, including a gzip file. So there's several different ways
of approaching it, but let's break it down to the two most common, that if you just have a small,
email-y type size, I guess, of show notes, but you want to include a few images. What we tend to do
is just use rename the images as HPR episode, you know, 999.jpg are not HPR 999 on
the score, picture 1.jpg or whatever, and then you can include references to those new show notes
because they will be served from hacker public radio, forward slash EPS, forward slash HPR 999.jpg.
What we will do if it's more complicated than that, and you want to include more stuff,
you then just create a sub directory on your home there, put HPR 9999, call the directory
that and put an index.html file in there, and you can reference any files, however you wish
inside of that. And Dave, I believe you have a tool that will assist people in doing this.
Well, yes, I have a tool that I use to do this much, how shareable it is. There is available on
GitLab, I think, but yeah, I did do an answer to this where I showed a bit of a make file,
where I actually use a tar command to generate the zip file, use B zip, actually.
And I use the X form argument to tar, which allows you to chop out the paths,
so what you get at the other end is not my paths, the full paths that I have at this end,
but it's sort of a chopdown tidied up path to do the end result. So,
but yeah, it's one, it's a small contribution to the discussion of how many people want to do that.
And also, we were talking about how to make the upload form easier, because some people are missing,
people always seem to get there, they clean and, you know, the iTunes tag with explicit or clean
tag, but they don't get the intro and outro tag for some reason. And that actually causes a lot of
issues for us, because if we encode it and we add the intro and outro, then you got double
intro and outro, so I end up having to download the files anyway and checking to make sure,
and I kind of know that this host always tends to do their intro and outro, but they've marked
that there's no intro and outro, so I better double, double check that, and sometimes that holds up
things because, so Dave rightly pointed out that their website could do with some more explicit
way of signaling that, so I'm not, I'm not sure if people have improvements, then feel free to send
them our way. That showed them up. I was just waiting for the fuselade of um,
fireworks to stop. Can you hear them? Nope. Oh, I kind of can't know. Yeah, yeah, it's not,
there's not a lot. I just, I live on the outskirts of the city, so there's not many people around.
So yeah, yeah, the, yeah, there's work that could be done to make the process a little bit more
clear, I suppose. And like I said to you, I didn't, I'm not very good with forms, I look at a form
sort of panic and run away. So, you know, if you could take away the need to panic,
also the CSS needs a little bit of work as all. It's not 100% the line at the top on the website
seems to not be working. I don't know what I did to break that. But anyway, so I don't have anything
else, Dave, do you have anything else? No, I don't have anything else. No, I should remember to press
that damn button. Sorry about that. Yeah, I think, I think we've covered everything this time,
there's nothing else. Well, folks keep sending in the shows. We're doing pretty okay. But worry,
there's still a lot of, I'd like to see, you know, people contribute shows out further so that you
pick a week that's empty so that we can start filling out those empty weeks. And then that leaves,
you know, nice little spaces of one or two free slots coming in. So people don't have to wait that
long, but I don't have cardiac arrest every time I look at the at this show. So, cool,
anything cool planned for this month, Dave? I am making some, trying to make some hardware things,
so I've got a, I've got a blink stick pro, which I may, which I bought about two years ago now,
to finally solder. Now I've got a fancy new soldering station. I just finally soldered this thing.
You know, you took about 10 minutes. It must be the new soldering iron, that was why. So, yeah,
when I play with that, make it light up all sorts of fancy things. With my new phone soldering skills,
I saw I had a, I have two Phillips sets of headphones, you know, over-year ones. They're actually
quite reliable. And I've had someone's seen me interviewing people. They're the ones I tend to wear
because they block out a lot of noise. And, you know, I just went for a bust and then I realized that
I brought a spare soldering iron to work and I found some solder and I just sold the thing up in the
middle of work. I'm not so chuffed with myself. The thing just worked. Put it back together.
Yeah, there you go. Job done. Well done. Absolutely. That's the way it should be, isn't it?
Yeah, soldering is not that hard. I don't know why I've been so, you know,
phobia or just a mental block against doing it. It's just, you know, try it. I suppose if you're doing
detailed circuits and stuff, but if you're just hacking stuff together, just hack,
hack stuff together, just do it. What's the worst thing to go wrong?
Yeah, yeah, you can, you can practice. When I was younger, I used to make little, little
gadgets and stuff out of bits of copper wire. You know, you just get, get an old bit of
mains flex and cut out all the individual strands. Then you can bend them into interesting shapes
and make things out of them. You know, I made my mum a device which she could fit underneath her
the worktop and put a gas lighter in. It just sort of slid into a sort of, little sort of
skeleton framework type thing made out of copper wire. So, and you can have a lot of fun
making that sort of thing. You know, if you're into sculpture or anything like that, it'd be a great
way to make the skeleton of a model as well. That's what I do it to say to you sometimes, you know.
So, someone can be used to all sorts of things. It's a lot of fun. Cool. Okay, tune in next week,
next month, tune in tomorrow in natural fact for another exciting episode of Hacker, public
Radio. All right.
Hacker, you'll be free. Don't know what I was going for there.
Oh, yeah. It's like a monastic giant almost. I thought I already did one of that.
Yeah, you did, you did. It's supposed to do country semester or something this time. But if you
have a request for what version I should do, then give me a shout. All right, thanks Dave. Talk to you later. Bye.
Okay, cheers now.
You've been listening to Hacker, public radio at Hacker, publicradio.org.
We are a community podcast network that release the shows every weekday, Monday through Friday.
Today's show, like all our shows, was contributed by an HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording a podcast and click on our contributing,
to find out how easy it really is, Hacker, public radio was founded by the Digital Dog
Pound and the Infonomicon Computer Club. And it's part of the binary revolution at binrev.com.
If you have comments on today's show, please email the host directly, leave a comment on the
website or record a follow-up episode yourself. Unless otherwise status, today's show is released
under Creative Commons, Attribution, ShareLite, 3.0 license.