Episode: 1293
Title: HPR1293: A Week of Freedom
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1293/hpr1293.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-17 23:06:40

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Greetings, hacker public radio. I wanted to do another podcast. This one not about programming.
I'm going to kind of ramble a bit. I apologize for the noise in the background. I've got some
fans going because it's pretty hot in here. This particular podcast will be about a week
of freedom. I'm trying to use nothing but free software for an entire week. Unfortunately,
I am using non-free software to record this. But I'll talk a little bit about some of the hitches
I've had with non-free software. So I want to talk a little bit about where I started. The early
to mid-90s I cut my teeth on minics on an old tandy machine that didn't even have a hard drive.
Shortly thereafter I got a nice 486 and wound up wondering how I would install minics on it as
the previous machine was a hand me down. I didn't have any source installation material. So
after talking to some friends I stumbled across the Walnut Creek CD distribution company and
ordered a pile of Linux and Unix derivatives as I knew that Linux had come from minics to some
degree. I ploughed my way through Red Hat Mandrake as well and even I traveled abroad I carried it
with me. Shortly thereafter I found one of the old FreeBSD disks in the set. There's been many
computers and during that time but I stuck with FreeBSD for quite a long time. When I'm going to
college picking up a job at the job they were heavily using Red Hat and I implemented several
FreeBSD servers there. Same job I talked about in my previous podcast where I spent about eight
years on IT. Then they began to roll out no-vell network services and started using open
SUSE quite heavily. Contributing to open SUSE spending time at their conferences spoke a little
bit and tried to help with bug fixes and documentation all because we were using the enterprise version
of SUSE at work. We ran into some hiccups and started moving away from no-vell software at that
job and we wound up switching over to Ubuntu. Shortly after we switched to Ubuntu and I had
several servers set up for them running most of their services including a eucalyptus cloud or cluster
rather. I wound up moving into the exciting field of software development instead of IT general
IT work. At that point my computing needs changed quite a bit. The computer was mostly a general
purpose tool for me and I didn't get into the more geeky stuff as I spent all of my brainpower
trying to build software and finally understood the gap between development and IT. The job that I
left for handed a MacBook Pro to me and after over a decade of using nothing but Linux and Unix
derivatives it was a little strange. I owned a power book at one point in my life but wound up
installing a Linux on it and I found that it generally let me get the job they defined done.
Relatively effortlessly. Was not real pleased with the crystal prison that Apple provided but I
rolled with it and gradually started purchasing nothing but Apple devices at home. I own a Mac Mini.
My wife has been steeped in Linux since we've met but she agreed to the purchase. I own an iPad
because for the longest time I used the iPad to remote into a couple of servers and work with
nothing but the tablet. I own an iPhone when my Samsung droid charge decided to give up the
ghost. iPhones at the time happened to be cheaper than the Android options and I went with that.
So that's kind of my current situation at work I use a MacBook Pro and at home I use a Mac Mini.
Most of my life is spent on most of my computing life is spent on the SDF public access
unit system so the Mac is really just a proxy for me. It's sort of a thin client that lets me get to
where I do my real work. Become increasingly frustrated with the crystal prison I spoke of and
also the closed nature of the hardware. I also don't like the interface and the fact that I can't
change the interface is another annoyance. So I've been looking at other options for a while and
would just rather not buy another machine. I've invested a lot of money in these and we'll find
options in the future when they give up their ghosts. So I've just kind of existed on SDF in general.
I recently moved all of my mail and some more of my network services like XMPP and VoIP over to SDF
because I guess last year I decided that I would drop Facebook it just got to be the privacy
concerns were too overwhelming and it became a time sync so I went ahead and deleted my Facebook
account and that led to me wondering if I could live a week without Google. I often like to give
things a try for a week to see if I will like them. In this case I'm trying free software for a week
and when I decided to leave Google for a week I moved my life out of Chrome. I moved all of my
network services away from Google with the exception of my domain and the only reason that still
exists is due to my wife having an email account on it and I moved everything I switched from
Chrome to Firefox moved all of my network services to SDF. I enjoyed Firefox and I enjoyed SDF
and when the week was up it would have been too much hassle to migrate back and I think in the
long run I'm a little bit better off for not giving Google even more information. So that road
sort of led to me bumping into more free software foundation and GNU websites and started to wonder
if I could live for one week using only free software and the purpose of this podcast is to talk
about that week. I am halfway through the week so I've cheated a little bit and I'm considering
extending it. So here is a basic rundown of everything I use in my day to day life. I no longer
do anything really geeky and the past I used to love to tweak Linux, I used to love to obsess over
my hardware. I don't do any of that anymore. These days if I'm not working and work consists of
existing and terminal cranking out Rails code and Ruby code for any commerce company I'm generally
browsing the web or browsing message boards at SDF. Reading books, digital books. That's
about the extent of it. A couple of news feeds. Rarely listening to music, I listen to a lot of
podcasts and a lot of online radio. So as I mentioned before I moved from Chrome to Firefox.
I spend most of my time at Firefox very minimal. I don't really use any extensions.
I use the pinboard extension, keep my bookmarks there. When I'm not using Firefox I use iTerm2.
Usually in there I'm running either Teamux or dbtm with detach so that I can get some sort of
tiling interface out of my machine because aqua provides a pretty horrible user interface
with a lot of wasted real estate in my mind. Beyond that sometimes I listen to iTunes or Spotify
for podcasts or occasional music. I use YNAB, you need a budget to track my finances.
VIM is my editor of choice. I also own an Xbox, a Roku, an iPhone and an iPad. Those I will be
attempting to give up as well. I have a couple of minor local games. I think some of them might
be under the GPL. Some of them might be OS X specific. I don't really remember.
Remind my term, I generally am SSH102SDF. I keep all my notes there. I use terminal velocity which
is a console-based notational velocity and involved clone. Teamux are detached as well. I use mutt
to read all my email. I use, and I'm going to butcher the name, news butler. I think is what it's
called to check all my feeds. I use iris.si for IRC. I don't kick around on any public servers
just hang out with some private folks. I use STF's comm mode which is a chat system and I use
their bulletin board and I use e-links to browse the web. I find that I use e-links a little bit
more than Firefox because I don't have to worry about JavaScript and pictures and things of
that nature. I can just get the content I'm after. So that's kind of my software life in a nutshell.
So before I decided to take this week, I wanted to evaluate a few distributions. When I came
across, I like really minimalistic installs. So the first thing I tried was Dragoora. The issue
I had with Dragoora was I never could quite get screen resolutions worked out. I like minimalism
but I also don't want to roll up my sleeves and get too far into configuring things.
So that proved to be too much of a nuisance. I'm running these under VMware at home and virtual
box for a point of reference. Once I tried Dragoora, I jumped the other end to GnuSense and GnuSense
is a nice pretty install and generally worked but aesthetically I wasn't really into it and I feel
like it came with a lot more software than I wanted. And these are all really small nitpicking
things that I didn't like. I could probably work with GnuSense or Dragoora. I was just looking
for something a little more comfortable. So next I tried Parabola which is the Libre version
of Arch Linux and I really enjoyed it. The short period of time that I used it. It felt a little
bit like FreeBSD. I liked the package system. I just felt that I would spend too much time tinkering
during the week and not emulating my day-to-day personal interactions on a computer.
So then after I tried that I gave Triskull a go and I'm probably mispronouncing that one as well.
It's Triskull Linux. It's an Ubuntu derivative and it happened to fit my needs quite well.
It's relatively aesthetically pleasing. Comes out of the box with almost everything I need
but doesn't give me stuff I don't need and it's generally easy to navigate. The reason
I'm recording this podcast is because I'm currently reinstalling it. I didn't give it enough
disk space. So once I increase its disk space I think I'm going to be very happy with it.
So I'm running this in VMware and I run it full screen and avoid the utilities on my Mac like
I said I'm not ready to buy another computer just yet. Kind of want to see how this goes.
So in the last three days I have used some non-free software. Clearly my phone, my iPhone,
but I'm restricting myself to text messages and phone calls. It would have been too much hassle to
try to make my phone an open source and free device to use. I do not use my iPad. I've kept that
aside. I have used my Xbox and my Roku so that my son could watch some shows and play a couple of
games but I am not directly interacting with it. I still visited the bullet and board
technically it's non-free software because it is closed source. Nobody sees how it works.
But I wanted to stay connected and I caved a little bit. I did use Preview and OS 10 to
sign a document for my business. I couldn't figure out how to pull that off in the document viewer
and Triscoll which I believe looks suspiciously like events which I had used in the past on OpenSusa.
I also used the VMware guest tools so the resolution appropriately resizes. I don't know if I
consider that cheating because I like to think of the virtual environment as emulating hardware
and it's near impossible to find totally free hardware. Interestingly enough the reason I'm using
the VMware guest tools is because Triscoll's resolution detection was not quite spot on.
Genusense however picked up the virtual resolution almost immediately so I'm not sure what the
difference is there. And obviously at work I'm using a MacBook Pro to do all of my Ruby development
and Rails work there. So I figured if I was going to do this I may even look at some replacements
and options for the actual free software I use. So I have been using ABrowser which is the
Debranded Firefox that comes with Triscoll and it's worked fantastically. Start using Thunderbird
just to kind of try a graphical email client. I've lived so long with mutt that anything else
sort of jars me but Thunderbird has been relatively easy to use. I've been using Life Ray. I
stumbled on it on accident because it was in the messaging menu that provided with Triscoll.
I use that to read my RSS feeds now. I simply exported all of my newsletter feeds as OPML
and they came right into Life Ray. I'm very happy. I'm using Ghibber for Identica however much
longer that'll exist and for STF's status net instance which is not federated unfortunately.
Ghibber it's fun to see that application because I recall the the Novel Hack Week when it was
created and I recall when Tomboy was created in the Novel Hack Week as well and I had some minor
part in helping with bug smashing for those so that was quite fun too. Very minor part if I
I better underline that but it was very fun to see those again. I'm not using Tomboy as I keep
all of my notes and text files now but it was it was kind of nice to see those after not being
around them for three or four years. I've installed SSHFS so that I can not entirely use
STF but mount my important directories locally so I can get to my notes and things of that nature
and I fired up G at it. Now normally I'm a VEM user but and I don't like things like sublime text
or text mate and without getting too far into Editor Wars I really forgot how great
of a basic Editor G at it is. I've really enjoyed using it. I do miss my VEM keys
but it's another one of those situations where it provides everything you want
and nothing you don't need and the plugins are astounding. Wonderful Editor works well
in this situation. So my thoughts so far I would really like to go back to using something
other than OS 10 and I may strive for I guess moral and emotional reasons to keep that as free
software. So it would be kind of neat to get a hold of a cheap notebook or a netbook and a netbook
would be optimal just a small machine that's that Triscoll is supported on. If anybody knows where
I can get an inexpensive netbook to put Triscoll on I would be very happy to know of that
and I've been really watching Firefox OS very closely. I think my next phone
may end up being a Firefox OS phone. I don't need a lot. On my phone I need to send and receive
messages. Maybe connect to VoIP. Maybe connect to SSH. Definitely make phone calls.
So I guess SSH in VoIP is asking a lot of a phone but those are superfluous. I can do without them.
The occasional email would be nice and Firefox OS is pretty close to aligning with the
free culture standards even if it's not spot on. I think it's better than handing my life over
to Google with an Android phone or living in Apple's Crystal Prison. So I'm going to
try to do the rest of the week and see where it goes. It's really pleasant. I'm going to try not
to cheat anymore. The best way I think to cheat would be to avoid cheating would be to get a
machine and just live with it rather than using a virtual machine. I'm excited to see what comes
of it. So I think that's it for this. I'm sorry if it was a little noisy. I did have to kick
the fans on and off and I had no real script for this. I was just sort of rambling while the
installer goes. I hope you enjoyed it. I still want to make some more podcasts as I have time.
My schedule is a little rough. If you'd like to talk, I've been using pumpIO for most of my
micro-blogging needs. You can catch me there at nil method at microcast. So NIL METHOD
at M-I-C-R-O-C-A.ST. Or you can simply email me cmhobbs at acm.org. That's cmhobbs at acm.org.
Thanks again, listeners. I appreciate your time and I appreciate Hacker Public Radio for giving
me yet another opportunity to post a podcast. Goodbye.
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