hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr2068.txt

Episode: 2068
Title: HPR2068: Podcasts I listen to and how I fetch them.
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2068/hpr2068.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 13:54:31

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This is HBR Episode 2068 entitled, Podcast I Listen To, and How I FHM.
And in part of the series, Podcast Recommendation.
It is posted by Christopher M. Pond and in about 9 minutes long.
The summary is, and I drive to work, I write all of a short list of Podcasts I Listen To, and How I FHM.
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Okay, HBR, good morning.
Hopefully this is going to actually record.
I've been kind of clever and hooked up my rock box to part of the visor on my car here.
And I thought, on my way to work, just dropped off my kiddo.
I would talk about some of the Podcasts I Listen To since there's been a couple of these episodes coming along.
And I don't have a script.
I'm just going to mention the ones I remember off the top of my head because my thought process here is that,
if I can remember them off the top of my head, they must have been good.
So start first, naturally with HBR.
I've been listening for, I don't know, since maybe 2012.
And I wish I was around in the beginnings of it because there are quite a lot of good episodes in the past.
And once in a while, I go back and grab some of those.
Next, I listen to Off the Wall and Off the Hook, which are 2600 Podcasts related to 2600 Hacker Quarterly.
Off the Wall tends to be just a manual gold scene ranting about politics.
And I don't listen to it near as often as I listen to Off the Hook.
And Off the Hook is just a technology related radio show.
I guess they're technically radio shows and not podcasts, but they release them regularly online.
And then I, let's see what's next.
Probably one of my favorites is the KPFA Puzzling Evidence Show.
It is a whole lot of different old movie clips and stuff like that.
It did together just to sound weird, with a little bit of a subgenius flare to it.
And I guess that's a good segue to talk about the subgenius hour of Slack.
It's another one that I listen to pretty regularly.
There's a little bit of a weird one, but I like a lot of the subgenius art and the music and the conversation and the pseudo religious overtones.
I do listen to, I can't remember the name of it, but I'll put it in the show notes.
It's the daily arbiter or the daily arbitration.
It's also called Hour Battle Tech.
It's a relatively long running battle tech podcast.
I played Battle Tech as a kid and once in a while I still play it.
I don't have quite the array of miniatures that I used to have for it.
None of them are painted up.
But I'm sure I like to play Battle Tech when I get the chance.
And it's fun to keep on top of some of the developments.
You know, that's almost it.
I really don't listen to a whole lot of them.
Oh, I do listen to the X-worker from Crime Think.
It's an anarchist podcast.
And that also brings up open source with Christopher, I think his last name is Leiden.
That one is sort of a political one with an unfortunate name.
I don't think it should be called open source, but don't let the name fool you.
It's a good podcast.
Once in a blue moon, I'll listen to the Moth podcast or Love and Radio or the memory palace.
But all three of those feel kind of overproduced.
I like a lot of the more DIY or amateur type podcasts.
I'm sure I'm forgetting a few of them, but those are the ones that I listen to the most.
Oh, naturally, I can't forget the Defercast.
Some of you HPR listeners and hosts are also on the Defercast.
I enjoy listening to those folks rant and rave.
So yeah, I think that's the bulk of the podcasts I listen to that I can think of off the top of my head.
The pod catcher I use most of the time is jeep potter.
But I've found that lately jeep potter has been really slow on my machine.
And I don't know if it's maybe jeep potter's database or if I just don't have the resources,
I use a little net book that I've modified with a solid state SSD to try and get some,
I guess, what amounts to slow RAM by increasing a bunch of swapspace.
But at any rate, jeep potter has just been painfully slow.
So I recently evaluated pod racer and podgett.
I found that pod racer, while much more simple to configure,
it didn't have as many options as podgett.
So I uninstalled it and I'm using podgett.
I'll try and post my podgetrc here.
I've got it set to run every night, like two or three in the morning,
right after my backups run.
And I've had a couple of problems with it.
It doesn't seem to recognize the maximum download limit for new episodes.
But I think it was just a configuration error on my part.
The other concern I'm going to have with it is I don't have any way to
mark episodes as having been played.
So I've got a lot of stuff just sitting around on my disk.
I need to figure out how it determines the age of a podcast
because if it's doing it by file name,
it does add the date to the file name.
But if it's doing it by file name, I'm afraid if I delete some of the files
that it'll try to re-download them.
My initial thought was I could just reuse our sync to copy everything to my
Sansa clips appear in our little rock box device and then delete them.
But yeah, I need to see how it knows when something is old.
But so far it's not been bad.
The initial download took a long time because I had a lot of podcasts to load into it.
But once that's happened, I found that the nightly runs really don't take that long.
And it's got nice logging functionality.
I really enjoy being able to read through everything that it's done.
And yeah, it's been pretty good.
It's a little different workflow than using G-Potter.
With G-Potter, I would only fetch my podcasts when I needed them.
Usually I listen to podcasts while I'm mowing the lawn or washing the dishes
because I have trouble listening to people talking while I'm working.
I can't really listen to them while I'm driving about because nine times out of ten
I'm taking my son to school or I have him in the vehicle with me for some reason or another.
So yeah, it's gone from that sort of workflow where I'm going to go do some chores.
So I download all the podcasts and then load them on my rock box and listen to them as I do.
The chores to now, it just updates every night.
And when I'm ready to go do something, I just arsink them to my device.
So we'll see how it pans out.
I'm pretty excited about using it, especially since it's not as resource intensive.
One feature I wish it did have is downloading in parallel like G-Potter has.
And I wonder if I could run multiple instances of it.
It does use a session lock, but I don't know if that would let me do things in parallel or not.
So it says it's optimized for curl and that it is.
I mean, it's really designed to run overnight, grab one thing at a time when network usage is not high.
And then you sync up your podcasts later when you feel like it.
So at any rate, those are the podcasts I listen to and that's how I'm fetching my podcasts.
And I've now made it to the office.
I know this is a very short episode, but it's a contribution.
And if anybody out there is listening has ever wanted to make a podcast, it's pretty simple.
And HPR lowers the barrier of entry.
And I'd encourage you to just pick a subject and start talking about it.
We could use the episodes.
All right, guys. We'll see you next time.
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