hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr1301.txt

Episode: 1301
Title: HPR1301: Conversation with Nybill and Jon Kulp
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1301/hpr1301.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-17 23:14:47

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Hey everybody, this is John Culp and I am from Lafayette, Louisiana, but I'm not there
right now.
I am in New York.
You're in my home state.
That's right.
Look who's come to visit me.
It's in Whiteville.
Hello.
Okay.
Can you say the static?
I want to check the level.
I'm not too loud here.
Check the levels.
I think the levels look pretty good as long as we don't get two rimbunks just here.
I'm starting though.
John Culp has no stickers on his laptop so I'm starting to see what I can give him.
Okay.
So he has quite an assortment here.
There's tucks.
Excellent.
I think Windigo gave you those, right?
Yeah.
I've got those, but I haven't stuck them on my laptop.
I think I stuck them on one of my servers.
But that will not reach the level.
So this is your second meetup with HPR people in what?
Two months.
Yeah.
It went to go three or four months ago.
I think it was April or May that Windigo stopped by Lafayette.
And we recorded eight or nine minutes of conversation there in my dining room.
And right now we're at my brother-in-law's house.
And so we just had a nice lunch, walked down to a local diner, had a nice lunch.
I've met Mrs. in Whiteville.
Yes.
Pretty nice to meet her.
Who is taking pictures right now?
Yeah.
She's taking pictures.
We can post these.
You don't want to say hi?
That's it.
I don't know if that'll pick up on the mic or not.
It'll probably pick up a little bit.
I'm a little closer and say hello.
It's alright.
And I've got coffee brewing in the other room.
We're going to get rolling here in earnest once my coffee is in my cup.
So how long did this take us to actually finally meet?
I'm thinking about five years.
Five and a half years and a half.
We met on the Linux outlaw's forums.
Yep.
I think we were the original, what were we calling her?
The old school or something like the original outlaws.
I don't know how it was.
I was number 130 and the number of people who registered on there.
Yep.
And you were probably right around that time.
Yeah, yeah.
It seemed like a whole bunch of us, well not a whole bunch of us, maybe 30 of us came
in within a month of each other and all just became fast friends because we talked every
day.
Yeah, that was our chat.
You and me and Wendigo, Jezre, Lost in Bronx.
Yep.
Next one, 101, Fab and Dan of course.
Yeah, a handful of others who have gone here and there and kind of lost touch with and
then new ones come along getting the various.
I switched over to Identica mostly at a point where what prompted me to do that really was
Jezre had written Hey Buddy and I like helping my friends, you know, if one of my friends
writes some software, I want to try it out.
We were the beta testers.
Yeah, that was the whole reason why I tried Identica.
You guys were on a way before I was.
Well, I think I was a year late when the whole L.O. crew went over, I was reluctant for
change.
One of those people.
So it was a big less peak, less pounder, I can't twist my arm and say you have to sign
up because that's the only way people were talking to each other in Wolverhampton, so.
Yeah, that makes sense.
Anyway, I took to Identica pretty quickly, I mean, I remember first being really confused
like thinking that, I don't know, I was like worried that I wasn't going to see all
of the posts that came in in a day and I would like check way back in my history to make
sure I didn't miss anything and after a while, I just realized, you know, just let it go.
Yeah, you can't check your mentions.
You can't read the whole world.
I'm going to contact.
Contacts help.
Yeah.
Contacts.
It reminds me of IRC if you can press Contacts and see who has talked to you in the past
day in IRC.
That's what I like about it.
Yeah.
But now it's gone.
Identica.
Yeah.
Identica is now the pump I.O. platform and a bunch of us still have status net instances
though.
I do, and you do, and I think when the go is becoming the new Identica, he's got like 30 people
now.
Yeah, he's becoming a hub for, for, you know, orphans from Identica.
Speaking of the devil, here's somebody talking to me on, that is not now.
Nice to see.
Nice to see both behaving like adults, because I just said John Cope is chasing me around
with a microphone.
Oh.
When the go says the other day at the log, he goes, he goes, before you leave the house,
John is going to put a microphone down in front of you, I said, oh, that's course.
Here we are.
You got to take advantage of these opportunities, man.
So you mentioned your log, and you had a meeting yesterday, correct?
Yes.
Nice things.
Picture if all of us friends that we talk to every day on Identica could sit in one room.
I mean, it's just, it's a bunch of, well, it's just a bunch of friends, just talking Linux.
I don't get a chance other than online or at the log to talk Linux at all in my job
or in my personal life, so it's an outlet.
I can understand that.
And Ace fear, he's just as much as a geek as me, but he's got two little kids and he says
it's, it's double for him, because he gets just a little downtime, gets to hang out with
his geeky friends, and that's, that's what it is.
It's nothing structured or things on the overhead projector or things like that.
It could be if somebody wants to do a talk they can.
Well, you mentioned something about packing your bag for the log.
What, I mean, is this like you got certain things you need to give to people or you want
to show off or just, not really, it's a great place if you have trouble.
And you say, look, I'm having trouble with this and you have 30 people on a table.
Somebody's going to know how to help you or sometimes it'll just start taking over the
room, like everybody will start Google and then trying to find out, oh, I got this.
So that's fun to get, you know, 10 or 20 people brainstorming on one problem.
So usually people leave, by the time they leave, they fixed whatever problem they had.
I like the sound of that.
Yeah.
I don't have that kind of support except on my timeline here and various user forms and
no love to tell that way.
And you don't have any time to start one.
There is some sort of, like the Acadiana open source group or something, but their meetings
are always at an awkward time where I can't make it.
So I've never been.
I did talk Linux a little bit with the director of computing support services at the university
where I teach is an open source guy.
He runs Sentals on his desktop and I went and asked him about access to, I was going to
see if there was a way I could get a VPS through the school and I said, oh, that'd be good,
but the department would have to pay a hundred bucks a month or something.
I was like, yeah, I don't think so.
You can get a Linux for 20 bucks a month.
Yeah.
But anyway, I always enjoy talking to him because he understands everything I say.
That is another thing with the log.
You just, until you just said that, I realized you're amongst people who are at your technical
level, you don't have to explain how Grinim's to them.
So you can talk as fast as you want and the other people are right on the same level.
I don't get a chance to do that in my personal way.
Yeah, I don't much either.
My son now understands quite a lot of things I say, but it's still nice to get together
with other people.
You guys are all going to have matching tuck stickers because I just gave him, just gave
him too earlier.
We can line up all the laptops and display them.
By these things 20 at a time, everybody in my lug probably has one by now.
Oh, it's from Adafruit.
Adafruit.
They're a dollar each.
Yeah.
So whenever I get something from Adafruit, I just pat up the order of it with a couple of
those.
Oh, that's cool.
Do you get free shipping if you go pass a certain threshold?
No, it's just like, when I see it's $8 shipping and I only have $9 of stuff for some reason
I...
For some reason, I want to change the levels to 20.
Yeah.
So Bill, you've given me something that's my turn to give you something.
Oh.
What do we have?
Home link.
Oh, Corydoctoral.
Nice.
Corydoctoral book.
It's a sequel to Little Brother.
Okay.
I don't know if you read that one or not, but...
No, but I'll put it on my list.
Nice.
Yeah, you should read them both.
They're excellent.
I mean, it's just perfect book for people like us who are a little bit paranoid and interested
a little bit paranoid security.
I'm wearing tinfoil right now.
Now, it's great.
I just...
I bought it at that little independent bookstore that we walked past on the whole lunch.
Very cool.
Red it myself and then handing it off to you.
I can see the drones.
Right.
They've got drones.
And one of the characters in the book actually makes his own drones that will go up with
cameras and send a feed to the U-stream or something.
This has been talked about at our 2600 meetings.
People are playing around with little helicopters and stuff.
And you can see...
My intention with this is to have it be a little bit like the last book I sent to you.
So I bought it here.
Nice.
And then we can kind of document the hands that pass through them and solve the nerds.
Yeah, we should mention that.
There's a couple of books that we've been passing around through friends and everybody kind
of signs on the front leaf.
You know, I got it.
It's going to him next.
So we have a book club, a cryptid email club, but we have a lot of little...
Yeah.
Little clubs.
It's not funny.
It's very serious.
Yeah, man.
My wife is laughing at us.
The last book was Crypto by...
What was it?
Stephen Levy?
Oh, yeah.
And so I sent that and remembered his name.
And then you read it and sent it along and then I think it's going to six or seven people
by now.
Yeah.
J Rob.
X-1101.
I don't know who's ended up with it.
It's still out there.
If somebody wants it next, try to get down.
This one, you know, Cory Doctoro is just so great in his advocacy of free software and
he also provides his books free of charge for download.
Okay.
You could go download this one for free.
And all of his other books so far I've read by downloading for free.
He released it.
Okay.
Creative commonsly.
But they're also published in hardcover format.
And so...
I do still like reading books.
Yes.
I do too.
And then...
But after reading them and enjoying them so much, I like many people wanted to donate to
them and he said, no, don't donate to me.
Buy a copy of my book because I want to support the publishers.
But here's a list of libraries and school teachers who have requested copies.
Oh, right.
Take one of them out.
That's a good idea.
Buy the book and send it to them.
In that spirit, I bought it full price at an independent bookseller which he's really
big on also.
He's in a little brother and maybe one or two others.
The beginning of every chapter has a paragraph describing one of his favorite independent book
sellers.
Like what makes them cool, why he likes them and the name of a salesperson who's especially
knowledgeable about whatever subject.
And so he's really big on independent bookseller.
So I went to want to bought it, giving it to you and you can pass it along.
Nice.
I will.
Donate it to the public library in your area or something of that sort.
It'll be next on my list after I get through Quicksilver.
Which might take about six months, but then you have to read the confusion and system
of the world.
So it could be the rest of the books.
Five or six hours.
Neil Stevenson?
Yeah, Neil Stevenson.
Yeah.
I keep joking around that he has slash V set because he's very verbal, but they're
great books.
He's a good author.
I think it might be VVV.
The triple V verbose.
I love that cycle.
I've read it a few times and really enjoy all the whole, the whole, the emergence of the
economies of the Baroque era.
Hodorken and spoilers.
I'm just.
That's a, that's a general theme.
I'm sure you've already been past the part where Isaac Newton is explaining the various
coins to Daniel as they walk along.
Yes.
And getting a feeling it's kind of a revolution of technology.
It's right on that cusp of when they thought the world was going around the sun and vice versa,
discovering new science.
Yeah, it's a little bit later than Copernicus and then, but they are definitely battling
against conventional wisdom on many fronts.
It's really, really interesting.
Many true historical figures woven into the story and it's all held together by Daniel
Waterhouse.
I felt that somebody was asking, I was talking about Quicksilver to somebody at the log and
then another person asked, you know, how does this story work or how does it flow or something
I go?
It's kind of like forced gump where you make up a fictional character and he runs into
historical characters going through the fictional, fictional novel, but you do kind of pick
up some history or at least names that the guy was talking to at the log pico.
He said he was on the Wikipedia after every third chapter because he wants to read about
these historical figures and.
They're good reads.
Yeah, the force come things a little is a good analogy.
That's kind of interesting.
I didn't know.
Oh, go ahead.
Another thing that's cool about that though is that Daniel Waterhouse and Jack Shafto are
long ago ancestors of the protagonist of Cryptonomicon.
Yes.
Yeah, I picked that up.
It's Mr. Bell.
Bobby Shafto and later America Shafto, the young lady and Quicksilver.
I think a low last summer I read Crypto Mountain, yeah, I just, I just butchered that one.
Crypto and Omicron.
So I don't know when you had read that, but it seemed like a few of us read that last
summer and we were all talking about it.
Yeah, I've been through it a couple of times.
It's a great one.
It definitely stands up to multiple readings because you'll, there's so much in there.
It probably takes a few readings.
All of his books.
Yeah, but this, it's a good one.
I think you're going to like this one by Corey Dockborough.
You don't have to read Little Brother first, but it doesn't hurt because there's some
of the same characters in there and they refer to the events of the previous book numerous
times.
No, I'm always looking for books along our geeky kind of a computer-y, nerdy, you know what
I'm trying to say.
Our sensibility, man.
Yes.
That's what it's all about.
In the first, in Little Brother, one example of the hacker mentality that, that pervades
in there is, at some point, some corporation, either Microsoft or somebody, decided to give
away all kinds of consoles for free and then just make money on the software.
Well, the main character of the book took advantage of all these free consoles by realizing
that they had certain hardware properties and things that they could run, what did he
call Paranoid Linux, was the distro and so he spun a remix of the Paranoid Linux distro
or something and made it available to people with Xbox and stuff.
He took all the kids' had one because they were given them away for free and so when the
surveillance got to be too much, he taught everyone how to use this live CD environment
to get onto the Xnet, I think he called it, and they could all communicate with each other.
It's very aproposive, current times with the surveillance.
There's something at the very end of this, this is not a spoiler in terms of plot line,
but at the end of this book, Homeland, there's an afterward by Aaron Schwartz and it was
chilling to read because he clearly, I mean, he wrote it before he committed suicide and
he said something in there about, if you need help reach out to me, maybe that's the
shivers down the spine, but yeah, so anyway, it's a great book, it's aimed at the teenage
market, but I as a 40-some-year-old guy really enjoyed it.
We're putting stickers all over laptops, we can't be that adult.
Well yeah, I think I'm going to apply one right now, oh, make sure you put it in the
right direction, I give them to young kids at the log and poor kids, they put them the
wrong way, I'm going to put it where my students can see it when I open it up in front
of the class.
Oh, there you go.
Is this going to come out?
Oh, actually, just the tux comes out, comes out.
Oh, so it's all blinded?
Just pull on his head.
Is it going to have an outline that can be seen?
Oh yeah, yeah, it's got a white outline, okay.
Okay, so live on Hacker Public Radio, I'm applying the very first sticker to my Toshiba
satellite.
It's history.
Put it discreetly up here in the corner, like that, are you capturing this on the film
look?
We're going to have show note pictures, do you want credit as photographer?
You have to hold poses for a long time, okay.
All right, okay, so I have applied a tux sticker to my Toshiba satellite and there's a beeping
in there.
I don't know what that is, whether it's the dishwasher or some other thing.
Maybe the coffee.
It's not my house and so it does things.
It's the art beeps when it's going to shut off the warmer under the coffee.
Oh, well, I already turned off the machine that thought of it.
Or something's going to explode.
Oh well, it's the kind of thing where if it was mine at my house, I'd probably figure
out a way to disable it.
It went through SSH, SSH to dev dishwasher.
Oh, man, so I thought I would demonstrate for Inuit Bill the blather thing that I've
been blathering on about with Jezre.
Yeah, I listened to your HPR, but I have never tried it, so a demo would be cool.
Yeah.
This is the condenser mic you talked about.
Yeah, this is my little levelier condenser mic, and it might not be the best thing for
this kind of thing.
I think it's better to have a mic that will pick up a little bit less ambient sound.
But you know, we can see if blather will pick up me imitating your Southern accent.
I don't think it picks up accents at all.
I'm just joking.
You don't really have a different Southern accent.
I am from Louisiana, in Tennessee, in Texas.
You're doing that typical Northern Southern.
What is it doing?
Discrimination.
Well, it's listening to us, and you can see that it has all kinds of words all the way across
there.
But until it hears a discrete command that it knows that I want it to act upon, it won't
do anything.
It'll just kind of show those words.
So, for example, here's one.
Good morning.
What's up, mid-dye?
Let me turn it on.
Oh, that's interesting.
Let's try that again.
Good morning.
You're bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, and ready for a busy day.
So, what's happening there is I have a command that I say, and then when I greet it by saying
good morning, it will choose from a list of possible responses, and I have a text file
with all those responses in there, and then it will shuffle them randomly and choose one
and then pipe it through e-speak.
Oh, I see.
That one that we heard happens to be something that my grandfather used to say to me when I was
a kid.
You're bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, and ready for a busy day.
So, I thought that had to be one of the responses, as a way to help me remember my grandfather
a little bit.
Oh, that's nice.
So, as you're talking, it keeps putting up words, oh, did it just pick up me saying
talking?
It did.
Oh, I see.
Because one of the commands is stop-talking, but that only comes into play when I'm using
the web speech API thing right here.
Let me, I'll demonstrate here.
I'm going to post a message to my status net timeline now, live on HPR, and the way I
do it is like this.
Go to dictation box.
This is a demonstration of my use of web speech API using Google Voice Thingy thing, and
NY Bill is sitting right here next to me, and Mrs. NY Bill is sitting over there, and Bill
just took a picture of the screen.
Now, it's making a lot of mistakes right now, but you can still tell that I will be able
to save tons and tons of keystrokes by using what it's putting on the screen for me.
Stop talking.
Don't.
It missed the stop.
So, part of the key to making this work is when I give it the stop-talking command, it's
supposed to put in there the word stop-talking, because when I transfer it over there, I run
it through said and remove those two words.
Now I see.
So what's what happens now?
No, I just before you keep going, it's paused right now, but did it pick up me, try to
pick up me when I was talking to you?
It might have.
I could be half of the problem here.
No, it's fine.
So now I will say that the next command, transfer text, no, that's cool.
It does a series of keystrokes when I say that it does alt tab to get back to the previous
application that it was on, and then it does control V to paste all this stuff.
Well, first it does control C to copy to the clipboard, then alt tab to flip back to the
previous app, and then control V to paste it in there.
It does that series of minutes.
Is this like a script sitting in a config somewhere?
Yeah.
Yeah, I'll show you the config file.
So whoops, that's not the right file.
To mycommands.com file, the, oh, here it is.
Stop talking.
Does xdo tool key tab and and sleep 0.2 seconds, and then key press return, oh, so what
that does.
When I say that, it hits the tab key, which moves the focus onto the little button in here.
Let me show you.
If I refresh this and if that is, hang on, this is not going to work right.
You're so you're tabbing through the window with, yeah, you tab through the window and
it puts the focus on there and then I have a virtual return press, and so it stops everything
and then gets it ready to do control C, alt tab, control V, to put the text over there
into the hey buddy window.
And here I could edit it a little bit.
What I normally do if there's something that's going to need a good bit of work, I'll just
take it and put it over here in a different thing.
Speech recognizer.
Paste.
Paste.
Hey, woo, you, hey, let me, let me help you that paste, it doesn't pick up that either.
Paste.
I forget it.
I'm just going to paste it, okay, so this is, okay, so I've got here, it says this is
the demonstration, my use of Wimpy KPI.
So I'm going to select that and then I've got a command to turn on that little microphone
right there.
It also uses the web speech API, but it's got, it doesn't do continuous listening, it
just listens for a moment.
Microphone.
Web speech API.
Oh man, I see, that fixed it.
Using Google Voice thingy thing and in what bill is sitting, so that is just you, that's
hard to fix any way except manually.
Bill's sitting here next to me and Mrs. N.Y. Bill, oops, ah, what did I do?
Pick that Mrs. N.Y. Billing, Billing, a Marin build, Mrs. N.Y. Bill, oh, this is live,
typing.
This is exciting, just took a picture of the screen, making a lot of, let's see, yeah,
this is probably enough, I'm just going to call that done and now I will give it my post
to HeyBuddy command, we'll see if that works.
Post from HeyBuddy.
Oh, nice, grabbed it, stuck it in there, oh, and send it to.
Done.
Nice, that's awesome.
Pretty cool, huh?
I might have to, is there a command that I can say, fix all my typos, that would be
very helpful for me.
There's a, well, not all of them, but some of them.
I always do T-E-H instead of the T-H-E, yeah, just my fingers do it every single time.
So here's what you could do, you could set up a command that says fix-tuh, and it'll
look for all of them.
I've got a similar one here, where every time I use the word, either the word comma or
like, if I want to put a comma in there, it'll say the word K-A-M-A, like a weapon, it's
like a martial arts weapon, I think, a comma, or some kind of clothing, I don't know, but
it's down instead of a comma.
And so I have a command that says fix-tuh, and it'll go through and find every instance
where that happened, and it'll put a comma instead using the said stream editor.
And so if you have a problem like that, that you have this little misstep here, fingers.
Even from my brain to my fingers, yeah, it's somewhere in my elbow there.
I also have one that does, let's see, microphone.
This is a demonstration of the Blather speech recognition program period.
Now look, see, almost every time it puts the word bladder instead of bladder, now watch
this, fix-bladder.
Blather, nice, yeah, that's cool.
So what it does there is it selects all copies it to the clipboard, pipes it through
said, and substitutes any instance of bladder with blather.
Or if there's 20 instances in them, it's six paragraphs, if it's them all, slash, bladder,
slash, bladder, slash G for global, it'll do every single one, and then it puts it right
back in my little editor right there.
I'm going to have to fool around this.
Yeah, it's fun.
I think we should be courteous to the laptop and tell it.
Thank you.
At a time.
Thanks.
Feel free to leave my tip.
You're so funny.
Oh, come on, you're so funny.
It's supposed to respond to me.
You're funny.
What does it think I'm saying?
You can always check to see what it thinks you're saying.
Oh yeah, that's when I keep, there's a little box and it's showing words, I kept going
down to try and read what it was saying.
I might have been speaking to the command too soon, let's try again.
You're funny.
I'm hilarious.
You're so funny.
This is true.
You realize this is just another abstraction from humans, right?
You're talking to your computer by yourself and you're detached garage.
We have all kinds of things we could ask it.
Here's a good one.
What time is it?
Why don't you look at the clock?
Sarcasm.
That's pretty rude.
That's pretty rude.
Oops.
Oh no.
What time is it?
Time to go pet a fluffy kitty.
Oh, you mean Dingle?
Who's the fluffiest?
Dingle is of course.
What's he?
No really.
What time is it?
105pm.
Thanks.
It's one.
It's easy.
It's crazy.
You're funny.
Wait till I really get rolling.
Oh boy.
Humans, we don't need humans.
Yeah, this is the kind of thing that a nerd will sit around thinking, oh man wouldn't
be funny if I did this.
Just sitting there configuring laden to the night thinking of all the silly things I
can do with Blather.
Is this too geeky, Mrs. NYPEL?
It's quite geeky.
It was quite geeky.
That's pretty good.
My kids really enjoy this too and the cousins were having a blast playing around with
it.
What we would do is we would turn on the dictation box and just let them start speaking and
speaking.
They'd speak a whole paragraph and then we'd select it all and have it read back by
e-speak.
You just read back and then random, whatever, it decided to pick up.
No, I would select something.
It's a modern day.
If I select this, I can, I have a command that will tell it to e-speak whatever is selected.
Speak this.
This is a demonstration of the Blather speech recognition program.
Speak this.
Reconciliation.
Okay.
So just the highlighted words.
Yeah, whatever is highlighted, it will speak it.
And yeah, cool, can be useful.
I had never seen it demonstrated.
I just heard you guys talking about it.
Yeah, it's fun.
It's incredibly useful.
I mean, I haven't even shown you the navigational kind of things so much, really, but watch
this.
Go to Thunderbird.
Nice.
Fiber inbox.
Fiber scentbox.
You see, it navigates all through my Thunderbird client.
That's really, you know, the way it does this is I'm actually going to do an HPR episode
detailing how I go about this, but the principle is that anything that can be done with a predictable
sequence of keystrokes can be done using Blather and a voice command.
And so what you have to do is figure out what is the predictable sequence of keystrokes
that can get you where you need to go.
And so for this one, to go to my first inbox, the keystroke sequence is Control K. They'll
get you to that thing, tab, home, to go all the way up to the top, left to make sure that
it's not open to make sure it's collapsed, then right to open it, and then down.
So you're kind of mentally stepping through like a screen capture of what it would take
to get pretty much and then script it.
Now that's a lot of keystrokes right there, but when the computer is doing it virtually,
it happens like that is so fast.
So let's see, work in box.
Now it looks like it just went down three, but it didn't.
It went up to Control K, it went down here, home, I mean it did all that collapsing and
everything just lightning fast, because that's the only one.
You can't tell it that you need to go down twice because sometimes this will be collapsed
and sometimes it won't, and it'll end up in the wrong place.
And if you physically did that with the mouse, it would have been three seconds longer.
It might have been.
A couple of seconds longer.
It might have been.
That's the keyboard, and sometimes you just don't really, you know, it may seem like
not much for your wrist to have to go over here and click on something, but if you've
got problems like I have, then every time you touch it, it builds up.
It's cumulative.
Have you had these kinds of problems, too?
Isn't that true?
I mean, computer programming, so she's typing all day at work.
Yeah, and even if, I don't know, it's cumulative, like every time I can cut out five or six
keystrokes in my work, compound it over the course of a day, that can be hundreds of keystrokes
that I've saved myself, and I just feel better at the end of the day.
Do you want to sit in your office and talk into the microphone?
We can set this up for you.
Here's a really good one right here.
Go to Firefox.
You have to put a pause in between each command or else they won't pick it up correctly.
Go to Firefox, press Home, go to Muse 300.
This is my online music class.
Control-Shift-In.
I had to do that to log in.
That's my keystroke to use.
So he started Firefox.
He went to his home page.
He input his name and password.
This is the Moodle page for our university.
So the publisher's textbook for my class has its own website.
To get there, you have to go first to the home page on Moodle.
Then you have to click this link right here that opens up a new tab that takes a moment.
And then once it finally does open up, you have to go down and find from a list of about
20 things.
You have to find the one class that you need, which in this class is this one.
You have to expand that, go down and then click this button.
It's extremely tedious and annoying.
You can see the problem here.
And then it opens up here and finally I'm where I need to be.
Well, I've automated this because again, this is something that can be done with a predictable
sequence of keystrokes.
So what it does is it uses the Firefox as an awesome quick search feature that I didn't
know about before, where if you're inside a web page like this, you can start searching
for linked text by prefacing your search with a single quote.
So I'm going to do single quote and it'll open up a little box right there.
And I'm going to type the first view.
Okay.
I usually do a control after that.
Yeah, but this is different.
Okay.
It automatically puts focus on whatever you're doing.
And so as you're typing.
I can tell it to automatically start searching with a single click for this string of text
and it puts focus on it.
And then I send a virtual return click.
So and it will take me to the next page.
So that's the first step.
Go to campus.
Like that fast.
Yeah, that's cool.
It's incredible.
It might be good in lecture.
Yeah.
It could be.
And now to automate the next step, what I have to do is do that same string search.
For I do, I think just this much SC13 for the summer 13 section.
I do that string.
And once it finds it, it presses enter.
And then it does four tab keys to get focus on the connect button.
And then I press a virtual enter key and watch how fast it happens.
Go to a wait.
What is it?
Oh, yeah, I remember.
Connect.
Yeah, I can see as I'm watching the tab, I can see it working going down through the
different links.
Gradebook Sync List.
I don't know how well this is still going to translate into audio, but I'm sitting here
watching John screen.
Gradebook Sync List.
And that one does a search for that thing right there and takes me over to my list.
This is like a place where I sync up the gradebook on this remote site with my Moodle
gradebook.
And this is one of the places I often have to go.
And then I can tell it to log me out by saying, leave connect and it searches for that
sign out thing and press enter.
And then it closes the tab, leave campus.
You just talked on Hacker Public Radio three times.
What?
She's forgetting the microphones here.
Ken Fallon, put her picture up.
Contributor.
Now consider to co-host.
No, that's pretty cool.
So, what do we say to our computer now?
Thank you.
My pleasure.
You're not bad.
You're funny.
You talk to me everything I know.
All right, well, so what else do we have to talk about?
The speed of this.
The speech.
You can, yes.
Yeah, there's a command line switch for e-speak where you can change the rate.
And I actually do that for one of my commands, the one where I tell it to do the random Shakespeare insult.
There's a Shakespearean insult page where they give you all the text strings and you choose a noun, another way.
No, an adjective, an adjective and a noun.
And so I have a script that will randomly choose from each one of these categories and then put them all together and pipe it through e-speak.
And I actually have it do it slower than default because it was just too fast to understand it.
I don't remember what it.
What does that look like?
Where is that command?
Oh, I actually put that was complicated enough where I put it in its own script.
Some of these things, I will write out the whole series of commands in a single line in the config file.
And once they get complicated enough, I'll put it in a separate script.
In their own script?
Just to keep the config file looking halfway tidy.
Let's try it.
Insult me will.
How important it, multi-minded baggage.
The importantly, monkey-minded baggage or something?
I don't know.
It's really hard to understand.
Oh, here's one that I...
If he doesn't respond to me soon enough and I'm not sure whether it's working right, I'll ask him this.
Are you listening?
Yeah.
Yeah.
John, you're talking to your computer.
It's true.
I am talking to my computer.
It's a good thing I drove over here so we can have a little bit of human interaction.
Yeah, I mean...
He was just sitting in the corner with a computer and a feeble fetal position.
He always answers me, but sometimes he doesn't.
He's my best friend.
I'll ask things in my kids and they just keep on playing their games or reading their books.
They won't even acknowledge me.
So by the way, I've just made a slight breakthrough yesterday regarding Blather.
And that was to get a working installation script for Debian-based systems that will install every build dependency you need
and grab the source code for sphinx and pocket sphinx.
Those are the back ends that Blather works on.
And it'll build those and put the libraries in the right place.
So it's like a Deb?
It's a shell script.
I don't know how to make a Deb.
It's probably a few steps away.
Yeah, I think it probably is.
For now, I'm just going to use the script, I think, until I've had a few people test it and make sure that everything...
I tested it on a virtual machine using a brand new CrunchBang installation and it worked.
Who does somebody package his Debs?
I think it was P-Squid.
It was a P-Squid?
If you could figure that out and then just shoot this up to Chronome.
Chronome only might just throw it in the repo.
Yeah, maybe.
Yeah, that could go in the CrunchBang repo, but not the Debian one, I don't think.
Well, I mean...
Eventually could get into Debian.
Once Jonathan Nato and his bunch are behind it, they might be able to get some of these things in an actual repo.
I think we'll see.
Very cool.
Yeah, so what else do we have to talk about here?
I don't know.
We should have been recording the whole day because we've been talking at a diner and talking on the walk-over and the walk-back and stopping at the guitar center.
So I could do it along some guitars.
Yeah, what guitars did you play there?
I played a Fender Telly, a Martin, like a $3,000 Martin, that was quite nice.
Love that.
Gretchen, which didn't sound as good as I thought it should, but...
Yeah, this...
There's Fenders coming out of...
This is not technical at all.
There's Fenders coming out of China right now called Classic Vibe or something.
Everybody says the next item are great, so I just wanted to pick one up and try it and it's not too bad.
Yeah, I just don't know if I wouldn't.
Yeah, that's my stop.
I wanted it to stop listening just in case while I'm not demonstrating, I'm just going to let it be.
So you've actually built guitars, too, though.
Yeah, I'd consider doing some kind of HPR thing about what it's like to build guitar and...
After you did the bike one, I realized this.
I could have stepped through all the pictures for that...
Yeah, that 52 Black Guard I did a while ago.
Yeah, that's something to keep in mind, yeah.
That would be cool, because you had a good suggestion about how to kind of get started in it.
It was just to buy one of those fairly inexpensive kits.
Yeah.
There are only a couple hundred bucks.
Well, there's two ways, and it's kind of like you did with the bike.
I would buy beta guitars out of a garage sale or something.
It didn't matter if you screwed it up.
Yeah, and you might end up throwing...
This was years and years back, so...
Just try and learn how to refrat something and then level the frets and buff them out.
It was step by step slowly getting up to restoring and...
By the time you're restoring a guitar, you might as well just get some tools and start building them,
because the rest is just cutting stuff out, so...
I'm making it sound easy, but it's been a long...
15, 20-year hobby, so...
But it's fun.
Computers and guitars, those are my hobbies.
So what guitars have you built?
A couple of...
Martin Dreadnott's size, triple O size...
That 52 black card that you saw, you probably saw it back in the L.O. days...
Yeah.
...under 52 black cards.
So I wanted to try and as closely recreate the classic first solid body that came out.
That was a fun project.
Five string bass for my brother.
Trying to think of the other ones.
A lot of restoring.
Just...
It keeps me off the streets.
Yeah, what do you find as the hardest part of those projects?
Finishing.
Yeah, I was about to say that's the part that would probably get me the ansiest,
because I just want to play the darn thing.
I mean, actually applying the finish and buffing it out, yeah, that's...
That seems so.
I've never liked doing that kind of thing, so when that part of my bike project came along,
I mean, I could have tried to do my own paint job,
but I actually looked up on YouTube and various other places.
How do you paint your bike yourself?
And there were very detailed descriptions of how you do it,
but they all involved so much prep and such tedious,
you know, coat after coat in just the perfect circumstance.
So that has to wait to dry for however many days.
Yes, yeah, only a couple of times.
I just didn't want to pull this.
Another thing with it too is how...
You need the proper equipment.
If you try and fudge it with like a spray paint can,
or it's not going to come out right,
so you just...
A lot of it is having the right equipment,
and how often are you going to finish on something?
So you don't really want to spend the thousand dollars on a spray rig,
but...
Yeah.
What you did?
No, I think...
My wife's sitting here.
No, I did not.
It was $440.
It's a...
Evilax or something like that?
The compressor's in the bottom, the paint's in the top,
and it's got the hose.
It's kind of like a portable rig,
but it's...
Look on her face as well.
Yeah.
There's my money.
There's her money, and there's our money.
I used our money for the spray kit.
Oh, no.
Yeah, when I did the 52 Blackguard,
I wanted to put real lacaron,
which was what they used back in the day,
and I needed to buy a gun, finally, so...
I bought a spray gun.
I'm...
Mrs. Whiteville.
Did you know about that?
You want to see it when we go?
It's just coming out now.
Do you remember driving...
What's the other stuff in the face?
See, once you get enough junk down there,
they won't notice if one more thing is added.
This thing's up in the cloud.
Do you remember coming home last summer or something
in the garage stunk?
Yeah.
Because I was doing lacquer,
and lacquer is very...
It's...
If you don't wear masks and stuff,
it'll burn your lungs.
So I would do it while she's at work
and then open all the garage doors,
bring the guitar stuff down in the basement to cure.
And I love this.
So...
Oh, what did you buy without telling me?
I think you have a $440 credit to go buy something.
Nice.
Did you hear the part where I was talking to my dad about how...
I asked him, you know,
how did you get this?
Yes.
I asked my mom.
I didn't tell her.
Well, I didn't ask her.
I just...
Oh man, my mom is a saint.
See, if anybody's still listening this long,
this is a very good husband and wife thing.
Just don't say anything.
Yeah.
That is really funny.
You're going to have to talk louder.
All right.
Well, I think...
Here's what I think you ought to do, Bill,
is...
You ought to do at least one or more of those guitar construction
or refurbishing kind of things,
and then play a little bit on the...
Oh!
...to see how it sounds.
I mean, you don't have to play me like, you know,
check it out.
I did it.
I mean, you just play chord or something.
Yeah.
I suppose I could.
I just don't know.
I didn't know how well it would translate to our geeky crowd.
I mean, I know construction and the research that goes into it and, you know,
figuring out all exact measurements is quite geeky,
but it just seemed to me that,
unless someone was inclined to work or into the guitars.
But you did want to, on a recumbent bike,
and how narrow is that niche?
And I enjoyed it.
I mean, a couple of people have given compliments.
Maybe it's some freaking narrow.
I mean, there are a couple of bike nerds who reached out and said that was really great,
but I think a lot of people enjoyed it.
I love how-tos.
Like, just about anything.
Like, how to do something well, you know.
I like watching people do stuff if it's interesting.
If the process is interesting,
then I like hearing about how to do it.
I think that would be a really interesting episode.
Have you ever visited the page on the HPR website that says,
will my topic be of interest to hackers?
No, I just do things.
Can I put them out there?
Okay.
People can click fast forward.
No, you have to look at this page.
Okay.
Okay, we're going to go to the hacker public radio.
Hey, where is it?
It's under a contribute?
Does it just say yes?
Yeah.
If that seems like it.
Where is it?
This is the sound of scrolling the text path.
That's great.
This is a good radio here.
Oh.
Oh, forget it.
Where is it?
It just goes to a page that says, yes.
Just put out a show.
Please.
It was a dedicated HTML page was just like a giant word, yes,
an exclamation point.
So, yeah, you should definitely record that.
I would definitely love to hear that.
And I know there are a surprising number of Linux enthusiasts
who also play the guitar or just really interested in music.
Yeah.
It seems to kind of go hand in hand a little bit.
I think it's the inquisitive spirit of not just wanting to use a computer
but figure out how it works.
Not just wanting to hear music, but figure out a play that's kind of
altized in in my head.
It does.
It doesn't mind, too.
Well, have we missed any topics here?
Not that I know of.
We didn't even have topics to start with.
We didn't have any topics to start with.
We didn't have any topics to start with.
We didn't have any topics to start with.
We didn't have any topics to start with.
We didn't have any topics to start with.
We didn't have any topics to start with.
No, we didn't even have topics to start with.
No, we didn't have topics to start with.
This is all the customs.
This is a free form here.
Do you want to do the dreaded pause?
And then that's when we have to wrap it off?
The awkward pause.
I don't suppose we have to have an awkward pause.
It was kind of nice when...
I always take them out, but they always happen.
When Jesper and I had the awkward pause, I left it in there.
Yeah.
Because right in the middle of it, he said, awkward pause.
That is so Jesper.
One of these days, we're all going to have to get in the room.
Jes, you got to drive to New York.
I'm sorry.
Yeah, I think we should descend on Petaluma.
Oh, that sounds cool.
Let's go to California.
I like the sound of that.
Well, Bill, awfully nice of you to drive all the way down here.
Yeah, no problem.
We've been talking about this for a few years and just finally made it happen this time.
Yeah, so it's not too awful far.
It was two and a half hour drive or so.
Two and a half hours on a Sunday.
I don't know if during the week, getting this close to the city.
Well, I wouldn't ask you to come down there.
No, I'm just saying it would probably add a couple hours to the drive.
But Sunday, the traffic's not bad.
Yeah, two and a half hours.
I appreciate you all coming down here.
Oh, it's cool. It's nice to finally meet you.
We practically impossible for me to come up there except for...
I don't know.
I think I'd planned it out where if I took the train from the large month station into town
and got on some other train or on the big blue bus or whatever.
The super bus?
Yeah, there is a bus that runs out of Albany and then the train would go into Rensselier,
which is not too far.
There's a Rensselier station.
It would have been probably a four hour or so or deal.
The train tends to take longer.
You avoid the traffic, but it seems to be just about the same as driving at time wise.
But you get to kick back and read a book.
But I don't have a car here.
And so the part that would make it add time is having to go into Grand Central Station first
and then I guess go over to Penn Station or whatever.
Yeah, you're probably on local lines and you have to get to a major line that would go up towards Albany.
This is the Metro North Railway here and I think it goes to somewhere...
Connecticut, maybe?
It goes to Palman.
It says, I don't think it knows.
It says, I don't think it knows.
I think it knows.
Oh yeah, that's great.
We just started the round.
We marked...
We might cut this part out.
Look, we're just like...
We're channeling our early days where in the Linux Outlaws forms,
We would just immediately derail threats.
Yes.
Yeah.
I thought about it years later, I don't want to say self-police, but the people that would
end up in the Linux Outlaws forums ended up being all the same type of person.
Because if they weren't like us, they just get bored and go away.
So that core 40 or 50 of us that all had the same mindset and the same sense of humor,
we just all ended up being fast friends.
So that was an interesting way to meet people online.
Now I still do, but they were so concentrated then that we're all in the same form.
The social networks I'm finding are not so social because there's a hundred of them
with 30 people in each one.
It seems like we're getting spread out these days.
Yeah, we're getting a little bit spread out.
One of the things I don't like about certain timelines, I suppose.
It seems like the reason I left Google Plus, first of all, I was trying to dig Google
quite a little bit, but also because it seemed like 90 or 95% of my timeline was
people just linking to stuff.
Yeah, reposts and stuff.
There was no conversation.
That's what they asked for.
Conversations.
Yeah, no conversation.
That's what they asked for ended up being that way for me.
I find this interesting and they post an article.
Yeah, check this out and then here's a link.
That kind of thing is just not interesting to me.
I was looking to see on the timeline here if anyone had responded to...
Oh, our earlier dent.
Actually, I think we may be not using the identicals or the twitters.
I don't know if there's supposed to be a conversation medium where a conversation
goes on for days or weeks.
I think they were supposed to be...
I'm having lunch or...
Yeah.
Well...
Hey, we've been...
Yeah, we've been to our ways.
That's what hackers do, man.
They use things how they want to, how best suits them.
And not necessarily the way they originally intended to be used.
All right, Bill, let's call it a day here, at least for the purpose of this recording.
I don't know how long we went, but...
Yeah, it was quite a while.
We can see how long it was 52 minutes, 53 minutes now.
If we cut out the coffee making and the beeps.
Yeah, well, just play it at 1.5 times speed and then suddenly you're down to about 38 minutes.
I will talk slower.
Don't do that.
All right, we're checking out.
All right, see you later, guys.
Bye, everybody.
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Oh, do we have an official photographer?
Yeah.
Yeah, take pictures.
Oh, I just said your name on HPR.
Take pictures, Mrs. N.Y. Bill.
We can...
These are the first ones.
We haven't really stood.
Yeah, I have something just like that.
I think I heard that my coffee has done something.
Okay, step out for half a step here.
The photographer is still...
Photographer ring.
How many pictures did you take?
Yeah, I did.
Have to get the chance for the chance.
Oh, you're...
People are going to hear that chitchat if they leave it in.
Let's Mrs. N.Y. Bill giggling now.
Oh, I'm just giggling.
Hmm?
Oh, I'm just giggling.
You can just say hello.
Okay, so now I just got a bunch of Mrs. N.Y. Bill giggles in there.
If they stay, yeah.
That's cool.
Well, what have you heard it?
Is this yours?
No.
I say yes.
I don't want to make a big bang on that recording by putting my coffee just in.