hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr3954.txt

Episode: 3954
Title: HPR3954: Sedating HPR at the Steading
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3954/hpr3954.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 17:57:57

---

This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3954 for Thursday the 28th of September 2023.
Today's show is entitled, sedating HP are at the Steeding.
It is hosted by Dave Morris and is about 74 minutes long.
It carries an explicit flag.
The summary is, Brooks and Dave Morris have launched and record another chat.
Okay, we should be recording.
It's certainly picking up in some sense, but it does that when it's not in record mode.
It is recording.
Yeah, you see the counter is coming.
Okay.
Okay.
So, hello everyone and welcome to Hacker Public Radio Show.
This is Dave Morris and I have a partner in recording today sitting beside me.
Hi, Mr. Brooks.
Hello.
How old are you?
Yes, yes.
I haven't quite managed to get the tension because I guess it is.
Back it back as you do beat.
So yes, we had lunch.
It was lovely.
It was good.
Yeah, yeah.
I don't fall asleep.
Especially the cheesecake.
It's a warm day in Edinburgh.
It's not a clear blue sky, but it's high wispy clouds.
And Edinburgh, this part of Edinburgh is quite busy, but the car is hot, so the windows
are open.
So if you hear ambient noises of cars and buses and stuff going buzz, then well, you
know, it's just the way things are.
So we're going to do a show where we could talk about a bunch of topics.
We've got lists of things, but we're not quite sure.
Yeah, I've not been very organised.
I think Dave is far more organised than me.
We're going to have a sheer last bit of a quick hint of that.
No, I didn't.
So I think I might just start then with the first one that I put, deliberately put to
the top and it's not, it's not really a technical thing, but I think it might be of
interest.
I was surprised to receive a letter from the NHS in the past week or so, inviting me
to organise an appointment for a vaccine.
In fact, it's a double vaccine because of how old I am.
I get a flu vaccine and I get a COVID-19 vaccine.
SARS-CoV-2 vaccine.
And the reason for this is because there's a new variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which
has the wonderful name BA2.86, well, it's not his name, that's the sub variant of the
Omicron version.
Right, yeah.
Right, yeah.
Yeah, I mean, I've heard the little rumblings and the news about it, and I don't know how
concerned we should be.
It's funny, I was speaking to a colleague the other day and he was saying, oh, yes, where
are I?
You know, but we'll never go back down to lockdown again, of course, some of it, I see.
But that's nonsense, you might well do, I said, you know, because the thing is that if
you get a very serious outbreak, when it comes to the point where your health service
of a country is going to be overrun, then at that point, you will have a lot of thing
you have to have.
Well, either that, either that, or I recall the time, maybe I don't know if I've told
this story before, but my uncle Jim, he was nine kids when he died, and he remembered
the flu outbreak and he told me that he remembered as a small child skipping over all the coffins
big as a coffin actually, every single door.
Yeah.
As I tell you, you know, just skipping over all the time.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Have you ever thought you could know the whole thing?
No, I'm not.
That's a pretty shit.
So that's what I could lead to if you do not cut things, it's not, I know, deadly, as
it's how fast it spreads, it's a problem, isn't that, that's the thing.
Yeah, absolutely.
But the, there is some concern that this version, whatever you call it, I'm sure the technical
time, might be, it's not currently what they're calling a variant of concern, but they're
scared that it might become right and they're targeting older people, people with special
needs of immune system problems.
The concern would be that a vision of vaccine or natural immunity, and at that point, many
people start becoming very, very ill because of course that's what the vaccine with people
are doing, but it doesn't stop you from getting the virus, it stops you from becoming
very ill.
Yeah.
That's what it does.
It's a disease preventer, not a virus.
That was a YouTube video I was watching about an outbreak and of something, and I happened
what it was, and back in China, or somewhere like that, there's just many, many, you know,
hundreds of years ago, and they used to, you know, get postures and used to prick and
then they would touch other people and the villages and whatnot, and it seemed to, because
they'd have a very mild form of it, and in the civilized parts of the world, they thought
this was just silly and you know, and it was actually a woman that picked up on this
and through, she was able to, I can't remember what the world was, but basically she more
less discovered that you can, I hope that, you know, but the fact that you can, you can
do this sort of thing.
It's a small amount.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It means you're protected somewhere, right, so yeah, because that's how smallpox became things
discovered and also prevented in the early days, because it's similar to another pox disease
in cowpox, so if you worked with cows a little bit, the chances are you had cowpox, you
were exposed to it, and your immune system would battle against it, and we also had the
way with all to keep off the smallpox, right, so yeah, so yeah, so yeah, it's all
a matter of time until something else happens, it's, yeah, absolutely, absolutely, I'm
not too, you know, scary, scary, I should tell you, because I got invited for a flu vaccination
and I thought, oh, thank you, obviously, you want to keep the pressure off the NHS, National
Health Service in the UK, so I thought we had a good idea, I had to fight in previous years
a little, I speak to my mother about this, she thought I had had it last year, but certainly
in previous years, I had never bothered, but I got invited to this, then Chris, my mother
said, I've not been invited in the course of all of the means, you've been invited, but
I don't know, but anyway, it was this Friday, because I've got something on this Friday,
I've actually moved the appointment on to the following Friday, so I'm going to be about
nothing for COVID, obviously, so I've always believed it's my age, or why I've been
there, normally the flu shots are in October, so they're changing the priority for people
getting the two shots at the same time, or something like that, yeah, there's a lot of information
out there, I must admit, I don't very deeply into it, but I just thought it was worth
just as a subject, so yeah, did you want to, you've got something you can...
I've really met, I've not really met technical things, I've been in holiday with our
smashing team in Glasgow, I don't know what to do with the goal with us, so I was telling Dave
that we went to Glasgow for a few days, and we went to a hotel called the A Point Hotel,
and it was quite funky, it had the digital door entry with RFID passes, and you had the lighting,
you could change the colour of it, and you pulled your seat that you'd pull at the wall and tables
that came out, and it was very nice, we paid extra for a window view, and we got there, there was
two windows at the end of our very thin corridor that were manky, so I'm not paying for that again
if I ever go back, but yeah, I must admit, it's not long since we've been to Glasgow and it was
a nice refresher and change, and while we were there, we came across the jungle rumble
which is an indoor night time, indoor putting, and they've got like ultraviolet lights, and one
that's your teeth all the way up light, and that's nice, it's quite fun, an ultraviolet glowing
golf ball, that's it, yeah it's exactly, that would be fun, and there's different themes as like
under the sea, that's one, yeah, so there's been various things like that, I would do that,
it wasn't sure, and it was better than anybody, that was really good, that was a big
practice up, you know, it was great fun, yeah, night time thingies, events like that can be fun,
you just reminded me, the ed and razu, I went to the light show a couple of years ago,
before the pandemic, where they had a lantern display, and you had to sort of go in there about,
was in the early part of the year, just after Christmas, and you had to go in about six o'clock in
the evening, it was pretty dark by then, and then walk around this thing and with all these
these illuminations everywhere, and that was, that, something's very, very special about that,
when you saw it in the daytime, it was boring, but the night was just fun, yeah, yeah, these things
are changed a lot that way aren't they? Yeah, also it was a late day, we also visited the London
London, yeah, yeah, yeah, that was, I don't know if I've ever been in it before, it was,
because it was so fast, you know, right, there were a few minutes, it just shot off like a rocket,
and it was so noisy, absolutely deafening, you have to shout to the person next to you,
and the whole carriage was, I felt like it was going to come off the rails, it was a bit of a
opportunity, so you've got, oh, this is okay, you know, but really efficient way of getting
an ATV, and you know, when I got, well, we're a bit confused because there's an inner line and
outer line and that, and when you've got a list of the stations, I thought, oh no, we've got
in the wrong one, and we can't get to that place, we're trying to walk backwards through all the
crowds of people, and trying to get to the counter to see, oh, I've got in the wrong line,
no, no, it doesn't matter, you can get in any line, you know, what, though, it doesn't matter,
right, that's how I've got, so when I got back to work, what's going on with these things,
and it turns out that you've got two lines, and it's just going to look, and one goes in one direction,
say, clockwise, another one goes, another direction, anticlockwise, but when you get the list of
stations, they may be going to give you four or five stations, so you think one line goes to one
to one set of their stations, and the other one goes to different, but it's only because I'm not
giving you the full list, so once you realize that, and it was because, I think it was 100 years
old, on the ground, it was originally driven by a steam engine at the end of the track, and I've
understand, and it pulled the round cable driven, so one pulled in one direction, another pulled in
another direction, a bit like how it worked, you know, some Francisco Trolley's, and you've got a clutch
system where you pull a lever, and it clamps onto the cable and drags you, but of course now they're
convicted to electric, and what our friend, Big Clive was saying in one of his videos was that the
stations are raised, so it slows you down as you come up to the station, and then obviously the clutch
and it comes to hold however, but likewise when they bring the clutch back on again, it comes down
to the other side, and that's what shoots off like a mockery's other thing, so that's clever design,
and he was amazed with it, because when you got the card, he was looking for the, they said in
his videos, looking for the barcode thing, you know, it said, sure, it can't be RFID, and it's a
paper, it's so thin, you know, I think it's got the cost of it and all that, and in the sun was
not sunny, he put it on the top, so he was here, he could go back to it, it was RFID, he took the
cut the bits and the camera and two of them, that's what's watching stuff, yeah, I've been on it
a long time ago, I used to go to Glasgow fairly often, you know, about three or four times a year,
that's how often, with the kids, because you could, you can get a train from near where we live,
to Glasgow, and then get off, and you know, there's loads of interesting things to see in Glasgow,
and one of the highlights was to go and use the underground, yeah, it's small, isn't it?
It is, it's small, well, if you think about, well, that's, I think in the,
Wikipedia's wonderful, and it was telling you about the history of it, and it's, I think it's the
third oldest underground in the subway in the world, so I think, is it India's the first, and
no, London's the first, India's the second, I think, and Glasgow is the first, so yeah, quick,
I didn't use that, no, yeah, yeah, yeah, so, yeah, it's well worth it, well worth it, yeah, if you're
ever in Glasgow, it's definitely a place, I think you're going to see, you need to know where,
where you want to go to, yes, and of course, I think if you, if you do so many stops, then it
becomes an all-day ticket, and it's quite affordable, as well, you know, you can have all day, yeah,
yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, so I mentioned the fact that
the Edinburgh tram system got extended, I did it, it's not on my list, I forgot to put it there,
yes, remind me, Edinburgh, wow, some big old bikes going past it, the Edinburgh tram system got
extended in the past few years, it used to run from the airport into the centre of town to a
place called York Place, now it's been extended to go down the road that leads from there called
Leith Walk, which takes you into the port of Leith, and it stops there, and then, you know,
I was speaking to a friend of ours, and he was saying that, since he's come in, you know,
he feels that atmosphere, the whole place has changed, and it's not too much more cosmopolitan,
and yeah, really, we've been walking the canals and whatnot, and we went, we were trying to
get a bit of the river of Leith, and the last wee bit was just getting to that bit, the very
bottom of Leith, it was just the last weekend, we were there, and yeah, it's lovely, really nice,
you saw these trams go back and tingling, yeah, it's lovely, yeah, it's very, very different from
what it used to be, up my head, yeah, yeah, yeah, it was my kin to Edinburgh, it wasn't regarded as a safe
place to go, yeah, it's indeed, yeah, it's, and the whole of Leith Walk with the trams on it,
it's changed the fare, but I think there's a bike lane that's been installed, not sure it's ready
to use it, but it will be soon, so yeah, so I took the tram from near the airport,
out, well actually I took the tram from near the airport to the airport, then got off and got on
another one, because I get it for free, and I've got an old geezer's card, and then I went all
the way out to the new Terminus at New Haven, they came all the way back, and looked part of my car
at the car park outside, yeah, and we planned to do the same at some point, yeah, yeah, it was
really nice, it was really nice, it was quite a, you know, a slow, leisurely thing, you could look around
and it's just, just, just nice, I've been modern a lot, it'd be quite smooth, yeah, nice, yeah,
nice, yeah, I like the fact that they, the sound it makes is a sort of bell like, yeah, and it's
nice electronic, and it is electronic, yeah, but it's a really bell, bell-like, yeah, it's,
could it go, could it pick some mouth, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, so it's good,
it's very good, so you've got a thing you want to, you want to talk about, oh right, was it my turn,
was it a pack of tea already, oh no, well actually no, yeah, yeah, yeah, of course I'd just been
blabbing, that was my turn, but it wasn't really, it's stealing your turn, so I was just going to
mention the fact that I use Thunderbird, and I've been using Thunderbird for ages now since before
I retired, which is sort of the early 2000s, and it's been a pretty good male client for a long time,
doesn't have all the features that some more fancy ones do, but it hasn't got all the anti-features
that stuff like Outlook has a detest and love, yeah, yeah, so I've got version 115.1.1, whatever that means,
and they're actually changing the code underneath it quite a lot, and they're changing the look of it,
and you don't have to use the new style interface, I'm not yet, but there is new stuff there,
so the only trouble with it is that I've used Thunderbird with add-ons for a very long time,
so I've got things that make sounds when I get male, and they're tunable to a given folder,
so if I get a male from Mr X here, you have the male, and we used to go on that,
yeah, I want to have the tram bell, I think. Anyway, so I've had a lot of fun going and collecting
free sands and sniping them up and sticking them in as well, but that's now, that doesn't work
in it, because it was written to the old API standard, and now the new API, I'm not sure that
I think some of the add-on creators are going to be a little bit reluctant to re-create these.
I can imagine. Yeah, it's funny, just by, for instance, I was listening to
a recent episode by Clath, who I'm not, probably a good bit behind on these latest,
this isn't his only show, not the API, and he was talking about, I'm sure he was talking about
Thunderbird and about male clients, and he was ranting on about the fact that, you know, you're doing
it in a web browser, like a lot of people doing through Gmail and all that, and how it hides,
at the very least, you know, it hides the header sort of thing, and it's in the very least,
it should at least save what the email address is, and I had a test, particularly, and I looked
that it hides the, you know, you've got this aliasing, who the hell bloody is, I want to know the
email address, not some daft alias. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, you just smith come a John, and that's
what you know. Exactly. Well, you can get that, I think I'll just say, all right. Yeah, it doesn't
even give you the, I think it'll say, if it's, if it's, if it's, it'll say, John Smith, I don't know
that's John Smith, AOL, or John Smith from, from, from Apple or John's, it could be some of the,
other John Smith, and for God's sake, you know, I know, I know, I know. I like Thunderbird. It's not,
it's not the best mailer I've ever used, but it's, it's got a lot of really good points to it,
but I like the filtering capabilities quite a lot, because I use, I've got a lot of filters. I've
got a lot of, I used to have a lot of mail accounts, I've got less now, but I've got Gmail, and I've
got others that allow me to access them through IMAP and so on, so forth, my ISP, which is sophisticated.
So I, mail comes in from all these sources, and then I, I, I classify them based on who they're
from, what was in the subject, sometimes very rarely do I do that, but, but, you know, other headers,
I can look at, you know, who is the, who, what's in such, and such a header, and so on and so forth.
See, see, see, when it does, does it, does it place it in a folder, or does it tag it, or does it do
both, or puts it in folder? Yeah, see, it's, it's, it's, it's interesting, because I, I remember,
I'm always worried, I can't find things, so I'm just like, from a lot perspective, I, I,
I gotta, I gotta get far too many emails these days, and it all just goes into, into my inbox,
and I remember a colleague having all these folders, they kept things in, you know, and he said,
oh, it's, it's in, I'll never put it in this one, I'll never put it in that one, you can't,
couldn't find which folder it was in. So, um, where it's, sometimes something like tags,
you can tag all the things that, that are a bit of a specific subject, but you can look at it
in different directions. Yeah, so I'm, I'm, there's, there's, there's, there's pluses and
minuses with that. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Um, Thunderbird has, doesn't really have, it does have
tags, but the tags are, are not what you're talking about, really. So you can't, you could create a tag,
you know, from, from Fred or something, but then you're limited, I think, just to a fair
degree as to what, what tags you can have. Right. Um, and, uh, it's not as flexible as just having
being able to add any arbitrary tag at the time, you know. Um, to be fair, I don't, I don't,
I don't do any of that with any of my clients, I think I, I mean, it just, I'm just banging
into an inbox and that's it. But that's how, if I was going to do that, I think that's how I'd
like to do it as usually tagging not folders, I'd be worried that they wouldn't find something
like that. Well, I, it, it, it, it, it's got some reasonably powerful searching in Thunderbird.
Right. And it has the concept of a virtual mailbox, which means that you can set up a search.
So you can say, okay, search all of these folders, which, you know, fit into some grouping of your
own and find stuff from, from so and so, or with this in the, in the subject, or with this, in
them, in the body. And then you save that search as what they refer to as a virtual folder.
That's like a filter. That's, that's almost like a, that's good. That's powerful. Yeah. That's
all you want. Um, so you filter it. The filter is the thing you use as it comes in to make sure it
goes into the right folder. That's the same sort of like a tag almost. Yeah. That's almost
like a tag. But the same, the same message can be, uh, filtered in different directions, different
ways. That's clever. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And that case, I would still just have an inbox, but have
these set, set full filters or searches, I don't know if that's how we do it. But there's
only different ways of doing things, of course. Yeah. Yeah. The tag, the mail system we used to use
before, and I've talked about this before, and I shouldn't really go on about it, but it used,
now with Thunderbird, each message is in a mail box, which is a file of the four, which just
contains one message after another. Mm-hmm. And it spots where one's darts and ends and then begins
with the from, head of that you get, there's the first line you get from a message. This is why if
you have a message with, um, the text in the body from here on in, it puts, uh, puts a, uh, uh,
a greater than sign in front of it. Right. Because it wants to separate that out from the from,
which is the delimiter. Right. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's very, very,
interesting. Yeah, yeah. So, and because of that, they've got, it's an old technology, but they've
got to keep running with it, they can, yeah, that's interesting. So, the mail system I used before
had the concept of one message per file. Right. So, what your folder, when you look to there,
was the directory, and then it were a bunch of files where the system just gave them sequential
numbers. So, you could, that gave you the advantages that you could, there were tools that let you
go to a given message and write things in the header. So, you could easily say, you could add a
header, the header is something which has got a piece of text, a call on, and then some more text.
Right. So, you could, and there are some predefined ones, but there's a whole range of all
possibilities if you start them with an X. So, X, hyphen, Dave's header, call them, and then you put
banana, then you've now tagged that thing as, as a banana related email. Right. And, and you could
then do a search that says, go through all my emails, or go through this folder, go through this
subfolder, find all banana related emails. Wow. And I thought that was a fantastic design and
used it enormously. But, but you'd see, it's not impossible to do with Thunbird, but not in the
same way. It's not made up of the attack, like I said. And I'm not sure they're actually stored
as headers anyway. So, I'm going to have permanent, they're all whether they're transferable to
other systems. It is, it is one, is it not a regular member, because they're not in port,
because I think I had your door up, because it was called to talk me, yeah, was your door
used to use. And, and I think you don't, so, and then you put that into a thunderbod, and it,
and that was not like a big, huge big fail, I think, for your mailbox, I think it was one failup.
There were, there were various tools that will, will crunch down a bunch of individual file messages
in turn into it, and the so-called inbox format. Yeah. People invented other formats after that.
So, I was around when mail was invented. No, not really, not really. We had, we had, we started
on Unic Systems, and there was no email, and then email became, became a thing, and it developed
from there, and I was around at that time. So, I did spend a lot of time learning about this stuff,
writing stuff to hack it. So, I think these are, I'm, for, for, for, personally, I'm,
I'm, I'm more key with Jimmy, like, it does what I want, you know, yeah, for, for work, I do
the taste, don't look, it's just, oh, I, I, yeah, I was supposed to be using Outlook at work,
but I refused to use it, except for those sort of meeting requests, and that sort of,
yeah, Thunderbird can do that as well. But anyway, I, I, I'll wrap it on about this too much,
sure. No, no, just fine, do you want to have a, do you want to have a go?
Yeah, we've got an X, and that's a C. Well, the next thing on my list is Tix.
Not sure if we're going to talk about that. So, our four-legged companion has been,
yeah, there's a few Tix recently, and yeah, it had one, all right, one of the things you had
on in these, uh, Bobby's eye, and it might, it might, it might, it might be, it might be, it was one
under his arm, you know, oh, it's a nightmare to get out. I think the next thing was another one
said that one. So, yeah, it's been a bit, and I think Scotland is, you know, there's, there's,
probably the, it's more prevalent in Scotland, there's any else we don't know in the country.
Yeah, yeah. And I do believe that climate change is making it more.
It's making it more, yeah, I think they're, they're surviving easier with the, with the change in
the climate. Yeah, I know, my daughter did, um, the Duke of Edinburgh scheme, which involves,
amongst other things, uh, doing some fairly rigorous hikes around the place.
And, uh, so she, the part of the training was, you know, to be tick-aware, and to, uh, to,
you know, you don't go around their legs because they have a jump on you, and, uh, they will get on
your clothes and try and climb to an area of skin, but you, you need to, the, the members of the
department do tick checks against one another, you know, to make sure various points can't stop for a
tick check, and they can walk over, over the, uh, when you, when you hear people that, what have,
gone through the, the, I have to have been bitten, uh, I, I have to get to, what's it called,
they get, the lens disease on it. Yeah, so it's horrendous. I am, I've never been,
it's not, I know I've been bitten with a tick, and I don't know what to do. I've, I've had, I've had a bite.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I do, I wasn't that well aware of how to, how to deal with them.
So they found them. And they're, they're, yeah, I mean, you don't know, you don't see how many
sunny notices a thing on you, on your lake or whatever. And, from then on, I started wearing long socks,
with boots, and then putting, tucking my, yeah, trying to legs into the socks. Very old daily
ways. And, and, or where gators are one of those sort of things. So, but, yeah, I've always been
interested in, I suppose it shouldn't be really, it's got nothing to do with the hack, but really,
we're interested in parasitology for, since I was doing, uh, degree in, in, uh,
physiology. And, um, I listened to a podcast called this week in parasitism.
They were talking about, uh, somebody, they, they have, they do a case every, every month, or,
how often they do it. And, um, the, the case is described by a, one of the medical members of the
podcast. Uh, and then it's left to be guessed as what the causes and what steps you take in,
yes. And then the next month, they, they review it and look at all the letters that've got
and stuff. And the most recent one was somebody who was in his sixties, very active, did lots of
cycling, lots of walking, a little bit running and stuff, and he'd not been out of his, the
particular state. I can't remember it. Might have been New York State, not sure, but, um, he was reporting
that he was almost unable to walk. He was so ill, that he was almost unable to stand, he came in
in a wheelchair. They tracked it down to, um, a tick bite, which had caused, uh, thing called
Babesiosis, which is a bacterial infection, which I don't think is in the UK at the moment.
At the moment. No, not well, absolutely. Uh, so, you know, these things spread some pretty foul
stuff. There's, there's other tick-borne disease as well. I can't remember the more. But, uh, yeah,
so it's not a trivial matter. No, a trivial matter. I remember you mentioning that, that podcast,
another chance to, to listen to my, I must do that. It's heavy going, though. I've worn you
all right. My, uh, my, my doctor friend, um, my son's girlfriend, I said, well, you should listen,
you'll find that interesting, because, you know, I'm like, helpful in your, in your work,
and she can't take it. She's, she's, is that, and also so horrendous. It's a mixture of,
is way outside, you know, general practice stuff, though, you know, you might be called upon by
somebody, but you, you, you'd hopefully refer them to somebody with the expertise. If you think
about what, what a job like this has got to cope with, these huge rings, yeah, and then you get
these friends at extremism, you know, I'm like, how can you, how can you, you can't, you can't,
you can't, it's too much. You, you have to sort of say, well, I can't classify it in any of the,
the places that I would normally classify, I think, so I need to call in somebody with different
expertise. Absolutely. And in fact, this, this week in parasitology, you think, um, parasitism,
is, uh, one of the, the contributors is, uh, an infectious disease, um, uh, doctor. And so he
is the guy who gets called in, in hospital, and stuff off to, to give the second opinion,
like, on what I think he's, you know, so, so yeah, yeah, it's, it's both fascinating and scary,
and also slightly repellent, repellent. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, so, so yeah, I hijacked your
tips. That's okay, you know, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I didn't know very much better than other than
I didn't want to, I don't want to do it. No, no, no, no, no, of course, it's trying to hold the,
you know, the dog and trying to get it out. It's, it's, it's, it's, they've got, yeah, it's actually
very patient, uh, supplies and, you know, I mean, that, that, that, that, uh, things, like,
way up in the air, I mean, you know, what it's, oh, yeah, what's going on? Yeah.
But I'm trying to, I had a torch and my, I had the tech tool and, oh, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
This is important to get them out, yeah, fully, not because if you just pull the bit out and,
you leave the, the head, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, yeah, yeah, yeah, I, I was aware of that when I
hoaked my own one, I, I used a very fun pair of tweezers to get it. Yeah, it was really hard to
kill. They, they're tough as hell. All right. Try getting one on, and squashing it with your finger,
kind of. You can use it, use it, use your thumbnail or something really hard to get them.
I tend to try the jar and, and then close it and keep it, because in case, then you've got,
you can, yeah, you've got, yeah, yeah, in case it's got something. Yeah, yeah. But they're,
they're not easy to, to deal with. Yeah. Unless you're, what is it that eats them as like
turkeys and, and, and various wildfire, or when, um, uh, yeah, I mean, something eats them.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. There's, there's, there's, um, you know, there's always got,
something must have got predator sort of things, right? I think in the States, it's possums,
isn't it? Oh, possums. They're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they will definitely
detick you. I don't know how, how, how those you want to get to one to let it do that, but they
will definitely eat ticks. Right. Right. Anyway. Okay. Oh, I'll tick that now.
So I'll tick off that. So I don't know whether you want to pick another top pick or, um,
well, you were talking about audacity. Oh, yes. And I, and Ahuka has done a show, um, on the
reserve queue that came up recently. We just talked about it on the community news that we recorded
yesterday, talking about audacity and his, his ups and downs. And I spotted, at least YouTube showed
me a, a video which, uh, summarizes the recent history of audacity. You know, and I think I
started to see that, actually, I think I've seen that video. Yeah. It's called whatever happened
to audacity. Yeah. As a picture of, uh, tombstones like that. Yeah. I don't remember what it looks like.
Yeah. I've, I've put it in as a link to this, to this show. Right. Uh, to the, the notes I've
got here. So I don't know. It's worth posting it in the, in the, in the links when we can't
put it all together. But, uh, it, it seems as if audacity's doing okay now. I think Ahuka's
analysis was that that maybe, maybe improved. I can't remember what, what, I mean,
quite apart from the fact that, uh, they've, they've changed the file format. Yeah. And then,
uh, what, what else happened sometimes? It was, it was flattening my files to us from, like,
I'm multi, sometimes I was, I had like a multi-chang to one, something, yeah. I couldn't quite
work at which point it was doing. I'm not sure about that. I've not really looked into that one.
And then, and then a setting maybe that was on by default, where it shouldn't have been. Don't
tell us because it wasn't doing it all to it. It was, it was, it was, it was, it was, might
run in the process. So it's like, it's okay. But good. Maybe not, maybe it is something I've
not said. I mean, I mean, what else was happening? Something else happened. I can't remember now.
But, um, I mean, generally, I somehow have that struggle with the, the editing,
it's not as, find it clumsy to, um, to scroll around about and edit a bit. So I can't, I can't,
I can't remember what, well, it's the tools have changed the tools, selecting and cropping and
and so I find that much more clumsy than that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, I think you can turn,
some of them have been turned off. It's like key bindings have been changed or something.
I think, because I used to play through stuff in order to edit it and then use the space bar to,
to start and start thinking that, that stopped working for a while. Um, and I don't have a scroll
bar anymore. I think I said this last time we talked about it. And I still haven't managed to find
it out and make the scroll bar come back again. Yeah. But, uh, yeah. Okay. Well, the other thing I was
going to say, which I hadn't even noted, because I think I just spotted it last night or something.
As, as always, YouTube is saying, oh, you watch an audacity video. We'll have another one. And
this one was there's a version of audacity that seems to have been developed for the browser.
Oh, I will, I don't, that's all I remember. I haven't got a link. I didn't, I didn't think
into the notes, but I will go and find it. And, and, and it might be, I'm not sure how that was,
because, I mean, is it going off? Is it going to serve us somewhere or how does that work?
I would imagine that it will be some quite low level stuff running in the, in the browser.
I mean, you can do a lot with JavaScript. Right, right. Okay. Wow. And all these, these,
the huge investments, uh, and you can, you can write just about anything you want as a,
as a browser plugin these days. Unless you've got really strong sandboxing and stuff.
Right. Right. To keep it away from you. We want to try it.
Everything else. I mean, yeah, I just find it a bit clumsy to, to, the, the editing now,
computer used to be, uh, better that I felt, you know, I think it's the tools. I think, you're
switching between like, select and some of these buttons that you click on to do certain things
that there's an option missing, though, and I find that clumsy. I can't, I can't, I can't
why it was, but it's good enough. It's good enough. Yeah. It's that, that thing that I was,
I had been running about with Thunderbird that they've changed it. Yeah. And they've tried to keep
it that look in the same thing, not too shocked. However, it's doing subtle, subtly different
things. I, I, I, something is to think that, uh, uh, that sometimes, I don't, I don't know,
if you get a different, different software people working on it, then the, the, the deep idea,
the reasoning behind some things forgotten. Yes. Because there's certain things, for example,
a Microsoft Word, I hate to bring out Word, but, you know, that, that, that, uh, it was clear from
the way that, that the things work now, that the person who's changed, didn't realize how this
worked in the first piece, because the way they're doing it now is just nuts, you know, so, uh,
I'm going to appreciate the history of it and the exact reasoning behind the exact way it works.
So that may be true for the last piece, but I think it is, uh, is, is the possible pitfall
whenever there's, there's a change, especially when a new team comes on board and says,
oh, yeah, we can make this better. Yes. Yes. Well, I'm sure you are making it better in all sorts
of fundamental ways, but you're also messing up some of the, the stuff that all the,
old hands have been used to be, but I think to be fair, people that do this sort of thing,
I think know to leave the doors open for people to report that. Yeah. It's no longer doing that
thing I've been doing for, these past 17 years, and you've broken it, you know.
Yeah, it's good enough. It's good enough. I'm a very glad we still got it, you know,
yeah. So hopefully that, yeah, it will gradually get back to, to, to a better state.
So I guess it's me now. So, um, I don't know how, what we're going to say, but that's, but, uh,
why we're on holiday, because there's a theme going here, it's what we're doing my holiday.
So I had to find it off recently. So, we visited the, they had met a friend, and it's something
I haven't done for many, many years. Um, and, uh, I don't know how you actually just,
I don't know how you describe the fringe it's, uh, um, collection of artists that come along
once a year and do weird events. Do the weird events, do the weird jokes, and the, um,
talk, all kinds of weird things. The festival itself is sort of fairly managed and constrained,
isn't it? You know, there's concerts, there's, there's, um, theatre, there's comedy, um, and, and,
but do you perform as well? Yep, yep, yep. But they're all fairly mainstream, whereas the fringe is,
is the sort of lunatic fringe almost, would you say? Yeah, that's, of course, because, you know,
you get all sorts of bizarre things, like the man who pretend he was eating his own brain
with a long spoon that I went to see. Yeah, I don't know why, I just, just, just,
he had this talk, he kept digging the spoon down into, and, and coming up with some sort of
grey jelly stuff, which he then ate. It's like a minute, and as he did it, he acted
losing all his, all his, uh, mental facilities. Oh, I wonder if you got that idea for him,
was that Hannibal Lecter? There's a, there's a scene from that, really, that, that, that was,
Oh, right. I gave it to the person, but I'm sure that was one of the Hannibal Lecters.
Yeah, oh, I do. Yeah. Um, yeah, because, yeah, that's, that's pretty fringy, yeah.
Yeah, because we were, we went to see a, Michael Safar, is, I don't know, he's a Schaffar,
S-H-E-F-E-R, and so I haven't got any details here, but from what I recall, it was, um,
see, it was, you know, um, it was, yeah, uh, what do you call it? I, was a slusser or something like that,
but he, he got, um, uh, testicular cancer, I think, or something like that, and, um, sort of,
sort of, sort of, decided to go back to the comedian and sort of wrote that into, uh, into his show,
basically, uh, and there's a bit, sort of a bit, you know, there'll be a bit kind of, let's see,
EG and fringy, let's see, uh, I've actually looked on YouTube and, uh, you, a bit more, if you
watch the, uh, if you look up on YouTube, you'll find, a bit, basically, about 9th,
until we, we saw because it's just the same thing, you know, so that's when you definitely
differentiate slightly between, and then you must do all of the better. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Was that okay? It was all games, right? Yeah,
yeah, it's, yeah, it's very good. When you can, you can, get some good stuff. If, yeah,
you've got to be really selected, you've got to read through the, the, the, the guards. We just
It was short-term notice that we were going to go to the fringe and we were really working
for a walk around Edinburgh and go to some of the outdoor.
It was funny, we had down in the high street and the street performers and stuff and you
got the feeling, I was sent to my feet, they almost seemed a bit frantic, maybe I'm just
imagining it, but the atmosphere didn't feel the same and I just thought maybe they're
a bit desperate, you know, I don't think it could be better that as well, you know, there's
a short money, I mean I'm like maybe I'm wrong, or maybe I'm too old and I don't know
about the way else I've always been, you seem a bit desperate and I wasn't, I didn't
see too much going on either, I mean we went out to Princess Street and you usually get
a paper on the corner, no backpipes, so that's when you might have a little bus hit, hit
backpipes, you know, these are worse things, you know, it's often seen some interesting
musical things in the past, there was a guy playing the Chinese, what do you call it,
hammered, double swan type thing, sorry I'm in Princess Street Gardens and I think there's
a glorious, glorious sound, he was playing some really traditional Chinese music, just
just stood there in the mountains, yeah, in the gardens and they had the fountain and
there was a wee area for the kids and as far as I could tell, there was nothing else,
there was nothing, you know, the concert bit, there was nothing happening there, it was
just people mulling up out of the world, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's maybe, yeah, it's
expensive to get here maybe, it's not part of it, but the policing business, there wasn't
very many acts, but maybe there was acts, like you see, like this comedian chat, you know,
in venues rather than on the street, maybe you don't do any street artists, you know,
because the whole venue thing in Edinburgh is a little bit bizarre, because there's lots
and lots of little places in corners, which are venues, there's big venues where we shall take,
you know, several hundred people, and then there's a little teeny-tay, which, you know,
just somebody's back room or something, and we were in this wee room and there was about,
I don't know, 30 people, maybe something in the room, and we were at the very front doors,
oh, I'm basically looking up at these nostrils, oh, that's closest to the venue, you know,
yeah, yeah, yeah, but don't look at me, don't look at me, oh, that's the thing that always
drove me and that's going to do. I went to see, there was a band or, yeah, a band of performance,
musical performance, called the Doug Anthony All Stars, years and years back, and they were
from Australia, and they played some really nice music, I can't remember what sort of style it was,
it was sort of, there is Country Rock and something like that, but I went to see them, because they were,
I'd been hearing them on the radio or whatever, and they're long gone by the way, but they had,
they weren't really sort of nuts at one point, we were in a theatre, one of the university theatres,
it's really a fairly large capacity in the stage, and the guy starts interacting with the audience,
and people are sort of answering him back and stuff, and he suddenly, suddenly jumps off the stage
onto the back of the nearest seat, and runs across the, through the audience, on the backs of the seat,
and he goes to the guy who just laughs at him and he says, get shut off, and the guy has to take
his t-shirt off, and then he took it away and threw it away, those sorts of things,
yeah, I think I'd be out and running, running down the street, I really do not do well in those
situations, I was freaking out, maybe a much more like a little bit like the night,
it must have been something, well the guy who I did shut, stole and didn't seem to be overly
concerned about it, but yeah, there's a lot, there has been a lot of that type of thing in the past,
I've certainly been to places where I choose my seat carefully, so I'm not too near the eye,
because there's more likely to be called out there, not too far back, because they said, well you're
hiding from us, and then I keep my head down so I don't get picked, because they will pick
members of the audience to come out and do stuff, you know, I really don't know,
I just thought that I must have done that, anyway, so you had fun, you didn't get picked off,
no, no, you shut stolen it, yeah, I thought that it seemed a bit quiet, you know,
well I don't have a lot of time, it was a nice day and I got nice, nice seats, we also,
yeah, it was lovely, good, good, so I didn't do anything with the bestful French this year,
we don't know, we don't do either, we just just, we've got the opportunity, so well, we'll grab it,
because it's been years since I've been tired, yeah, it's good, my son and his girlfriend went to
something, to a comedian, Frankie Boer, oh you're Frankie Boer, he's more of a mainstream,
Frankie Boer, nice, it was a really good evening, yeah, good, good, shall I mention about what's
been happening on the HPR, we haven't, I mean we've said a bit about these things elsewhere, but
we can just run through a quick summary for those who are not completely up to speed,
we've moved HPR off the hosting service that was run by Josh, who owns an honest host.com
and he's trying to cut back on his commitments and stuff, so he set us up a virtual server on the
Amazon AWS, and we've been moving stuff for several months now, I think we started in
maybe late May or early June, and so it's all, it's gradually been going, going across and
Rowan, who is with us at that point helping us with setting stuff up, used his static sites
software to implement the whole site, yeah, so that's been running since mid June, I think
might have my date slightly wrong, never mind, so we've got the static sites, all of the pages
with shows are on the static site, so they get refreshed daily except not at weekends,
because not much happens over the weekends, but if a comment's added, you won't see the comment
being added to the show until the next day when it'll have been added, but the static site hasn't
updated yet, so there are some dynamic bits, so if you want to add a comment, then the dynamic bit has
to work on it, if you want to submit a show, then you talk into the dynamic side of things,
right, pretty much invisibly I think, and if you go and look at the page of the calendars we call
it, shows all the free slots and stuff like that, that's dynamic as well, so that's all working pretty
well, but unfortunately Rowan, he became unavailable, from about mid June, we tried to contact him and
haven't managed to, and we have no real idea of what's happened, whether he's, I don't know,
that we've had to work on getting his software, all the wrinkles out of his software,
which there weren't many, I mean, it's quite, amazing feat to do, yeah, he did a magnificent job,
he really did, and it's really important that we say that, just talk about the negatives,
so that's obviously the negatives, what was the purpose of that then?
He's written in Perl, he did that deliberately, I remember him saying to me, he said I'm going to write
it in Perl, and I'm going to use the template system, which is basically a thing where you prepare
a sort of webpage, you don't have to be a webpage, but a thing in a template form, and the template
contains bits and pieces that written in a sort of meta language that say to fill in this bit of
HTML, get this thing out of the database, so in some cases actually calling a query on the database
to get the stuff, and then it's displaying it, so with various changes and comments, not comments,
but changes and reformats and stuff, so yeah, so it's something I can maintain without too much
trouble, or it took me a few weeks to actually get my head around them, all I think was quite big,
the code is, the actual script is not big, but once you look at all the templates,
there's lots of them, and they interact in an interesting way, so learning how that happens,
so it's been a challenge. So then the other thing I've got random is we have the HPR mailing list,
which we were trying to run on the server, and run mail there as well, I think we've got a
minimal mail running on the server, but the mailing list turned out to be really difficult to set
up, because it's the mailman version we use seem to gobble up all the resources, so we've actually
outsourced the mail list to a paid service that can use this for his own mail, okay, things,
so that seems to be working fine, so we had, so show upload works, comments are working,
there are changes that need to be made to get it all back to, back together again,
because we have, you know, it's been a major change, it's one thing to another,
so we've been just developing this, I did say some stuff about this in the community use,
so I'll not go on anymore. It's funny, if you look at this, you never know the end thing,
change, it just looks the same, you know, I know, I did briefly mention today that I've got my
message that we were following, but I've got a device, as we pie, there's a Python code,
it does have a number of things, but one of the things that does is when the power on it,
it checks, it used to be a status page that was generated, and it could create that and grab
the number of shows that left in the queue, but of course, now that no longer exists that page,
so that's broken. Yeah, I think the thinking was, we had free access to various dynamic things
like that on the original server, but they cost, and now we're in a situation where we want to
minimise the number of calls to this server, because it's a costly and costable service,
and Josh is paying for it at the moment, so we do still have int of APIs that do this, but they're
authenticated, APIs that are being used by various bits and pieces of the software, so we don't
think we really want to put them out to the... But as I see, looking at that, I mean, I've not
not seen anything, I just don't think it looks frightening, you know, I've not
I've spent a lot to look at it, it's like, did I not hear when it suddenly mentioned that
as a bug tracking thing or something, because I couldn't... There is, we've got, again, Josh has
provided us with a site with get hosting on it, get repositories, so it's using GITI, which is one
of the free GIT repository management thingies, and it's available, we've got one for the static site
specifically, we've got others for the dynamic bit and various other things, and the static site
stuff is available, for you to go and look at and read and see the code, and grab your own copy of
the code, and run your own instance of HBO, if you want to. So as a GIT repo, one of the features
that it offers is thing where you can keep a list of issues, so we do need people who want to add
issues to be registered on the site, but you can just do that for now. But I was wondering, you know,
if you were if you were panning to run the service yourself, then that might that would be the
place, because you'd be getting the code presumably from the get repository wherever, but if it's
somebody who just visits the HPR site, presumably all that they would do is, if there's not
something they would just email the janitors, just say, well, I've noticed this by the name.
We've had three classes of reports so far, we've had few using the issue tracking thing on the
site, but not many, because not many people have registered, because, you know, why would you?
We've had several reported by Matrix, there's an HPR channel on Matrix, HPR, and that's pretty
easy to connect with and send in. It's what's Matrix. It's a social, I guess you'd say it's a
social networking thing, but it's meant to be something that is capable of interfacing it,
it provides a, provides a messaging interface like what's happened. But it also has got
gateways to other networking, to other social networking systems. So at the moment, we have a
a chat, we've got several channels set up, which we've set up, although you can just set a channel
up by itself if you want to. We've got several channels, but one of them is called
HHPR, and it's where HPR people, both stuff, ask questions,
chit chat, occasionally post the weather in Edinburgh, because just 72 post the weather in,
but where he's now Kentucky at least, and so we ping pong the weather, the weather details,
just for amusement. But we had some, I can't remember who it was who sent in a message on there saying
there's a problem with, with XYSET, and I simply copied that text into ratio issue system.
And this morning, I got one on a master done, where a guy was commenting on a problem there.
So I was able to point him to it.
Is it a reference to master an emitting option? There's a link to it in the mean each pair of
ebbs it was. I think so, yeah, it was one of the things that we hadn't done, and people pointed out
we hadn't done. But yeah, there's a master done, I'm on a master done, there is an account on
master done walled at HPR or something. I guess as long as all these are referenced in the mean HPR
site, then I must admit, I just tend to look at the HPR site myself. Yeah, you don't have to be.
No, I just happen to be on master and I'm following various things and I spotted some
user commenting on something saying there was something wrong with this one of the series,
so yeah. Anyway, so many avenues you can get, and for my support, that's the thing.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We don't want to go in. We did mention some of this yesterday on the
community news, so we don't want to be repeating ourselves too much. But by the time this show gets
put together, it'll probably be a couple of weeks down there, so people have forgotten this a
bit. So, so we're doing the service, we're doing the service, not really repeating ourselves.
No, no, I thought I was. So, I don't know, quickly look at YouTubey things. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, there's there's video and audio, I was moving on to talk about some of the couple of things.
First was, I was looking at myself, it was little Chinese everywhere. I don't know how you
describe it, but it's been really, really enjoying it. It's fantastic, you know. Yes, yeah. How
do you describe it? It's a ex-student, and she has got a degree in, I think, sort of geographical
related subject, and she got her degree in Switzerland, and on, and she's from China,
so she speaks English really well. She decided that rather than, you know, catch a plane back home,
she would travel overland from Switzerland to China. So part of the first part, the first set of
videos is about that journey, and then having got back to, I don't remember where she lives,
but she needs it, I'm not sure. Yeah. She decides that she wants to carry on doing this by visiting
every province in China. So, she has a skill of interacting with people and being very enthusiastic
about what's there to be seen and stuff, and showing it in an excellent way. And yeah, she just
is amazing in the thing, and that whole business of meeting people in other countries is such a
fascinating thing. Oh yeah, it's happened when we glued it, you know, it's, yeah, I think we've
watched ten of them so far, I think. It's one of those that you can't start. Yeah, good, good.
Well, I'll just quickly cover my remaining thing. So, I've been listening to, of course,
I don't know, for American audience, how relevant it is, of course, there's always
noises and waves as you can understand, but the BBC do a series back in the day. It's called
Computing Britain hosted by Hannah Fly, and it was back over the 75 years of Computing
yesterday to reveal the UK's lead role and developing technologies we rely on today.
So, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it talks about all sorts of stuff, the, the, the, the,
rather number generator that they used for premium bonds back in the day, which is a way to,
for it to encourage people to save, to save, been in the church, so it was a gambling,
I thought it was the most evil thing possible, and, and, you know, the, the, the, the,
the sort of a finding, a way of developing, of coming up with random numbers to pick the,
the ticket, and it had to be truly random, and no, no, no, not, not, not, not be able to novel, and
whatnot. And then it talks about, um, the very early Computing that was, uh, done by, it was at the,
the Lloyd, Lloyd's, Lloyd T Company, uh, the T Chain, it was, there was,
Lines, lines, lines, lines, lines, lines, lines of London, and they had so many shops that they
couldn't, uh, keep track of Inventory and all that, so, uh, they were, they were at the
desperation, they built their own computer, I mean, I, you know, a T shop, building a computer,
it's just nuts, you know, um, they'd done it before it, and, uh, so they were so far out of the
head of the game, and it took many, many years for everybody to catch up on the rhythm, but, uh,
it ran over stock controls and everything, but the, the, the history is just fascinating,
it talks, uh, more like the talks about the Ella computer days with, uh, you know, the,
the BBC computer and the spectrum, and all that sort of stuff, and it goes right through,
uh, right up to, uh, present day, I think, so it's, it's, it's, it's really, I would recommend
yeah, yeah, last thing to do, actually, yeah, yeah, so, um, yeah, yeah, so, um, I've got a list of
things here, which I've just sort of a, a bucket of things that might be of interest, which I'll
just dip into and tell you about maybe two, I used to cycle a lot, I would quite like to get back
into cycling, I went by myself, uh, electric bike, I'm not sure, and my first, uh, YouTube channel
is called Not Just Bikes, and it's, um, it's a guy who, uh, cycles a lot, and he's also interested
in city design, or in fact, the wrong way and the right way to design cities. I actually watched
some of those kind of fascinating things, because they just show you how the terrible designs are
some other, uh, I don't, I don't see too much of us, you've got to watch us, but I would never,
I would never think about the subtleties of what you've seen until you're into your own mind,
until you start looking at the way the places function. Yeah, he's a Canadian, and he, um, he was
brought up in what he calls fate London, so it's London, Ontario, I think, is, is the, is,
they're London, he's still there, there's a bit of a joke, uh, but he hated living there because,
uh, it's so, so car-centric, and he, um, he'd been around various parts of the world and stuff,
he's got kids, um, he's, he's married and, uh, and they're, everybody's keen on cycling,
and he and the family have moved to Amsterdam, and he makes a particular point of showing
how Amsterdam and, uh, the Netherlands in general, are much better designed for people to live.
People, yeah, people, central brothers and people, central family, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.
And, you know, they're, they're, um, in the cycling, uh, infrastructure, and so on, is, is, is, is great,
yeah, uh, and the philosophy behind it, how it's being changed to be more,
less car-centric and more bike and water on pedestrian-centric, and I, I did note the latest
episode I'd seen, maybe it's not the latest one on the channel, but it's, uh, the title is,
even small towns are great here, and there's five years in the Netherlands, so he's been there
five years, and he, he goes around various other towns, not just Amsterdam, but some of the,
other places, just to show, yeah, what the, what life is alive. As, as you get fewer cars,
you get more people, and, and it's more compact, there's more to see and do, I mean, it's just,
yeah, just to halt, yeah, it's, and it, it's, it's about how you structure your living spaces,
you know, if you go through many of these smaller towns and Amsterdam, it's all about medium,
high-rise buildings with a lot of people in them, and shops underneath, right, in many cases,
shops are very, very close by, so, so you, you can walk to shops to buy whatever you need,
you can cycle to them, you need to go to Ikea, well, yes, you can do that, and you can now,
you can hire a bike that's got the capacity to carry. I was, I was amazed when, um,
I met people in the States, maybe just, that, I remember some people I didn't want, and I
said how, how alien it was, I couldn't, but, could not believe that, that, that, a colleague of mine
he was over in Texas, now, this must have been, uh, about 30 or 30 years ago, something I was,
and he was saying how, and it went to the supermarket, and it, and it's like a bloody motorway
into the, into the shops, nowhere to walk whatsoever, so you cannot, you couldn't walk into the shop,
you had, you had to get a car on this motorway, dry, you know, I was like a three or four-way
motorway into the shop, you know, not, not passing by the shop, but actually into the shop,
with no pavements either. Are you nuts? You know, I can't believe that, you know, it's just,
yeah, yeah, yeah, and then you can see some of the shops, some of the big shops,
Tesco's and types like others are available, in partiality, but, um, yeah, I mean, even those,
you know, the car packs are so busy, uh, it's difficult to, to, to walk, but that's,
but that's nothing can be done, bloody motorway up up to the, the shop, no, no, you can't imagine.
We, we're, the UK is sort of, has been moving over the years more towards, uh,
and American styles, yeah, obviously, but, but, um, maybe it speaks. A lot of Europe hasn't,
um, it's definitely against that, that, that sort of philosophy, and, uh, you know, I think
there was a survey of the happiest people in, in the world, or something like that, I think,
the Netherlands has been very, very, I think Scandinavia also, it's good, pretty high, but,
yeah, there's a certain amount of cycling there, I'm not sure how much, but I think, uh,
the Netherlands are excellent. Believe it or not, I've just, I've just, I've actually made a city
from where I'm having a meal, because we touched on, on cycling, what not, and, uh, so, I, I,
I did a tiny bit of cycling, but, uh, my, my, my bicycle has been sitting in the shade for,
many years, my wife already sold, sold hers, so we've got two bikes, and, uh, we, we tried to
fit, uh, uh, I think to put it in the back, well, first of all, we tried to cycle in a bit,
everywhere was hills, everywhere was, we couldn't cope, so then we got a thing in the back of the
car, it was so much hassle to put it back, often on the, the, the car, then we stopped that,
so then with it right, well, trying to get a really good quality one, and you can get this,
I think, it might be a Swedish or some fancy design thing, and it is supposed to just drop onto
the car, and yes, it was easier than the other one, but it was still a pain, and we got fed up doing
that, so it ended up just sitting in the, in the shade, my wife sold hers, mine sat for years,
and just this weekend, bizarrely, uh, some friends of ours came, and there you go, you can have the bike,
they actually gave us some money for it, but, um, no, really, I'm not tired from that,
I was just, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, so yes, I'm like, no, so, uh, just two feet, no,
would you a lot of walking towards us? Well, yes, that sounds good. We used to cycle as a family
affair a bit, and I remember both my kids had bikes, and, uh, I've had bikes, and when I was married,
my wife had a bike, which used a bit, but, uh, yeah, I used to cycle to him from work, but I only
live about a mile away from my work, but it's, it's, it's, it's a, it's a hilly thing, but there's also a,
an old, um, uh, field side, uh, trackway that, uh, that, that you, that I used to use, so it'd
be nice to go down there, and, well, I'm not quite so nice coming back, I'm in the, I have to
work. I could definitely see the, the, the, because I would just send him away, if we are, if we
didn't have a fully companion, then, uh, then a, then a electric bike would be the ideal solution,
because you can flatten it the hills with that, and, you know, you sometimes pedal the whole
team, but just, yeah, that would be the thing to go with, yeah, yeah, there's, there's quite a,
you do see him around, you go quite around, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I remember them around here,
in Edinburgh, but Edinburgh is quite hilly, so, you know, I can understand that. Yeah, it's less,
of, less appealing, yeah. And many years ago I was in Amsterdam, and we were
hard to set up bikes, and I couldn't believe her, because we're not at the time, we're like, oh my,
look at Tim, we've only got so long to get back, and we're tough, a huge essence, I,
So that was so effortless because it was so flat.
Yes, it was.
Yeah, yeah.
And it's also geared up for bikes so well.
I've been to Amsterdam a few times.
So I drove there once, went there for a conference
and my boss with my boss.
And he'd hired a car, even though we went that far away
from the venue we were at.
From the hotel, anyway.
He hired a car and we all went to the conference-y thing.
And then he said, right, you could go now
and could you take the car back to the hotel?
I suddenly got this car in this foreign city,
which I was licensed to do and everything.
But go.
It's stressful.
It's stressful because it's trans,
because there's car bits.
There's bike bits.
There's different lights for bikes.
There's pedestrian bits.
It's quite scary for somebody who's not experienced it before.
But once you've got used to it,
it's so really well designed.
It's beautifully designed, right?
My second, I'll just say quickly.
The second one.
Because most of the details will be in the notes anyway.
It's another cycling in the Netherlands channel.
I thought I'd lump them together.
This guy is called, this channel is called bicycle Dutch.
And the guy is Dutch.
And he does videos.
He talks about the cycling things.
He talks about developments in cycling routes and stuff.
He's done a series where he shows,
he doesn't live in Amsterdam.
He lives there.
I can't say Dutch.
Hagen Bosch or something like that.
Anyway, he did a series where about 10 years ago,
he cycled the routes into town from the sort of suburban areas.
And he filmed them.
And then he's done the same route again.
And then he's interlead the two films.
He's got a picture in picture of the old one with the current one.
And to show how it's changed and how it's improved.
And so forth.
And I just find that you probably would not want to watch it
because it's just watching the guy cycling on the street
from his viewpoint.
But I find it fascinating because I just pick up on all the
things that he's supposed to do here.
Can you cross?
Can you turn the lights against you or against the car?
No, it's...
But the conclusion I draw is that it would take you
a little while to get used to it if you went there with a bike.
But you'd soon settle in and you'd find it was so forgiving
and so pleasant to ride.
I mean, touch ethic in another language to make me interested
in the traffic.
Not good.
I have not cycled much in town.
I used...
I did one point.
My first came here.
I worked in the centre of town in the grass market.
And I had a...
I brought a bike with me from my previous job.
And I would cycle from the outskirts
into central Edinburgh.
And I was very fast, faster than the bus.
And definitely faster than any car.
Well, my college is just a cycle home.
And he...
No, it was...
Probably my...
Johnny Tewak's 20 miles.
I got a golem of bypass and he'd be close to the centre of town.
And I don't think he got home before me,
but it was close.
Sometimes he was only a short time after me, you know.
But I mean, yeah.
First of all, don't trip that soon.
I'm super excited to do that.
Well, he has just...
It was...
It was really the way I went in.
I was used to cycling in Lancaster, where I was before,
which is also fairly hilly in places anyway.
It's funny.
A lot of car drivers can get...
Supply them in the car drivers can get very angry with cyclists.
And I just don't get it because...
I'm not cyclist, but, you know,
I get frustrated,
be stuck behind a lorry or something like that,
or a bus or whatever,
because you can't get past the dam thing.
And it stops every opportunity,
you don't stop a crawl or whatever, you know.
But basically, you don't start behind them for a very short time,
and you pass,
they're easy to pass, you know.
I don't see what the issue is.
No, it's just a matter of that.
That frustration,
fully understood.
No, and that...
Having been a cyclist first,
and then a car driver later,
I suppose I was a bit more forgiving
by the motorcyclist too,
at some point,
but yeah, yeah.
It makes you a little bit more appreciative
of what's coming.
Anyway, so,
did you have any more YouTubey things you wanted to?
I don't think so,
because I've...
maybe had other things,
but I think maybe they'll be...
Probably enough for me,
but for another thing.
I think so.
I did too.
It was greedy, yeah.
And I waffled a bit,
but...
By the...
Anyway, I think, hopefully,
that'll be of interest.
It's got a long way to do that.
One hour, we can do minutes.
Yeah.
Hopefully, we can trim things down a wee bit.
So...
All right, then.
So, that's...
That's...
That's...
In the latest episode...
Rapping up.
Yeah.
So...
Yeah.
So, for next time everybody,
and, as always,
and keep sending in shores,
we all want to be shores.
Absolutely.
It won't survive,
unless we have a...
So...
Yeah, that was just for them.
Yeah, bye everybody.
Bye-bye.
You have been listening to Hecker Public Radio
at Hecker Public Radio.
Does it work?
Today's show was contributed
contributed by a HBR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording podcasts,
then click on our contribute link to find out how easy it really is.
Hosting for HBR has been kindly provided by
an honesthost.com, the internet archive and our sings.net.
On the Sadois status, today's show is released
under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.