hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr2570.txt

Episode: 2570
Title: HPR2570: Penguicon 2018 Report
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2570/hpr2570.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 05:54:02

---

This is HPR Episode 2570 entitled Pengwikun 2018 Report and is part of the series, Pengwikun.
It is hosted by Aukun and is about 16 minutes long and carrying a clean flag.
The summer is Pengwikun 2018 took place on May 4, 2006, 2018 in Southfield, Michigan.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by AnanasThost.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HPR15, that's HPR15.
Better web hosting that's honest and fair at AnanasThost.com.
Hello and welcome to another exciting episode of Hacker Public Radio.
I'm Aukka and I am looking forward to giving you my view of what happened at Pengwikun 2018.
I've done these every year and so what I want to emphasize is this is a very large event and I am not that large a person.
So I'm going to talk about the things I did and I'm sure if you had gone there you would have done all sorts of different things.
So this is just a taste of what's available.
Pengwikun took place the weekend of May 4 through May 6 and so that's a Friday evening through Sunday afternoon basically.
But now if you were staying at the hotel where the event was going on you could be doing things well into the night.
I am too old to do stuff like that and I live nearby so I just go for the day and then go home and get my sleep.
So Friday May 4 as I usually do I went to work on Friday then I grabbed dinner before heading over to Pengwikun.
This year it was going to be different because I was not responsible for running anything other than my two talks.
Now last year after four years of running the tech track I stepped down because I was tired and be you want to bring in new blood to keep things fresh.
That's a pro tip to all of you event organizers out there rotate your staff from time to time.
It's a good idea all around.
So I got there I found the registration table I got signed in and I picked up my materials for the two panels or presentation or whatever that I would be on.
Then I headed for the opening ceremonies.
Now this is usually an introduction to all of the guests of honor and any other VIPs in attendance and it helps me to get a sense of what the weekend is going to be like.
I knew from previous emails that one of the guests of honor Dr. Christine Larson was going to be on my Isaac Arthur panel but I had never met her.
There was a guest of honor there that I had met and talked to previously that's Mary Robinette Cowell and I like her so that was good.
Then after the opening ceremonies I went to join my friend Craig Maloney for the Ubuntu release party.
Panquicon always happens in late April or early May so it pretty much comes on the heels of the April Ubuntu release each year so it's kind of a tradition to have a get together.
I mostly run the Kubuntu that's the KDE flavor and I tend to stick to LTS releases so I expect I will be upgrading as soon as they release to the LTS crowd.
Now technically it is released as a .0 release but generally what Ubuntu does is they don't really offer it as an upgrade to LTS users until it hits a .1 level and that'll probably be later this summer at some point.
That's what I'm expecting and when that happens I will upgrade.
I spent some time there with various friends the Murph who made it up from New Jersey as one of them as well as a number of the Michigan folks who were in attendance so it was a fun little get together.
After that I went to see Bob Trumbly, Jeff McLeod and Curtis Potterveld demonstrate and discuss various space simulators.
They showed several NASA programs that are free and simulate the solar system dynamics.
You can use them to see what would happen if for instance the sun suddenly disappeared and it turns out the sun suddenly disappears the planets immediately move in straight lines tangent to the previous orbit.
I guess that kind of makes sense or you could for instance as we did look at the collision that they think created the moon when a Mars-sized body crashed into the early earth.
Then we ran Kerbal Space Program which is a pretty accurate simulation of orbital mechanics and how to put together a spacecraft and get it up there.
Of course in the very best tradition of Mythbusters we made one go boom by flying a rocket into the vehicle assembly building.
And by this point after three hours of penguin con on top of a full day at work it was time to go home because I knew I had an early morning ahead of me.
So Saturday May 5th I had a 9 a.m. panel on Isaac Arthur where I was joined by Jeff McLeod who was at that previous demonstration of simulations and Dr. Christine Larson.
So now Isaac Arthur is an interesting fellow. He has a YouTube channel called Science and Futurism with Isaac Arthur.
And I think it's worth taking a look at. His channel looks at extrapolations of what can happen in the future given what we know about science.
Now some of it can get pretty far out but it never violates any known laws.
So you won't see things like warp drives or faster than life travel or perpetual motion machines or any of that kind of stuff.
Now that still leaves plenty of scope for thinking big and I really enjoy the panel, the channel I should say.
And give it a look you might like it too. So what we did is we ran some video and then had a panel discussion about the things we saw in there and how feasible could it happen.
That sort of thing.
Now from there I moved on to the DIY IOT, ABCD, EFG, yeah, all this alphabet stuff.
So do it yourself, Internet of Things talk and it was by Dave Puts and Connie C.
Now Connie I knew from last year when I asked her to present a panel on scientific Linux which she helped create.
This time the presentation was on IOT using things like Raspberry Pi and Urdueno to control the cameras and sensors.
I think this is the kind of topic that would appeal to hacker public radio listeners and is a good reason to plan a visit if you can hear when PangroCon is on.
There are great presentations every year and Daniel Dugan did a great job of programming the tech track this time around.
And the following presentation by Karen Burnham was called Turning Materials Science Fiction into Science Fact and I was pretty sure it would be great as well because it usually is with Karen.
Now Karen had worked for NASA and I don't for one of the aerospace companies but had moved to Michigan to work an electric car engineering for Ford Motor Company.
So I've learned that any talk she gives is going to be interesting and I was not disappointed in this one.
Now at noon I went to see Michael W. Lucas do a talk on large scale SSH keys and certificates.
Michael is a very successful author and he has a book on SSH just came out in the second edition but the first edition was one of my principal resources when I did some shows on SSH for hacker public radio.
And listeners to the popular Sunday morning Linux review will know that he is also the author of numerous books on BSD.
He's not only a good author but a good speaker and I always try to catch one of his talks at PangroCon.
I can't catch all of them because he's a glutton for punishment and does way too many talks.
After that I went to a talk called Feminism and Comics which traced the history of the comics and how the way women were portrayed in them changed over time.
Then it was on to gender and artificial intelligence. Now of course AIs don't really have any gender but their portrayed as having gender.
For example the voices of devices like the Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant tend to be female.
You can change that if you wish but it's where some consideration is to why female is the default in this case and what that tells us about our own perceptions.
From there I went to ask an astronomer a panel with Dr. Christine Larson Bob Trembley Curtis Potterveld and Jeff McLeod.
I've mentioned all of them in previous panels but I'll give a little more information here Dr. Larson is an astronomer on the faculty of Central Connecticut State University and very much a nerd.
She has written on the astronomy of Middle Earth and also has written a Harry Potter star finder.
Bob Trembley actually works for the Vatican Observatory which is extremely cool and they are both solar system ambassadors for NASA which is also really cool.
Then I went to Tom Lawrence's talk on open source video editing workflow on Linux.
Tom is of course well known from being one of the hosts of Sunday morning Linux review.
And he also has a YouTube channel for his business Lawrence systems and that channel is worth checking out link in the show notes of course.
As a YouTuber he does a lot of video production and he does it using open source software.
So this talk was well worth catching.
Particularly in light of my ongoing quest to figure out why Kate and live doesn't like me.
Following Tom's talk was my second talk which was Diffie Helman Merkel Key Exchange.
If that sounds familiar you probably heard this on hacker public radio.
So I'll put a link in the show notes anyway so you can download it if you didn't hear it or you just want to hear it again.
It's pretty much the same talk either way because I am a firm believer in using a talk as many times as I can after I put in the effort to write it.
In this case it was well received by the people there.
And by now it had been a long day I had started at 9 a.m. with the Isaac Arthur panel my talk on Diffie Helman Merkel ended at 7 p.m.
So that was about 10 straight hours of pretty intense activity so I grabbed some dinner and went home.
That did mean missing Michael W. Lucas on a panel called making a living as a mid-list writer but sometimes you just have to do what you have to do.
And that brings us to the last day Sunday May 6th.
And the last day is usually just a little more laid back because by this point most of the people there are getting kind of tired.
After breakfast I stopped by the Sunday morning Linux review I didn't really see anything they were just packing up their gear having finished the show.
From there I went to a presentation that seemed promising called All Energy as Perpetual.
Well it may have seemed promising but it ended up being pseudo-scientific nonsense.
My friend Craig Maloney was getting progressively more annoyed with the speaker and another audience member got up said loudly I'm sticking with science and stalked out of the room.
It was sad and unfortunate but I found the head of programming Bagel Garrison and told her that this was a mistake and don't bring this person back again.
That's the advantage of having been on staff I know who to talk to and what to tell them.
I then went to a talk by my friend Gerald Lance but he never actually made it. I think he was in a meeting that ran long.
So those of us who were in the room talked to each other for the hour.
One of them was my friend Liffy Dubois who was the chair last year for Penguin Con. Nice lady.
Now I had a hole in my schedule after this which meant it was time to hit the dealers room and view the things that were on offer there.
I wasn't really intending to buy anything and in fact didn't because right now my wife and I are more intent on getting rid of stuff than acquiring more of it.
But a little window shopping never hurt anyone.
Then it was on to a panel Clamp Studio Anime Deep Dive.
I do enjoy anime and these kinds of panels are often interesting.
Clamp Studio is perhaps best known for a series called Cardcaptor Sakura and we got a taste of that but they seem to have a number of interesting titles which we sampled.
So it was pretty much four or five minute clips from a bunch of different anime videos.
I followed this with a panel about dysfunctional communication on the internet.
It was not the most illuminating thing I've ever been involved with but at this point any chance you have to sit down seems like a good idea.
And then it was off to the closing ceremonies.
I would have to say I thought that ran about half an hour longer than should have run.
Sometimes people just if you ever been one of those meetings where everything's been said but not everyone has said it so it just keeps going on.
It kind of felt like that a little bit.
I was relieved when it was finally over.
But I already have my registration for next year and I'm looking forward to it.
Now as I was leaving the room I was hailed by 5150,
whom I had somehow not connected with at all throughout the entire weekend.
Well you know this is an example of what I was saying at the beginning that you know everyone's experienced a penguin he was there for the whole thing.
It should we never went to the same panels or presentations throughout the weekend.
And you know there's so much programming that that can happen.
Unfortunately by this point you know I was really exhausted I don't know about 50 but.
You know really all I could do was kind of exchange some greetings and you know hey let's catch up at Ohio Linux Fest.
Where we'll probably both be a little more rested and have a little more scope to just spend some time socializing.
So that's my experience of the 2018 version of penguin con and you know every year end of April beginning in May check the calendar.
There's going to be one of these events and they're always really good.
And you know if you can you should plan to spend a little time here because you'll enjoy it.
There's a lot of good stuff going on and so with that this is a hookah signing off for hacker public radio and as I always do reminding you to support free software.
Bye bye.
You've been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio dot org.
We are a community podcast network that releases shows every weekday Monday through Friday.
Today's show like all our shows was contributed by an HBR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording a podcast then click on our contributing to find out how easy it really is.
Hacker Public Radio was founded by the digital dog pound and the infonomicom computer club and is part of the binary revolution at binwreff.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 stated today's show is released on the creative comments, attribution, share a life, free dot org license.