hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr2889.txt

Episode: 2889
Title: HPR2889: Describing how I listen to podcasts PART 2
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2889/hpr2889.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 12:48:26

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Hello and welcome hacker public radio audience. My name is Mr X and welcome to this podcast.
As usual I'd like to start by thanking the people HBR for making this service available to us all.
HBR is a community led podcast provided by the community for the community. That means you can get involved and record something in post it too.
Just pick up a microphone and hit record or use your mobile phone, your computer, you've got the hand really.
It's really easy. I'm sure you must have something interesting to record.
This is part 2 about how I consume or listen to podcasts or something like that. I'm not quite sure what the title is going to be but something along those lines.
This one I think I'll probably cover. I will actually listen to podcasts, how I control playing back podcasts
and obviously my previous episode that follows on from the previous episode where I cover mock p which is a music player that I use.
I'll basically listen to my podcast using cordless headphones. These are analog cordless headphones. They're not Bluetooth or anything like that.
They just plug into the audio output of the device. I'm playing my podcast on which was originally my home server.
If you remember, back in episode 2,912. I download my podcast using HPodder which I covered in 2,106. I won't bore you with all that nonsense.
I actually listened to the thing using these cordless headphones. I've got some notes here on cordless headphones which I'll go through.
My first set of cordless headphones. I listened to my podcast using cordless headphones. They're not Bluetooth. It's all analog. There is no encryption. It's all out in the open.
The headphones operate in the 860 MHz range and use frequency modulation. They use the same frequency as cordless microphones. I regularly pick up the DJ and karaoke singers in the local club behind me.
I often wonder if they pick up my broadcasts. I wonder if they appreciate HPR. My first set of cordless headphones lasted quite a long time. They had a short curly cable that plugged into the side of them to allow them to be charged.
After some time, the coating around the earcaps disintegrated and eventually the strap that went over the head split and that was end of my headphones.
My second set of cordless headphones were made by Philips and I think they would have been quite an expensive pair.
I picked them up going cheap some time later on another visit to Blackpool Amateur Radio Rally. They had quite funky styling and were a fair bit heavier than my first pair and were quite a bit more sophisticated.
The tuning was very simple and they had circuitry that locked onto the transmitter's frequency and tended not to need re-tuning like my first pair that tended to drift off frequency.
They had one major disadvantage. They were not a snug fit and if I bent down they tended to fall off my head. The extra weight made things even worse.
These headphones did not last long. They sat on a charging base which made contact with two pins. These soon started causing problems and were temperamental at charging.
Eventually the push power button failed and that was end of set number two.
Set number three and third set of cordless headphones were cheap pair from Liddles. These were also a bit big.
I ended up spending quite some time trying to find a good replacement pair of headphones and they all failed with the same problem.
I'm here to tell you that size matters for us pinheads. Things might be dandy for all you fat heads out there but for us pinheads it's no laughing matter.
As I side note these days it almost seems that I'm living in the land of giants as all the everyday objects are built for an alien race of giants.
Whenever I sit for a meal, drive a car, sit at a desk, I feel like a child. Nothing fits.
And I don't get me started about clothes. My current set of cordless headphones.
Eventually I stumbled across my current set of headphones. They are a good snug fit. Our light have lasted a very long time.
Recently the coating around the ear cups have become perforated after many years of relentless use.
This hasn't caused an issue as I've had with much younger headphones where the coating became crumbly beneath and caused so much mess I had to stop using them.
I wonder in fact how much longer these headphones will continue to work.
The only fault with them now is that a plastic cover on one side sometimes slightly pops out but can be either ignored or popped in with a slight pressure.
And even this was not their fault. This was caused a few years ago when I dropped the headphones from some height.
I was sure they would break but no they have proved very sturdy.
When I bought them I was little nervous about them being on a charging dock like the Phillips headphones I had previously.
But unlike them they continue to reliably charge without a hitch. So the contacts are obviously made from a superior material.
For all their longevity, comfort and lightweight, they are far from perfect.
The biggest problem is that the transmitter and receiver tend to drift, meaning that you need to occasionally retune the headphones.
The other problem is that the tuning control is very sensitive and needs only the slightest movement to find the right spot.
Still, these are by far the best corners headphones I've ever owned.
Now at this point I could give you the make and model of these particular headphones.
But as they have probably been removed from the market many years ago and finding a pair of second hand headphones like these would be difficult.
I decided not to do this as this would make it even less likely for me to find a replacement pair if I were to reveal the make and model to you.
So I must decline and apologise for my selfishness. You know, it isn't easy being a pinhead like me.
Okay, so that's how I listen to the podcasts that they consume.
So, and I mentioned that I use a mock-p music on a command-line player to listen to the podcasts.
So, how do I actually control mock-p? Well, originally I used a compact N610C laptop connected to a dedicated screen session running on my iPAC server.
This was an old laptop which I think only had 256 megabytes of RAM.
The laptop was rather heavy but allowed me to remotely control my server from anywhere in the house.
After that I eventually purchased an EEPC laptop and used this to remotely control mock as it was considerably smaller and lighter than my aging old compact laptop.
It was very useful and convenient and I still occasionally use it from time to time.
I wanted something smaller that was more portable to carry around and stumbled upon the excellent Nokia N810.
I seem to remember clad to did an excellent episode about either the N810.
This was one of the best solutions I found for controlling the play of podcasts.
The device was ultra-portable. It was beautifully constructed with a unique feature unlike modern touchscreen devices.
It had a sorely missed slider keyboard.
This made it very easy to control the N-curses mock player running on my server.
It would automatically connect to my Wi-Fi and SSH into the attached multi-screen session running on my server.
It would run an all day continuously connected to my Wi-Fi using only one charge.
Like the other Nokia devices of the day, gaming access to the battery was easy, meaning the battery could be replaced which I eventually did after much use.
The build quality was excellent, the main body being metal.
Eventually my beloved N810 started to fail though after many years of faithful service.
The touchscreen occasionally seemed to lose calibration.
This deteriorated until the touchscreen stopped working altogether.
The weak point in N810 turned out to be the wonderful slider keyboard.
The repeated slider action caused one of the internal ribbon cables to fail.
I must have said the keyboard entered out multiple times each day.
I could easily reduce the number of times I did this which would have undoubtedly extended its life.
The slider action was very smooth and was rather addictive.
I'm sure this speeded up the device.
I managed to purchase a replacement main internal cable harness.
I spent almost a whole day meticulously breaking the unit down to the lowest level in order to replace the damn cable.
After all this effort, the device switched on but the original fault remained.
I'm still convinced it was an internal ribbon cable fault.
I think there may have been more than one cable and perhaps it didn't get a good connection when I refitted it as a whole process was very fiddly.
The downshot was that my lovely N810 was out of action.
I couldn't bring myself to throw it away and I still have it today.
But it's only useful as a paperweight now.
I was never in a situation how was it going to continue controlling my remote music player mock which ran on my headless server?
Well the first solution was a Nexus 7 tablet.
I purchased a Nexus 7 tablet hoping to use it to replace not only my faithful N810 but also my wonderful Sign 3.
It was the first Nexus 7 model with only one camera.
The Nexus was fun to play with but ultimately while it is great for consuming information pushed to you from Google,
it's really frustrating if you're trying to produce something on it.
Without a keyboard I found it very frustrating.
My wife used it far more than me.
Switching users seemed very slow and the battery life ended up being less than my N810.
Turned out not to be an ideal replacement for the N810 and a hopeless replacement to the Sign as data entry was so cumbersome.
After about a year my Nexus started failing.
I think there was a fault with either its inbuilt flash memory or the controller circuit.
The whole experience was a bit disappointing.
As I previously mentioned the sound eventually stopped working on my iPAC compact server around the time when I got my first Raspberry Pi.
It's now mostly replaced my iPAC server.
My server is now only used to download the actual podcast.
I use my Pi to listen to the podcast.
This provides a number of advantages over my old iPAC server.
First it used far less power than my server.
I think my server drew about 25 watts from the mains.
The Pi draws considerably less, probably in the order of 2 watts.
This means I can leave the Pi running non-stop all day.
This greatly simplifies keeping track of where I am in my current playlist.
In the past I turned my server off each night only turning it on when I came in from work.
I would do an LAS in the directory I was listening to and redirect out the detects file.
I'd update this detects file to keep track of what track and position of track I was listening to.
In the process of creating these files I learned a bit about formatting text using standard Linux commands such as cut, sort, orc, said.
I found this strangely satisfying and was amazed how powerful and flexible these tools were.
Though it did take up a great deal of time.
I later improved things and came up with a rather elaborate and sometimes unreliable script that would allow the music player mock
to automatically hunt for the track I last listened to and to then move to the correct position within the track.
Using the Pi greatly simplified all of this as I just left it running.
This meant I no longer had the tedious job of creating text files and manually keeping track of where I was in my playlist.
I decided it might still be useful to keep track of my playlist progress and came up with a much simpler script
that ends a cron job to get the current track and position and write it to a log file.
This has done every night at midnight.
That way should the Pi crash which it never does or there is a power cut which is very rare
than I always know where I was within my playlist.
This has proved to work very well indeed with much lower maintenance requirements.
My Pi was a very first generation Pi even back in the very beginning I found the audio quality to be satisfactory.
I don't know whether I have Duff years or are particularly good Pi but I really never had any issues with the Pi audio quality.
It is distinctly remembered complaint after complaint on many podcasts in the early days about the Raspberry Pi Audio.
As far as I'm concerned the audio quality was certainly more than adequate for listening to podcasts.
Over time audio has improved greatly on the Pi.
The biggest improvement coming from software optimisation and continual refinement of the firmware drivers by the Raspberry Pi Foundation.
From memory when I first started using the Pi a click or pop could be heard whenever the audio playback was start or stopped.
Playing audio also consumed a fair chunk of processing.
These days there are no pops or clicks and you can barely notice any loading on the CPU even when using the first generation of Pi.
The improvements are remarkable.
I also discovered by accident that it can very easily play two audio tracks simultaneously again with barely detectable CPU loading.
I think that's enough for this episode before you all fall asleep.
The next part, part three will cover my solutions to controlling mockp without an external device other than our triple EPC of course that is.
I'll cover that in part three.
I hope that wasn't too much and wasn't too boring.
If you want to contact me I can be contacted at MrX at hpr at googlemail.com.
Until next time, thank you and goodbye.
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