hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr2021.txt

Episode: 2021
Title: HPR2021: HPR Community News for April 2016
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2021/hpr2021.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 13:29:44

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This is HBR episode 2021 entitled HBR Community News for April 2016 and is part of the series
HBR Community News.
It is hosted by HBR volunteers and is about 92 minutes long.
The summary is HBR Community News for April 2016.
This episode of HBR is brought to you by an honesthost.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HBR15.
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Hello everybody, this is Hacker Public Radio Community News for April 2016.
My name is Dave Morris and tonight I have with me John Culp.
Hi John.
Hey everybody.
Hey Dave.
Ken Fallon is away on holiday just now, which I'm sure he very much deserves.
So he's not really able to join us tonight.
So we're just going to have to muddle through John.
We're just going to have to try our best.
Well I think we can probably manage you and I both done this as side kicks a number of times.
And I've listened to enough of them where we know the format.
I think so.
Give it a go.
I think we'll manage.
I think we'll manage.
So yeah so tonight we're going to talk about start off with the way we normally do things which is to talk about the new hosts this month.
And we've had two new hosts and they are Joe and Brian.
So some nice easy names to deal with this time.
So that's a lot guys.
Yeah indeed.
Always very very happy to see new HPR hosts coming on.
Right so let's get into the shows this month.
And we're starting with showed 2000 which is a good nice round number.
And this was some show.
This just happened to coincide with the first of April strangely enough.
We had a very interesting show from Ken.
It seemed to involve him dying of fairly nasty death at the end of it apparently.
That was pretty funny.
There was quite a wind that was blowing that you could hear in the microphone there.
Yes.
I wish he'd do a show on how he made that show.
I don't think he mentioned it on the community news.
No because we wouldn't have talked about it last week.
So yeah.
He really was on the roof he told me.
So it wasn't just you know he wasn't holding the microphone in front of a fan or something.
Now it sounded like he was out there right in the middle of everything.
You know what cracks me up about this episode?
It seems like with Ken.
Either you get an episode that's about two minutes long or one that's pushing two hours.
He certainly is.
Yeah he really went to town on this one didn't he?
It's an enormous show in terms of notes and everything.
It's brilliant.
Yeah it was pretty amazing.
I got to say that a lot of it went flying right over my head and I've never had a satellite dish or used one.
So I didn't really understand a lot of this thing or and I'm not able to put it to any practical use.
But I found it interesting to hear somebody who really knows the subject just will go.
Yeah.
It was quite fascinating.
Just how all this stuff works and how they manage to point that particular areas and point away from them as well.
I think Ken mentioned.
You know there's a lot of politicking going on about who feeds which community and all that sort of stuff from the satellites.
Yeah.
This was pretty amazing.
I mean I don't know that I can comment at all on the content of it but his show notes are phenomenal with pictures and links and all kinds of stuff.
Yes.
And then we have comment.
Do you want to say anything about the content before we get to the comments?
No I don't think so.
I think you've summed it all up there.
There's some brilliant work in there.
It's really quite a fascinating content and we had the bit of theater at the end.
It was great.
Which I thought was very well nicely done.
So yeah we had to do you want to start on the comments and John?
Sure.
Comment number one by Mike Ray.
I tried very hard to resist this but after about 72 hours here goes.
Oh no.
Ken's fallen off the roof.
Fallen off the roof.
Mike.
Mike what are you doing to us?
Oh that was really bad.
Ken's fallen off the roof.
I suppose Ken did ask for that sort of joke.
Anyway yes and Drupes giving a comment as well.
He said very good.
I appreciate you recording this awesome show and for keeping this whole thing going for so long.
Outstanding work everyone.
And that's relevant because Ken had originally promised to do that.
Do the show way way back as he said in the show itself.
So that was under Drupes' watch of HPR or its predecessors.
Very nice.
I'm glad he's still around to notice that Ken has finally followed through on this.
This is comment number three by Frank.
Absolutely fascinating.
Wait I think I just saw Ken flying overhead.
To which Ken responded beep beep beep beep beep.
This Ken in orbit.
That's a low flying Ken whizzing past.
Yeah great.
Very nice.
Thank you Ken for that excellent show.
So the next show is 2001 which was the last community news.
So we'll just skip over that.
Probably skip that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We did get a hooker joining us on that show which was nice.
We haven't heard from him for a while.
So 2002 was Swift 110 who was talking about Raspberry Pi Zero that he acquired.
I don't even know exactly what a Raspberry Pi Zero is but it sounds like I need to get one.
Is this one?
It's like a super super cheap Raspberry Pi.
Yes.
It's even cheaper than the others.
It's about four pounds in the UK.
So I think maybe four or five dollars in the state something like that.
And it's very much a good one.
Yeah.
Yeah.
If you can find one you should grab one I think.
It's about half the size of a full size Raspberry Pi.
Maybe a little smaller than that actually.
I have one but I've not used it yet.
Yeah.
It's equivalent to the original Pi A series.
So it's so in terms of it specs me.
Yeah.
It's a bit of the processor and memory and other type of stuff.
But it's got far fewer connectors on it.
It doesn't have full size USB.
It doesn't have an ethernet port.
And no wireless or anything like that.
You know what?
Maybe I won't get one.
I think I'd rather get the newer Raspberry Pi that's got the deep your specs and stuff.
Yeah.
The Pi 3 is really cool.
But if you're thinking of getting another Pi, getting a Pi, then that's probably one to grab I think.
I think what I would like to do eventually is to put the server that I use for my online class at school.
I'd like to have that migrated over to a Raspberry Pi.
Right now it's running on an old HP tower that one of my faculty gave me when he cleaned out his closet.
And it's, I mean, it's a very solid reliable server.
But I really think a Raspberry Pi would suffice for what we need.
Yeah.
And I think the new three is a great, great machine for that, that type of job.
I've set, I put one as well.
And that's, I'm in the process of setting it up to do that very thing.
Run, run as a server runs a headless, headless server.
So.
Yeah.
I don't need it to do much.
I would just get the engine X web server running on it and basically let it go.
Put some files on there and I basically need a, a stable place to keep media files that I reference in my online class.
Cool.
Well, as it happens, there's a show in the queue for next month, done by some guy who's talking about how he bought Raspberry Pi 3 and then put an SSD on it to attack the server.
So.
Would that be you?
I wouldn't listen to it personally as it will be rubbish.
I look forward to that one.
So there was one comment on this posted by Ken Fallon.
He says, I'm so jealous.
I've been looking for one since they came out and they're all sold out.
I checked the dimensions and they seem like they seem to fit into a cement tin.
I think that's a brand name of.
Yeah.
I think so.
It's like an Altoids or one of those types of tens.
Yeah, he says no idea what I'd use it for, but that's not the point.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I spoke like a true hacker.
I understand.
I just think too.
I've got one as well.
It's not, it's not come out of the wrapper yet, but yeah.
Yeah.
You really need to be watching the sites that sell them quite closely to see when they have new stock in.
Seems like you could probably set up an alert on it.
I know it plays like eight of fruit industries.
I think you can set up an alert.
You give them your email address and they'll ping you as soon as they get more in stock.
Yeah.
That's exactly what I did, actually.
I used one of the UK people called Pimironi and they ever tell me email me when you've got stock in.
That's how I managed to get one.
Makes sense.
I might do that.
Anyway.
I might not.
I might get the pi-3.
I would.
Yeah.
Personally, the pi-3 seems to be more useful unless you have a specific need for a very small machine.
That you can make into a robot or some other device, you know.
Now, that's not what I wanted for.
I want it for a web server.
I wouldn't go for a pi-0 for that personally.
Anyway, just a comment on the show.
Swift 110 had found a Raspberry Pi or more or more or less by accident when he was at microcenter.
And so he picked up all of the various bits of it and was telling us about them and unwrapping them in real time as he was recording sounded like.
He promised a photo, but we never got a photo, which is a shame.
But maybe he can send that one into us.
You know, I've never had that experience of running into something like that at a brick and mortar store.
No.
Me neither.
Me neither.
He's quite lucky, wasn't he?
Yeah.
I mean, I know that over here we have a series, like a chain of stores called RadioShack that they do have something like they've got
what are they?
Arduino components and stuff like that.
But I don't think I've ever seen a Raspberry Pi or any type of Pi at one of those places.
No.
I think most of the, they, they did exist in the UK.
They, they, for some reason or no, they weren't called RadioShack.
They were called Tandy in the UK.
It's the same.
Oh, right.
It's the name of...
The name of...
Yeah.
Yeah.
But I don't think there's many of them around anymore now.
So the company's gone out of business at one point, didn't it?
Well, I think it did go bankrupt, although they're still in business here, but it seems like they've gone away from their traditional business model of supplying parts to tinkerers to more things like selling cell phones and stuff like that.
Oh, okay.
Okay.
Yeah.
You can still go there and buy resistors and switches and parts, but I think that's not really their main deal anymore.
Yeah.
I've certainly bought those sorts of things from them in the past when they were in the UK, but...
Yeah.
Okay.
Okay, moving on then.
Show 2003 was...
Be Yeezy.
It's a good name, that.
Yeah.
Using the InCron file-watching demon.
Oh, I thought this was really cool.
I've never heard of this before, but it sounds really, really good.
I've actually installed it on my devin system to try it out, but I haven't actually started using it yet.
But it looks like it's got a lot of possibilities.
Did you check this one out yourself, John?
I installed it like you, and I thought for a little while of what I wanted.
It seems like I had a use case for it, and when it didn't work immediately,
it's one of those things where I had to go to work the next day, and then by the end of the day,
I completely forgot about it, and I haven't even thought about it until right now when we're doing this show.
And I don't remember what I was going to use it for.
Yeah.
I've got this mechanism I set up, but people can send in updates to the summaries and tags on the HBR shows.
And just as an aside, we got somebody who sent some in this week, which is very nice.
But I was thinking of maybe making it do an alert based on the arrival of an email or something like that.
But I don't know, I don't know.
That's the first thought anyway.
It's definitely something I want to try out.
I'm going to keep a bookmark on this page, I think, or just remember that he did this episode,
because I'm sure I will have a reason to use this.
The basic idea is that it keeps an eye on certain files, and if they either change or suddenly appear, then an action is taken.
Correct.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I think it's using the file systems capabilities to do this.
I'm not quite clear what level of thing it's using.
Some sort of kernel event or something like that, maybe.
But yeah, it looks pretty powerful in terms of what it can do.
So just a case of you attaching something clever to the end of it, I guess.
Yeah, you know, this sort of thing is something that I could have used.
In an episode of mine that's coming up next month, I talk about remapping the space bar key to make underscores.
And what I, this is an idea that my son had that whenever a dialogue box, like a saved dialogue box is open on your computer to have the space bar automatically remapped so that it makes underscores.
So that way people couldn't put spaces in their file names.
But what I, what I don't know how to do is to have some kind of Damon running that will kind of check all the time and see if a saved dialogue box is open.
And this is different. I mean, this, this has to do with the creation and changing of files, but it seems to me a similar, I don't know, a similar concept of always keeping an eye on for something.
And then once it sees it, it does something.
Well, it certainly sounds if you could set it running on a director. I think it's got a directory mode, hasn't it?
And then you can, if anything gets written in there that is a name with spaces in it, presumably you could have something that's run that, that just does a conversion into, into underscores, something of that sort.
Oh, you could do that. I actually have a script that will take all the files in a directory and rename the ones that have spaces in their file names and to have underscores instead.
But that, that was a long time ago. I wrote this one. And as you'll see in my episode next month, we probably shouldn't get ahead of ourselves, but I have a voice command now that will remap the space bar so that it makes underscores.
And then I speak another voice command that remaps it back the way it's supposed to go.
Very cool. Yes. Yeah.
It's pretty fun.
There's, there's going to be many ways that one could have approached this.
The incon one might be worth checking out at least.
There is a comment here by Ken Fallon. It's almost like he's on the show here with us, even though he's not here.
I think he anticipated his absence and has been rushing through putting comments on everything.
He says installing this now. I want to monitor an FTP location.
And once new XML files are there, it triggers a parser to extract data and put it into a database, which can then be queried over the web.
Basically turning a file-based interface into a web enabled one. Great tip. Thank you.
Yeah. Absolutely. He's, he's very right, isn't he? Yeah. Good show.
Right. Next then was NY Bill 2004 show number who was talking about the O1B35T.
It first looked at this device. What did you?
This is the one. Sorry. This is the, he's doing this whole series of inexpensive multi meter reviews.
And this is the one that has Bluetooth. That's right. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. It sounded most interesting. I did go and check it out to see if I could see, you know, if it could be bought in the UK.
Because sometimes these things can't easily be obtained. And yeah, I could get one from China on eBay, I found.
I haven't even looked to see. I mean, I have a multi meter and I barely know how to use the most basic things on the one I have.
And so I don't think it would really benefit me much to try out these things that he's talking about.
No, it's good to know what's out there, though. NY Bill did it, did some shows on other multi meters.
And the one he mentioned, particularly was the UniT, UNI's hyphen T. Right.
And I, that sounded really good. So I've actually got one of those.
I again found it in Hong Kong or China or somewhere and got it for quite a good price.
So yeah, I'm really, I'm still learning mine. Just all learning how to use it. I'm not very skilled at it.
But at least I've got a good multi meter. So yeah. Thanks. Thanks for these in my bill.
Absolutely. That sounds like the kind of thing that when I'm in my retirement, maybe I'll go to the local community college and take a course on this.
Like using tools like this and understanding basic electronics.
Absolutely. Yes. Yes. There's, there's many a new thing one can learn that's in retirement.
I can speak for that. I don't have time right now.
No, no, no, no. You have to wait till you, till you get to that, that exalted age.
There are several comments for this one. Of course, Ken Fallon starts us off. He says, great episode.
It's like it's not for sale anymore. Anyway, I was wondering why you would daisy chain two meters.
To which NYU bill said, Americanisms, I'm not sure where we got the term.
I think he was, he was thinking that Ken was querying the term daisy chain might be an Americanism.
Just guessing here, but hippies in the six years would make necklaces out of daisies, tying the stems in loose.
I think the term made it into the lexicon as to chain together, link up one after another.
In electronic terms, it just means in series. So until you asked, I'd never thought of it, he says.
That sounds like about as good of explanation as I've ever heard of it.
Absolutely, yeah, yeah. So do you want to read the next one?
Dave Morris says not an Americanism to my knowledge.
The chain is used in the UK too. I've made them from the real daisies. Have you really?
Oh, yeah, yeah. I was brought up in the country. So yeah, we did that sort of thing.
You said, I've made them as a kid sometime before the hippie era.
You split the stem with a fingernail, part way along such that it makes a loop and stick the head of the next daisy through it.
I had a fairly, fairly rural upbringing. Looking on eBay, I can see one of these meters for $61 around 43 pounds from Hong Kong.
How about a unity on eBay from China after hearing your earlier shows and I'm very happy with it. It was around 30 pounds.
I'm curious, when you bought this unity thing from China, did it take more than a month for it to arrive to you?
No, it was fairly quick, actually. I don't remember. It took longer than buying something from the UK, but not a lot.
A couple of weeks maybe. That sort of time.
I guess the UK is a lot closer to China than America is. I thought everything I bought from China has taken at least a month.
And the last thing was one of those Jinhao pins.
Oh, yes.
And that took well over a month.
I think it depends on all sorts of factors. Maybe, you know, because they make up a container of stuff, don't they?
And then send it over and get really, really heavy discounts on the shipping.
So maybe the electronic stuff comes over more often or something. I don't really know.
I don't either.
I've certainly had the same experience with long delays, but in this case, it's pretty quick.
Well, normally the long delay is more than made up for by the bargain price.
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
Anyway, go on. Shall I do the next comment?
Why don't you do the next comment?
Yeah, having made you do my comment.
Ken Fallon says, why not what?
Why would you daisy chain two meters together? What's the use case to do that?
Remember, some of us beginners, so you need to explain the obvious points.
Exactly. That's what I would have asked as well. So NY Bill responds.
By the way, for those of you who don't know, NY Bill is an electronics professional.
This is what he does for a living.
In my opinion, the unity is a better meter for the price, Dave.
You have a good one there.
After sending my last post, I do recall hearing daisy chain in a pink Floyd song.
I know the term is out there on both sides of the pond, referring to a chain of flowers.
Ken might have been asking why I would use that term when referring to two electronic devices.
Yeah, it looks like he might have done this post before he saw Ken's message.
It's just another term meaning in series, one hook together after another.
Ken, you could have one meter reading current amps and a second meter reading the voltage.
Or one reading voltage and a second reading frequency.
I see what he says.
Or if you're some nutter who happens to own like six meters, you could do it just because you can.
What? What do you mean by the even I go after that?
I would guess so. I would guess so, yes.
Very nice.
Yeah, I was wondering as well why you would chain two meters together,
but it's pretty obvious that you could do that.
I just feel like I've won if I can manage to measure one thing.
Oh, absolutely. Yes, yes. I'm not going to be buying multiple meters and chaining them together.
I can't imagine ever wanting to do that.
We should probably move on to show 2005 how I prepare and record my HP RKD in live voice over shows by Gettys.
This was pretty amazing here.
He goes through a very detailed explanation of the equipment that he uses and also the preparation,
as far as the text and everything to do a really high quality recording of an existing tech article.
Yes, it was, I thought it was a really interesting insight.
Plus also we got to understand a bit more about Gettys along the way,
which is always nice to get a picture of somebody filled out a little bit more like that.
But now, wow, doesn't he take a lot of trouble over these shows that he's doing?
There's a lot more trouble that I take. I'll tell you that.
Wow, yeah. Even the equipment looks really impressive, doesn't it?
Yeah, it does. I'm looking at the pictures right now.
The mixing board is very similar to the one I have,
although I think he said that his has a USB interface and mine doesn't.
I have a mic kind of like that audio-technical one, but not really.
I've got several microphones. I do have a Sure SM-58, like the one in the picture there.
And I've used that for a number of episodes. It sounds really good.
But maybe I've been using my $2 microphone.
Oh, right. Okay. I've got a Samsung mic that a lot of people like to use.
And I've been really happy with that, actually.
Oh, really? I'm yawning big time. Sorry about that.
Is it late for you? What's the time?
It's 1.30pm.
Right.
I should not be yawning this way, but whatever. I'm kind of tired.
Oh, tell me about it. Yeah, yeah.
Anyway, there were some comments on this one.
We had a comment from NY Bill who said, well done.
Nice job, man. It makes me want to invest in a bit of equipment.
So I don't have to keep amplifying my audio in post.
I don't see anything wrong with amplifying audio.
Well, no, no, no. It's good to do things to it if it's not just perfect.
It is nice to have a good strong signal to start with though.
You'd get a better quality.
True.
So then, Ken says, hi, get us.
I'm simply blown away by the effort you're taking with these shows.
Thanks you so much for putting in all this effort.
I think he meant to say, thank you so much for putting in all this effort.
I would think so.
Yes.
He's not going to thank me for reading his typos that way.
It's not.
It's what you get when you don't show up, Ken.
It's not very forgiving interface.
That comment thing is it's a.
I don't find it very pleasant to use personally.
Yeah, I usually have to prepare the text in my text editor first and then paste it in there.
Yeah, that's a good idea.
Yes, indeed.
Okay, so moving on then.
Shall I lead off with this one?
2006 was a show from Nacho Jordi, who says his name most delightful way that I shouldn't even try to copy.
Basic audio production compression.
He's talking about that.
So, yeah, really, really interesting.
Yeah, compression is one of the tools I use in pretty much every time I do an HPR episode.
And I don't completely understand it, but I did myself do an episode about compression once,
because I interviewed one of the adjunct faculty that we have in the school of music who is a technical person
and she explained it much the same way that he did.
I remember that.
It was Melissa Dupres.
Melissa Dupres.
Yeah, Dupres.
Yeah, yeah, I remember.
She's a professional audio engineer in the area here, works in radio and television and live sound reinforcement and stuff like that.
And she was teaching a couple of classes for us at the time, but very good with this kind of stuff.
Yeah, it's good to understand this.
And Natural Jordy is going to do a series on audio things like this.
He mentioned, he did mention a list of things he was going to do, but I've forgotten what they are now.
But yeah, it's definitely going to turn this into a series, he says.
So, I'm looking forward to hear more.
Okay, so Ken says, hi, Natural Jordy, great explanation.
I hope this is the beginning of a series.
Leave it to Ken to say.
Never miss a chance, Ken.
And that's all the comments.
Yep.
So, the next show, do you want to, do you want to leave it off with that one?
Some guy in Scotland, Mr. Dave Morris with HPR 2007 says, my new laptop.
And so, man, you won a laptop.
I did indeed, yes, yes.
It was, yeah, I mean, it's very, very happy, but also deeply embarrassed because I'm not, I just have that sort of mindset.
Oh, man, you got to just be strutting that right there.
I've never won much of anything, although one time I did win a set of tools at the credit union where I keep my money.
They had some kind of thing where you put your name in a box and then about a month later, they drew the names and I got a phone call said I'd won.
So, I got this really nice set of tools.
And actually, another time I won a folding bicycle.
Ooh, that sounds good.
It was, it was not a really nice one.
It was about a $150 bicycle, maybe, but still, it was a folding bicycle.
And I rode that for quite a while and then I started busting spokes on the rear wheel every month or so and I got tired of it.
So, I, it's hanging up in my shed right now.
Yes, oh well.
So, tell us about this laptop.
Well, it's, it's um, this company, Entraware, making laptops which are specifically designed to run Linux.
They're installing Ubuntu on it.
So, it's, it's, it's really, you know, you know that you're going to get something that's, that's a genuine Linux based machine.
And it's, it's a great little laptop.
It's, it's, there's, there's, there's extended notes where I went into more detail about it.
It's, it's an i3 based machine with early generous amount of RAM and so on and so forth.
And an SSD, it comes with an SSD.
So, it's, it's really quick.
It's, it's just, just great.
It's a lovely machine.
Are they, do they sell in the United States, you know?
I don't know.
There's always seems to be problems with these sorts of things.
I mean, I've certainly looked at system 76 at one point thinking it would be nice to buy from them, but the,
the, the cost of actually shipping it and all the customers, Jews and so forth,
completely make it impossible to, to do that, you know.
Yeah, yeah.
I'm actually considering getting a new laptop.
If it turns out that I get the promotion that I've applied for, I might celebrate by getting a system 76 machine or something.
I don't know.
I like the idea of getting the Linux preloaded laptop because I know for sure all the hardware is going to work
and I won't have to do any kind of circus tricks to get the wireless going or anything like that.
Yeah, that's often the sticking point, isn't it?
No, it's, it's a great machine like certainly, as I said in the, in the notes, certainly recommend it.
If, if anybody's in the market to, to buy one.
So, Ken responds to this episode with the comment heading suspect.
Strange that the person holding first ticket went mysteriously missing.
Very curious indeed.
To which I replied, I don't know what you're talking about.
You can't prove anything.
I left no trace.
And let's see.
Alpha 32 says another great show, Mr Morris.
How is the intro?
Where is hardware compatibility with other distros?
A very good comment.
Yeah, yeah, good, good question.
I am afraid I haven't followed that one up yet.
But yeah, in brief, I have no idea because I haven't tried other distros on it yet.
It's one of the things I have planned to do.
But I haven't, haven't actually tried.
I mean, I can just, just, just run something off, off a CD or something.
I'm sure of a USB, a live version of something to see, see how it gets on.
But yeah, I will, I will.
Does it have an optical drive?
It does, yeah, yeah.
Oh, it does open.
Yeah.
Which is, that's nice.
I'm surprised.
Didn't think modern laptops came with such things.
My son got a laptop recent.
Is this the right button push?
I've forgotten which button I'm putting.
Yeah, you're good.
Am I talking?
Oh, man.
Somehow, I forgot whether I had the menu or the alt, the right alt button for speaking.
But yeah, my son's laptop is a very large physically, but it doesn't have an optical drive in it.
And I guess it's to make it thinner, like in profile.
And so, like right now, I think my laptop that's about five years old is the only one in the house that's got an optical drive.
Yeah, this tendency towards ultra thin laptops is driven out the optical drive.
My daughter has a, has a Dell Inspiron, I think, fairly recent.
And she got an optical driver there.
But it's a, it's a, it's a chunky, chunky ear machine, I think.
So, yeah, it proves the point.
Well, I spent $15 and got a USB optical drive that I can plug into anything.
So, I guess that solves that.
Yeah, I'm sure a lot of people do that, but it's quite nice to have one built in if you can.
I agree.
But I wouldn't, yeah, it wouldn't, it wouldn't destroy my, my life I've got one without.
Right.
Anyway, shall we move on?
Yeah.
So, Ken puts out the periodic plea for shows in HPR 2008.
It says, do not listen to this show.
Record one instead.
Well done.
Yes.
Then there are numerous comments here.
Well, somebody, right.
Oh, wait, I've got one of my own comments coming up here.
Should I read that or should you read it?
I'm completely up to you.
Why don't you read the first one?
I'll get the first one.
It's from zero X F one zero.
You know, I should be able to say that in a more fluent way, but I never can.
Is it Oxflow?
I don't think so.
He's never come back and said he or she has never come back to say to tell us that different
answer.
We've stumbled over this one before.
Anyway, this person says, but Ken, I can listen to HPR and prepare my lunch at the same time,
but I can't record a show and cook at the same time.
To which I reply, sure you can.
Why not?
I recorded shows while walking to work, while riding my bike to work, while fixing the car, while
driving the car, surely you can record a show while you cook.
All you have to do is clip the $2 microphone to your lapel, plug it into your phone, put the
phone in your back pocket, hit record, and start talking while you cook.
Easy.
Well, that's actually true.
I did one where I recorded making coffee, and I did that with Sansa Clip, which is, you
know, Clip on your lapel.
So yeah, yeah.
It's, yeah, you can do it.
You can do it.
In fact, it would be a lot of fun to have more of those such shows I enjoy.
Hearing, you know, the sort of ambit noises of stuff as people do that.
Seriously, everybody who records on HPR, you owe it to yourself to buy like the $3
pack of $2 microphones, and just like always have one.
And the Clip dear lapel you can record, it's got a little tiny windscreen.
So like in the episode that where I'm riding my bicycle, I mean, I'm riding probably 15 to 18
miles an hour and the wind is blowing, but it still sounds fine.
And hopefully no one will ever hear that episode because if they do, that means that the
queue has gotten so dangerously low that we've had it dip into the emergency shows.
But, yeah.
So that doesn't happen.
Yeah, yeah.
Now I agree.
I actually bought some of those on your recommendation.
You can get them in the UK.
You can't remember what Amazon I think I probably bought it from.
Yeah.
And Dave from the bug cast also bought some.
And he said they were, he used him at his church, I think, for replacing some lapel
mics that had broken, that it cost $40 a piece or something.
And he said these sound just a good, if not better.
Yeah, good, good.
Yeah, I remember him saying that on his show.
Yeah.
So there you go.
In fact, my daughter was so impressed that she's taken one away.
She was nice.
That's what happens when you have kids, isn't it?
But, yeah.
So the last comment on this one was Ken Fallon saying, thanks.
Thanks to everyone that submitted shows.
We still have hundreds of free slots to fill.
Keep the shows coming and keep sending out the message that we need.
Contributors.
So this, this show actually did generate quite a lot of responses.
And a goodly number of people step forward and recorded shows.
And we have a few.
And a couple of new people too.
Indeed.
We have several new people in the, in the queue for, for next month.
So we'll, we'll be talking about them when next month comes along.
But, yeah, we got a great response.
But, as Ken points out, it's, it's wonderful to get that response when you put out such a plea.
But, it's a, it's a constant flow that we need.
Because, you know, there's a, there's a new day every day and a new week every week, you know.
And it takes a, it takes a lot of shows to, to fill, to fill all of the slots.
260 odd per year is what we need.
So yeah, the way I've, I mean, I contributed probably 30 shows last year or something.
And it's just a matter of getting into the habit of doing a show whenever you're doing something interesting.
Or if you've just learned something, just share it.
Write some notes, record it and pull it up there.
Yeah.
So there'll be any kind of perfection or anything.
No, no, no, no, there's lots of things you can, you can do, as you say, as you just go in a long.
You're talking about your, your general daily life.
It's a good technique to adopt if you can.
So yeah, yeah, just, and you start thinking of things.
Oh, that thing I'm about to do, or I just did, I could talk about that on an, on an HPR.
And, you know, it, once you start thinking that way.
It's remarkable how many shows come to, come to mind.
Yeah, I, I just prompted you yesterday to record one.
When he posted a picture on his timeline of a sheep feeder that he just built to feed the sheep.
The sheep that he's got wandering around his property.
So I said, okay, if you built this, you've got to do a show about it.
Oh, very good, very good.
I saw that message as well.
And was thinking pretty much the same thing that I hadn't got around to say anything yet.
Well, if he's going to do one about his chicken coop, then he's got to do one about the sheep feeder too.
Absolutely, absolutely.
That's a series right there, like barnyard animal series or something.
Oh, absolutely, yes.
Whatever you call it, small holding or something of that sort.
Cool, very cool.
So, HPR 2009, understanding the GNU screen hard status line.
CEPROMP talks about how he configured his GNU screen to suit his need.
Okay, so Dave, if you followed him or stood this one, I might need you to make comments.
The screen is one of those things that I'll learn it for about a day.
And then I don't use it for a while and I forget completely how to use it.
It is instantly forgetable, I find.
I do use screen all the time, actually, but I've just got a few commands sort of fixed in my head and all the other ones I forget.
But yeah, it's, it was basically talking about how to configure it using a dot screen RC config file.
And you could do this in order to configure up the, the way it function, the way it looked.
And it's, I did actually follow through this one.
I was, as I was listening, I was actually installing screen on my new Raspberry Pi 3.
Thinking, yeah, it would be cool to have it on there because, you know, it's a headless machine.
And I want to be able to just connect to it and do stuff.
I thought, well, why don't I just leave the screen session running all the time and then, you know, just just connect to it and, you know, as necessary.
So I did, I have started down the route of using it for real to administer a machine and so on and so forth.
So, you know, it's, it was good.
I thought it was a great show and it really sort of directed me anyway towards thinking more about what I'd not really considered very much before.
So that perfect HBR show really to wake up.
White people let me up.
Yeah.
I, you know, it seems like I tried screen once upon a time and then I tried Tmux after NY Build did that show about Tmux.
And I, I seem to understand and use Tmux a little bit easier.
But even that I've forgotten now because I was using it for IRC and it worked great.
But then I would just forget to check into IRC and now it's just completely slipped off the radar.
I think it's just not meant to be right.
Okay, yeah, I actually use it on my, one of my other servers, which is constantly running WeChat in a screen, screen session.
So yeah, I connect to and from that when I want to go on to IRC, but I don't very often go on there.
So it's sat there.
There's a presence.
There's a presence there that makes it look like I'm using IRC a lot and I'm not.
And then people will ping you every now and then wonder why I never write back.
Yes, I sometimes go to look and say, oh no, I got a message from NY Build or something.
Perfect.
So of course, Ken Fallon comments to this one.
Great show.
Can you send in a screenshot of the finished product, please?
Also, a general introduction slash series on screen and Tmux, etc. would be great.
Thanks for this.
Very good.
Yeah, I agree.
I agree.
It's an interesting subject.
And there's quite a lot you can do to configure stuff.
So certainly second that one.
Yep.
So what's next?
Episode 2010, parsing JSON with Python by Clato.
This was a really interesting episode.
I'm always interested in learning what you can parse with Python because I like to, I kind of suck at Python,
but what little I've done with it.
I've used some HTML parsing and find it just like magical what you can do when it works.
But I'm so bad at it that it takes me a long time to get stuff working.
Yeah, I'm not a great Python user.
I've written one or two little bits of Python.
But really, it's just using Python as a way of getting the libraries that do the thing I want to do.
But you know, this is, this is good.
And he's making the point that Jason is a, a good format for, for, for comparing all sorts of data.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it's, it's very similar to the way that a Python dictionary looks.
So, you know, the process of transferring from one to the other is a, is a relatively simple one, I think, was the point.
And absolutely, it's the, the only thing I have against Jason, which is a very small thing is that if you're giving, if you're asking somebody to put in, say, configuration data into a program, and you show them how to do it in Jason.
Sometimes they, they struggle a little bit.
And when I've done this and when I was working, I did this for some of my staffs that built some software for them and said, right, when you wanted to configure it, configure it this way.
But I used Yamol to do it, which is a more, it's a less sort of computerty type of type of interface, you know.
I've only seen Yamol a little bit and that was because Jezre uses it in the bladder configuration file, or you have an option to use a, a Yamol config thing for bladder to avoid having to put all kinds of command line options when you run the command.
Okay.
And that, that was the first time I'd ever even heard of Yamol, but it does seem very intuitive.
Yeah, I just found that it was, although it's also has its downside, you have to be very, very precise about how you line things up and how much white space you put in it and stuff.
So, you know, it's also, it's also dangerous, but it sort of seems to make more sense to people who haven't got a really dealt with computer languages, more so than Jason, just just in my limited experience comparing the two.
So, squirrel, no way, Zen Floder 2 says squirrel, glad to hear you didn't just pass away or go back to urban camping.
Frankly, I'm surprised Plasma 5 is still not ready for slack wear or anybody, but that's really no reason to go hide in a cave young man.
I don't know what he's talking about there.
Where's he going to that?
I think he's a friend of Clatu, and he hasn't seen him for a while.
Clatu's gone off to New Zealand, doesn't he?
He's probably...
I didn't know that.
Yeah, he's disappeared off the American side of the planet, at least.
As far as I can tell, nothing in this has anything to do with the episode, but maybe I just don't remember.
Well, yeah, you're right.
I think Ken's comment, you don't like X-path, is put on the wrong show because this is not about XML,
it's not about XML at all.
And I think he meant this to go on the next show, which is the one talking about the next of Clatu shows, I should say.
Just talking about parsing XML.
But he says, what, you don't like X-path?
Why, if only someone recorded a show about that?
Slash me, digs his own hole.
That's Ken talking about.
He wants to explain XML and how it works and how to work with it and all that sort of stuff,
which is a big subject, and he's a bit daunted by the size of it, as would I be.
You know, what I think is that Ken has written a script that will automatically post a comment saying that you need to write a show about some random word that was in someone else's comment.
Don't give him ideas, a goodness sake.
Yeah, you could be right.
So episode 2011, Dave Morris, introduction to said part four, is this the last in the series, Dave?
No, there's one more to come.
Oh my god.
Yeah, you actually hear this one.
I'm holding off on this, on the last one a bit, so let episode four sink in a bit.
Plus also, there's a lot of work involved in preparing these.
Now, I've not listened to these all that closely, because in part, because it seems like I'm never at a keyboard where I can actually try any of these things,
and because I trust you implicitly to make the best show notes anyone has ever done that will essentially be a textbook that I can go back and refer to when I actually need to learn it.
Well, that was really the intention, yes, yes.
Although I stopped using EPUB, which I maybe should go back to, but EPUB doesn't fit with these sorts of notes very well, does it?
Not quite sure how to solve that one, to be honest.
You do have to be careful with the examples, because they don't necessarily flow correctly.
Yeah, they tend to, if you've got a sort of 80 character line or something, then it can fall off the end of the margins and other strange things, can't it?
Yeah, sorry, yawning again.
Anyway, yes.
You have links to Introduction to Sets, Part 1, 2, and 3, and your Bash tips episode, and what else we've got comments by Be Easy says, wow, for a data analyst like myself, the application of the items covered in this episode are amazing.
May start to use SID to analyze and manipulate gene sequences.
And I said in response to that, thanks. Glad you found it useful.
I started using SID and later org at the university I worked at in the 1980s and 90s to process student record snapshots floating into our home brew identity management system.
They were great for data validation.
It cases like, why is this guy's date of birth apparently last week, which was a very, very common thing.
What is your date of birth? I don't sure whether it was a default somewhere or whether they completely confused date of birth with what was what's today's date or something.
Well, I always think that it looks like the freshman or younger and younger.
Well, that's true, yeah.
Anyway, I didn't really answer his point, but to be quite honest, I'm not sure I would use SID to do anything that complex, but he's obviously the genetics guy.
So he obviously knows better than I do.
But SID said, it's amazing, me powerful, but I wouldn't run to it for that type of thing personally.
I use SID all the time in my bladder commands for very simple substitutions and transformations of various things.
And as I go through my bladder series, I'll talk more about that, but I use it all the time.
It's a very handy tool to know at least a very basic syntax for substitutions.
Yes, indeed, indeed. It's a great thing to have in the toolkit, but it's a Swiss Army knife with about 100 blades in it and you only actually want one or two.
But in combination with AWK, it's also really power. Are you going to do AWK or someone else doing an AWK series?
I am.
There was a conversation last month about doing something on AWK, and I wouldn't mind having to go out, although it's actually a bigger subject than SID.
And there's a lot more material about, or than there is about SID, you know.
So some extent, I wouldn't want to go too deep into it because there's better, better resources out there.
But yeah, doing something on AWK would be a nice thing.
So unless somebody beats me to it, I'll do it.
I'll probably hit on AWK a little bit in my bladder series as well because I do use it occasionally.
Of course, Ken leaves a comment here, Hi Dave, another great episode.
I completely missed the dollar sign, dollar sign thing before, although I have seen it before.
Ken, although I think he, something must have happened because he did not say anything about your recording another series about something random.
I think his script has broken, yeah.
It must be.
He's, I mentioned the dollar dollar thing in this particular show.
You haven't listened to it yourself.
Just as an example, doing stuff with SID, I just threw that in there because it looked like an interesting example.
And that's the, returns the process idea of your bash process.
So you can use that as a way of making sort of random file names.
Crazy, that totally slipped by me when I was listening.
Okay, well, I'm going to cover it in the bash series at some point.
Awesome.
So we're, we're already at 53 minutes here on my recording.
So we should probably accelerate a little bit.
Yeah, okay.
Two, two episodes in a row by Klaatu about parsing XML in Python using a couple of different libraries.
One is Untangle and the other is XML to Dict.
Yeah, really nice, really good shows.
I enjoyed these a lot.
And thanks to Klaatu for stepping into the breach by the way with these shows because he was, he was very fast.
I get something to us.
Untangle.
Three shows right now.
Absolutely.
Untangle looks a little strange to my eyes, but it's a, you know, it's a way of getting, getting into a, an XML structure.
But personally, I prefer the look of XML to Dict just because it seemed to make more sense.
But, but it, I don't quite see what's wrong with x-path personally.
I have sort of understood to some extent how x-path works and have used it on an old occasion.
Don't find it too daunting, but basically there were all things trying to do the same thing,
taking a quite complex structure and walk through it to get a particular element out or put an element in for that matter.
So, you know, there's, there's many ways of doing it.
It's really down to, to taste, I imagine.
Yeah, well, the only time I've ever even seen x-path was in trying to construct various conversion,
what do I call it, regular expression commands inside of caliber, the ebook library management thing.
They use x-path for doing things like, you know, looking for certain kinds of tags
and then applying either a different tag or a class to them or something like that.
Yeah, so it's a way of expressing a path through an HTML structure or something like that, is it?
So, Ken says in response to the first of these, he says, high-clothed, can you do an introduction series on Python
and then talk about the normal XML methods as well, please.
Yeah, yeah, the script's working really well.
Exactly.
Oh, boy.
Was there a comment to 2013?
Yes, there there were two, three, two.
See it, yeah.
There was from Sigflop said, cool, cool beans.
Thanks for, thank you for making this.
So, yeah, interesting.
And Ken's script, yeah, Ken's script is, no wait, it malfunctionary.
He said, high-clothed, too, have you compared parsing times and performance
when loading large and complex XML documents?
Yeah, good question.
Ken works in XML.
Does he work in XML a lot?
Yeah, his job entails a lot of XML work, because we often have chats, because he writes stuff in Pearl as well.
So, I often have been asked to assist with certain things that he does.
So, I imagine he's, that's why it rings bells in his mind, I'm sure.
Oh, yeah.
So, then the in-white bill in episode 2014 looks at that same multimeter, and this is part two,
where if I remember right, this is where he took a break to get the Bluetooth function working,
and then he reported back with part two of the series, right?
That's right, that's my recollection as well.
Yeah, yeah.
So, yes, it was interesting.
Bluetooth on a multimeter seems like a strange and wonderful thing,
but the way Bill was describing it made it sound really, really useful.
Especially, it seems like what would be really great about that is being able to log stuff.
Yeah, I think that was his point that logging things was good,
and all you actually needed to have was this meter and a phone,
and you could do a lot of stuff out in the wild when you needed to.
So, comments?
Yeah, Mike Ray says, great show.
Great second part of this.
I love all the plasticky sounds and clicks of taking the thing apart and looking inside,
putting it back together, et cetera.
I can really imagine the work bench strung with test probes and other electronic hackery detritus.
It's my only face.
And my bill says, it's a brand new bench.
About four months ago, my wife decided she no longer wanted a four by six foot glass top desk
that was in our spare room, so I grabbed it.
The glass top would be good for hot work, soldering, hot air, et cetera.
So, I set up all my gear on it,
and made a nice clean dedicated space in the computer room for electronics work.
And then I used it.
Has been clean since.
We've all been there.
Yes, I confess, the bench desk is now how you describe it.
Strung with test gear parts and tools,
always with multiple projects going on at once.
But that's how it should be.
Yeah, I totally agree.
It sounds like a perfect desk right there.
Yeah, he's very lucky to have that sort of facility.
Yep.
So, episode 2015 by new host, Joe, Linux in the church.
Yeah, I'm slower than you, John.
I can't catch up with you.
John talks about how he uses Linux for various functions in the church that he goes to,
including audio engineering and presentation software.
I think he said he might have had to still use proprietary software for certain functions of presentation.
Yes, yes, that was my understanding too.
No, it was good to hear it being used in that,
in Linux actually being used in that sort of way.
And he was sort of convincing his friends and colleagues there to consider it as a possible.
Good for him.
Yeah, I think my dad might do a little bit of that kind of...
I know that he very frequently gets called upon to repair computers for people at his church.
And for some of them, when they've had old equipment and did not have licenses for windows,
he has suggested and even installed various flavors of Linux for them on them.
And I think it's gone okay.
But I don't know that they're actually using it for any of the functions in that church there.
No, no, it was more him sort of starting on the road to make it more available
and find openings for it, I guess, wasn't it?
Yeah.
So we had two comments on this one.
And the first one was by Jan,
said this should be positive to quite a few people.
Thanks for sharing.
Okay, can anyone guess who the second commenter was?
Anyone?
Ken Fallon says,
I Joe, great episode.
The content will hit the mark regardless of anyone's beliefs.
I'm not familiar with your church, so please feel free to record an episode on your church's history.
What it stands for, I've no doubt that that would be of interest to hackers.
Naturally, there may be people who do and do not share your views, but I'm sure it would all...
It would all get a better understanding.
Naturally, this invitation is open to all.
Reverend Ken Paster of the Church of Sendin' Morshoes.
So the script has a name now?
I see.
We see Ken working here.
In mysterious ways.
Oh my goodness.
And so the next episode, 2016, is by the guy who might have joined us today,
but was not able to echo print.
I'm sure what I've learned about the echo print music identification says,
Ah, yeah, this is one that grew out of a mailing list discussion about a month or two ago.
That's right, yes.
Ken was looking for a way to identify the intro and outro on shows that had been submitted.
And this was suggested.
I think by Lander was mentioned.
But I had a quick look at it.
Couldn't make a lot of sense out of it.
He's dug in far deeper and has made a certain degree of sense of how it does things.
I said that way because I didn't completely get what you're saying.
I need to listen to it again because it's really quite complex the way it works.
And there's a lot of pointers here he's put in the notes to how you can find out more about it, I think.
So I really need to look at these in a bit more detail.
But Sandra, like you've gone a long way to finding out how one could use this in order to identify particular bits of clips of music or whatever.
Yeah, this is something that I didn't really understand.
I mean, I'm a music professional, but not this kind of music.
I really need to run this whole idea by my music media specialist on my faculty.
And I actually intended to do that a long time ago, but I just forget it.
Yeah, it's quite a complicated business, isn't it?
It's quite mathematical and there's a lot of deep knowledge of sound and how to process it that seems we needed here.
So yeah.
It's out of my depth.
Yeah, I guess me too, yeah.
So Ken Fallon has a comment.
He says, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.
That's four thank yous.
I would have gotten lost at the first hurdle, although you may not be able to determine if the music was the HP or a theme or not.
Could you determine if there was music in a section at all?
That's a good question right there, because it seems like that would have a very different profile than speech, right?
Yeah.
So he can, he continues to say, if we cut the first three minutes from the front and end of an episode, could it check if there was music in there?
Thanks Ken.
Yeah, good question, good question.
I couldn't follow whether the fingerprint that this thing produced could actually identify whether you had music versus speech, because it's doing like little snapshots of pieces of sound as I understood it and then producing sort of hashes from what it found.
So you know, quite quite a complicated process, but I'm not clear how how you would compare one particular thing with another, but anyway, I'm just just talking about how I know.
Just just proving the point that I don't know what I'm talking about, so I should shut up.
I think we just need to trust people either to do this or not and then to say which one they did.
Yes.
Well, that's true.
Okay, episode 2017 by Cheeto4493.
Here are my thoughts on a 3D printer kit.
Oh, sweet.
I've often wanted to have a 3D printer and this guy got a kit, built it and started printing stuff and then recorded an episode.
Man, that is like the model of what an HP R listener ought to do right there.
Yeah, great episode. I enjoyed this one very much.
It's a rep rap. I think he said that that name triggered my memory and then he got this from China from Ali Express.
So yeah, it sounds and it like an interesting device and he certainly sounds as if he managed to get it together without a huge lot of trouble.
Is it quite six hours or something?
Yeah, it's not going to be so bad.
No, no, no. I think you probably have to be quite adept at the sort of mechanical stuff.
Good with your hands, I think is what he said, but you know, I'm sure many of us could have a go at such a thing.
That's something. I might consider that this summer with my son because he's always, I mean, in the summertime, he's about to turn 15 and in the summertime if he gets bored, he gets kind of grumpy.
This is just the kind of thing that he would enjoy doing. So we might be getting a kit and trying it out.
We can just think of a place to put the thing. They're kind of large.
That's my problem. Yeah, I have no space in this house. It's quite small house.
So yeah, I thought the same sort of thoughts.
It's a part of a series though. We're going to get more. So I'm looking forward to that.
Wonderful. Are there comments on this episode? Well, we just commented on it.
That's what we're here for. So 2018 is how to make kombucha tea.
It's a bit variability in the spelling of this. I think it's spelled K-O-M-B-U-C-H-A.
But I'm not a great, great proponent of this.
I haven't even heard of it before.
No, I've never heard of it before either. It's a fermented tea.
I've been reading the internet.
When I was a kid, my mum got given what was called a ginger beer plant,
which consisted of what I think this is, which is a colony of bacteria and yeast
in a sort of jelly-like matrix that you put into water, flavoured with ginger and with sugar,
and then it sat there and ate the sugar and did all of that stuff.
And the end result was a sort of homemade ginger beer, which was really lovely.
As a child, I remember drinking it. It was gorgeous.
And then somebody pointed out, you do realise it's got alcohol in it, and then that was the end of that.
No, you should not get in that anymore.
This is the same type of thing.
These are the kinds of things where I wonder, like, what in the world was the first person who did this thinking
to make something consumable out of things that are like living and crawling around and stuff?
No, I know. I know. Why when the tea has gone off, would you taste it, see what it tasted like?
Yeah, but it's the same as a one-time biologist.
This fascinates me because it's a symbiotic relationship between bacteria and yeast.
And as an aside, and I'm going to bore everybody to death here, Scoby, that he kept talking about,
is an acronym for symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast.
I don't think he mentioned that. I wondered what Scoby meant until I looked it up.
Yeah, it's a colony of these things.
So it's interesting.
And it's the same sort of thing that's going on if you make sourdough bread.
You want your sourdough starter to contain natural yeast and bacteria.
Once it reaches a state of stability, then that's the point of which you make bread with it and you get really nice bread.
But it's acidic because both of these things generate...
I think the bacteria generate acetic acid.
So that's why it's called sourdough.
And this particular one generates acetic acid as well as alcohol.
Yeah, well, this does not appeal to me in any way as a drink.
I'm not a big tea person anyway, but I'll give him this man. These are great show notes.
They're very detailed, lengthy, plenty of explanation, step by step.
So if this sounds interesting to you, check out the show notes.
I bet you, you can make yourself some kombucha tea.
Yeah, it's really, really well put together show.
Absolutely. Same with the same as you.
I'm not sure I'm going to run out to make any particular, but biologically I'm fascinated.
All right, we're nearly through the episodes.
Episode 2019, right up our alley here.
A pie project and an own cloud project by geek dad Matt McGraw.
That's the one. Yep.
Great show.
I love this one. Yeah, this is, this is absolutely, this is meet and drink for HPR.
Although he could have made two, no, sorry, no, I'm traveling.
Yeah, I was thinking, as I was listening to this, I knew what Ken's comment would be.
He said, you know, you could have made two shows.
Don't do two topics in the same show.
It seems to have held off on that one though.
But it's, it's a brilliant show. I like the music thing.
I've actually experienced some of these music thing.
My in-laws up in New York have the sonos system in their house.
And it's pretty impressive.
You know, you download an app on your phone and then you, like even I as a guest,
download the sonos app and I could get into their system and play music in different rooms in the house.
And it's really cool.
And I've actually got a, well, I had a comment about this below,
but I've made my own audio server out of a Raspberry Pi as well.
But used Jezre's audio server called MuttonChop instead of Roon Audio.
He, he tried a few of them.
And I, I had never heard of these.
The Pi music box, Roon Audio, then an arch-based thing.
It sounds like these are special distros just for the Pi to make a media server.
Yeah, it's quite interesting that there's a, there's a lot to follow up here.
I haven't done that yet, but there's, there's some really good pointers to, to some cool stuff here.
I think I might try a couple of those music things this summer.
The great thing about doing this on a Raspberry Pi is you can just pop out your SD card
and then use a different one to put one of these distros on there.
And then go back to the way it was before by just putting your old SD card.
These things are so cheap that it's very easy to just experiment with all kinds of different things this way.
Absolutely, absolutely.
Yeah, I quite fancy this as well.
I was thinking of, I've actually got an add-on for one of my Pi's, which does produce an audio deck.
It is, but seeing your comment a bit later, I maybe made the wrong choice.
I don't know.
So then the, he also talks about the, so one project was the music thing.
And then the other one was the photo frame project.
Yeah, that was nice.
A photo frame with own cloud is picking up pictures of phone cloud with a tablet
that an old tablet that he's passed on to his parents.
So they can see family photos on a photo frame.
What a great idea, brilliant.
Yeah, I had heard of those kinds of photo frames before.
They're commercially sold ones and they do cost a bit of money.
And I don't really know what kind of personal privacy compromise you might have to make to get access
where you could push the photos up to it so that your relatives could see them on the other end.
But I like the idea of using own cloud to manage this.
Yeah, presumably you could, would you firewall your own cloud or something like that?
I don't know.
Is that go against the grain and with own cloud?
I'm not sure.
You put it out on a server that's visible outside.
Would you, would you firewall it so only the tablet could see it or add tablet in your phone
and various other devices that you had?
I don't know.
I don't know.
It's been a while since I ran own cloud.
I had it for a couple of years.
But then when my server went belly up, I didn't bother reinstalling it.
Yeah, I'd be quite like to play around with that sort of idea myself.
I've not tried own cloud yet, but I plan to.
It's a very nice thing.
I bet it's a lot better now than when I was running it.
It sounds like it's got a lot more features now.
Yeah.
So there's a couple of comments on this one.
The first one was from Matt himself.
He added on some photos that he not included in the original notes.
But Ken attached the photos to the notes after the event.
So that was good.
Oh, I didn't see that.
Yeah, I just watch out for these things.
So if you do have additions to notes, then putting them in the comments is one solution.
But if you tell us then we can often stitch them into the notes for you after the event.
But if they're not to do it too often, but you know, I'm sure we can do it.
Yeah.
So then I had a comment just this morning.
So thanks.
I really enjoyed this episode.
I actually do something similar with one of my Raspberry Pi's.
But I use Jesvers Mutton Chop Audio Server.
And I have a link to that if anyone's interested in trying out Mutton Chop.
And control the audio either from a phone tablet or laptop.
Mutton Chop has a web interface.
So you just need a browser on your device to control everything.
And I hooked my Raspberry Pi into a 1972 Morance receiver.
Like you, I found that I needed to get a USB audio interface because the onboard audio on the Pi was terrible.
I bought a dongle off Amazon for $8 or $10.
I don't remember which and it sounds great.
And one of my favorite streaming stations comes from the very public radio station he was talking about.
Capital public radio in Sacramento.
And it's the jazz stream.
Feed and actually that was broken for a while.
But then this morning because they changed the address of the feed.
And but this morning I found it again.
So my Mutton Chop server now is streaming jazz stream again.
And it's wonderful.
That's really good.
I would really like to do something like that.
And I was I'd not thought to use one of these USB audio devices.
I was just advising my daughter to get one.
She had an accident with a laptop snapped off the audio connector for her headphones.
In the in the socket, the jack snapped off.
And you can't it's really hard to get out.
We would try to all sorts of things.
So the solution we reckon to us to get one of those USB dongles.
And which we've got a microphone and an audio headphone interface.
That's what you're talking about, isn't it?
And it's just a little bit.
Yeah. Yeah.
So that's that's what she's going to do till we can.
I'm not sure whether whether we can actually fix the laptop.
But you probably need to.
No, they're great.
Go on.
Sorry.
If you're interested, I could send you a link to the one I bought.
I really don't think it was more than $8 or $10.
And once I found out how well it worked,
I think I ordered two or three more of them to put into the pie.
And because sometimes my kids laptops audio goes funny.
And so we can fix it temporarily by just shoving one of these USB audio things in there.
Yeah, it looks like a good thing to have around.
Yeah, I'd love to get more info if you have it.
I was I would probably use one with the Raspberry Pi as well, actually.
The the DAC board I've got from my it's from my Pi zero.
I was going to try and make an MP3 player out of it.
That's another one of these projects.
I've not even started yet.
That's that's that's a special.
That's a things designed specifically to plug on to the top of our Raspberry Pi.
Okay.
Okay.
So last last show of the month automotive billing HPR 2020.
And I'll be honest, I've not heard this one yet.
I caught this one today.
In fact, just to make sure I listen to everything.
And it's a piece of personal experience with fixing a friend's car.
Where the car has got some interesting faults on it.
And he's describing the problem in quite a lot of detail.
How he identified it.
And then what it was.
And the sort of solution to it was going for the best cost solution to it.
It's really fascinating.
He wasn't sure if this would be appropriate for HPR, but I would say certainly
he isn't anything too small as far as I'm concerned.
I can't wait to hear it.
I'm all about fixing cars lately.
I just fixed my truck a couple of days ago.
It was having a problem with the battery connector.
When I got a new battery, one of the battery posts was smaller than it had been on the previous battery.
And so the terminal on the battery wire, like I could not get it tight enough.
I would tighten it as far as it would go.
And it would still wiggle around.
And so you don't get a strong connection.
The car sometimes won't even start.
And then when it does start, it doesn't get enough power.
And so for less than $5, I got a new terminal for the battery cable.
Put it on there.
All fixed.
I lost six in cars.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I've done that in my time.
I used to work for my uncle who had a garage.
He was mainly in doing body work.
But I got taught how to do a fair number of things with car repairs and stuff.
But that was in the 60s, where cars were very different from what they are now.
And I was quite astonished with Brian's description of the inside.
This is a Mitsubishi, I think he said.
That's what I wrote down here anyway.
Oh boy.
And talking about it was the inlet manifold, I think is what he said.
Intake manifold.
Intake manifold, yeah.
And so that's where your fuel mixture is coming into the four cylinders in this case.
And I hadn't realized that pretty much all cars are fuel injection there.
And so you haven't got the old carburetor type idea anymore.
You've got far more complicated stuff with computers galore.
So yeah, more of that would be utterly fascinating.
Now I'm looking forward to this.
I already have it on my phone in my queue.
I just hadn't gotten past my sports talk podcast yet to get to it.
It'll probably be later today.
Yeah.
Good.
Okay, so that's everything as far as last month's shows are concerned.
And traditionally we have a look at any comments that we haven't covered by going through the shows.
Oh my gosh, we've already spent an hour and 20 minutes talking about the show.
I see if Ken were here, he could have kept us on track a little bit better.
But as it is, you and I are just chatting away.
I must admit we have got a bit more rambling Ken and I in recent shows.
So they have tended to be a bit longer than they should be.
But yeah.
Okay, anybody who objects to that go ahead and record a show saying why it's a bad thing.
And come on here and help us turn to get three things quicker.
That too.
So there were a few comments to shows from previous months.
First of all was David Wilson, who commented on 1987, which is the Pomodoro timer.
First of the Pomodoro timer shows from natural Jordy.
And he said, thanks.
No, that was the we'd already covered that one.
David Wilson changed my life.
He said, no, literally, I'd never heard of the Pomodoro technique before this show.
And this is literally changing my life for the better.
Thank you.
Thank you.
I'd like to try your script.
Where is it?
Nice.
So.
Okay.
And then HPR 1990 had another comment.
Let's see.
He just says found it.
He found the script.
Is that it?
That's absolutely it.
Yes, he.
He's not spotted that it was on the next episode of the two part thing on the Pomodoro thing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And then actually, Jordy did another show on the Rap Poison window manager in 1993 and
Sig Flop commented on that one and said, I love Rap Poison.
Thank you for recording this.
So that was very good.
All right.
There was a new comment on episode 1996.
This is by Uragami.
I've never heard of Dr. Bunsen before nor his file naming convention yet.
My hard drive and backup media are littered with files whose names look a lot like what he outlines.
I usually just use MMDDYY descriptive name dot EXT only adding dot HHMM.
So he's talking about a file naming convention that uses date and time.
He is.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
I'd kind of lost the thread of what this episode was about and where he's going with this.
I think it was just on a side as natural.
Jordy was talking about various various applications.
He was dealing with it.
He mentioned Dr. Bunsen's file naming convention.
Not sure I could live with that, to be honest with you, but each to his own.
I'd much use it.
I'd much rather use find to find the files I need rather than have them named in an orderly like that.
But you know, it's whatever suits you.
You still there, John, you've gone quite.
So whoops.
I was pushing the wrong button again.
What a group I am.
Are we going to go through all of these?
Come on.
There's a lot.
No, no.
It's just it's just the ones for shows that are not in April.
So the next one is the comment on the home brewing episode 1998.
And then there's just one more after that.
Mine.
So we do want to hear the one on the home brewing?
Absolutely.
Let's see.
Comment to him.
Fallen says I'd love to hear the full recording.
I would be of interest to hackers.
Hi.
Can you need to get that script fixed?
It's making spelling mistakes now.
But we're going to know that it's not a human.
It's what he's talking about is.
Who's who's sure this mirror shades?
Say it was talking about his grandfather and how his.
His accent was was interesting.
They had a family recording of it.
And he played a little bit of his grandfather speaking.
And Ken say, can we can we hear more please?
Because it was I could hardly work out what he was saying.
But I'm sure this thing to more.
I would get it.
Yeah.
So then there's actually a comment by me on a show that we mentioned.
But we did not talk about it.
It was the community news.
I have a comment because you guys were talking about the belts.
My episode about changing the serpent time belt.
And who I don't remember who was.
But you're saying it must be the timing belt.
But it's not.
It's not the timing belt.
The timing belt is a different belt.
That was some.
Yeah.
I think it was Ken who said, what belt is that?
Is it the timing belt?
And I said, oh, yeah, sure.
So we're both a ignorant number for it.
Now, the timing belt is a much bigger job that I wouldn't even consider tackling.
It involves very precise finicky adjustments that you have to use.
Special equipment to do or else you could really jack up your engine.
So that's one that you pay the mechanics and it costs.
Last time I had one done it cost a thousand dollars.
Wow.
Yeah.
It's a timing belt went on my son's car.
They were in New Zealand for three months.
And they bought a bought a cheap car there.
And they were driving it around New Zealand.
And the timing belt went.
And it did it while they were driving along at high speed.
And it completely destroyed the engine.
Oh, my God.
Very, very, very sad.
Yeah.
Well, I hope they were not injured.
No, no, no, no.
It just sort of jammed.
It just seized the engine up, I guess.
That's because it.
Yeah.
Everything that I got out of sequence, so it just sort of smashed into the valve.
The valves and stuff, the valve rods, et cetera, et cetera.
Right.
Enough.
Now, we're going to go through the mail.
We normally go through the the mail discussions that have been going on.
I think we could maybe zoom through them very quickly.
Are you in a hurry to get away, John?
I wouldn't mind getting away at some point.
To me, the most interesting, I mean, we have the call for shows saying what was interesting to me was the accessibility pointer that Mike Ray started.
Number three in the numbered list there.
Right.
I always like his pointers on accessibility for HTML and CSS and whatnot.
Yeah, he was talking about links in show notes, wasn't he?
Right.
Yeah.
And what to use for the link text as opposed to, like, I think the convention has always been on HPR to use the entire link as the link text, but he says don't do that.
Yeah.
I'm not quite.
I came away from this conversation, not fully understanding at the end of it.
What was the best?
Because we've gone with this convention where we include both the, as you say, the the URL is the text and is also the link is the href in the in the a tag.
So we did that.
I think because it makes it more visible in our SS feeds and is generally more visible in, you know, and I've got scripts that generate this.
So I thought it was, it was okay.
And I said that back in reply to, to Mike and he didn't, he didn't come.
He didn't reply and say, no, Dave, you're wrong.
Well, I thought his point was that it's, it's like when you're listening to that with a screen reader like he does, it's complete nonsense to hear it being read.
And he'd rather hear a more human understandable descriptive link text instead of hearing an entire URL being read either character by character or whatever.
Yeah.
Thank you for interpreting it better than I did.
Yeah.
I tended, what I tend to do, if I embed a link in, in the text in markdown, I use the mechanism where you can, the text bit of it is, it becomes the, the, the link.
Right.
It becomes the text in the sentence becomes the link and then it then it uses the markdown reference to, to point the actual thing.
So if you hover over it, you get further information from the, the reference.
If you click on it, you get to the, the link.
So I mentioned that I use that and he said, well, yeah, so do I.
So I assume that that was okay, but don't do that.
Don't do the full blown thing.
Just keep that for the links section of the, of the show notes, perhaps.
Ah, maybe, maybe so.
I don't know.
But I love discussions about accessibility, best practices, anyway.
Yeah, absolutely.
It's good that Mike comes up with, with these, these things, because I think it's all too easy to, to, to, to overlook them.
I certainly do, unless I really stop myself to, to think carefully about it.
So thanks for that, Mike.
Yep.
So there wasn't, there was obviously the call for shows and lots of other things.
I just made a few notes here about what had been going on.
There was one point that, in my bill made in the early, early part of the month, which was the, in the form that you fill into.
Submit a show, explicit.
The question explicit yes or no is set by default to no, to yes.
And it says it should be, it should be no.
And I don't know if that if Ken has.
Ken, I think Ken.
He did, he said use yet, I wanted to use yes, because it's better to default to.
Something which is not going to get us thrown off iTunes than, than otherwise.
I think that was, that was the sort of argument, wasn't it?
I, I think so.
He, he wanted to, like, if somebody forgot to choose one or the other and their show happened to have, I don't know, curse words or something inappropriate in it, then it by default, it would be flagged appropriately.
Yeah, I think so.
And there's also that issue of what is offensive.
I mean, it depends his listening, doesn't it?
And we haven't, if we have a global audience and things that are not offensive to you and me, are going to be offensive to somebody else, you know, it's a, it's a very, very, very thorny issue.
So maybe that's why it's best to have explicitly the default option.
I always, all my shows are marked explicit because they're very, very, very rarely are.
But, but sooner to fault to, to, to a warning than not.
I think my shows are only explicit if I'm having a conversation with Jezra.
I've heard those, I've heard those, yes, yes.
So, in my notes here, there was the only other thing that stood out to me anyway was discussion about the whole series business.
And the question was asked, could there be a series on cooking and recipes and stuff to which the answer would be absolutely.
Thank you very much.
Absolutely, yes.
Yes, yes.
So, series on coffee would be all right too.
Well, I think we have one already.
We have that already.
Is there?
Okay.
Yep, yep.
So, yeah.
And it was also about whether you, whether it's okay to jump in on other people's series and contribute episodes.
And I think in this community, most people are fine with that.
Yeah.
I think historically there have been, there's series where host X is doing a series on particular thing,
the relevance to them or, you know, it's maybe not as widely open.
Or it's a time-related series that then those are going to stay closed.
But anything new that gets created, let's just make them open because, you know, it's why, why not really.
I should have a really good reason not to then, then I think you should.
That's what I've been trying to do with mine anyway.
Well, even the series, like Ahuka's wonderful series on Libri Office, he, at least said that he didn't object when I threw in a very short episode about a Libri Office.
What about a Libri Office feature or a, you know, a pro tip or something like that.
And then I tagged it with the Libri Office series.
So, you know, I don't, I would never confuse my episode with one of his much more detailed instructional things.
But I think it did belong in the series anyway.
Yeah.
Well, he did comment on this.
He said, if the references to the Libri Office series, my view is that all series I contribute to are open to anyone.
This is a community and we build things as a community.
Do you think it's a great comment?
Yeah, absolutely.
That's very much the spirit of it.
Yep.
Okay.
Are we done?
I think we should stop it there, John, because there's about 40 mail messages in the last month.
But I'm sure people can read them and you don't need to go through the month and to highlight things if I like it already.
So let's go.
It might be worth, yeah, it might be worth commenting.
It seems like I remember one person responding to a digest thing.
And isn't that one of those things?
Did you see that?
Did somebody reply to a digest comment?
Yes indeed.
Yes.
So you were holding your tongue, I know.
Yes.
I think I said all I need to say about this.
Unfortunately, people don't quite remember.
If you're receiving messages as a digest, you think, oh, I need to say something about then just not to be able to reply to it because it's in a digest.
It's a pain.
So you should be trying to reply to the digest, but then editing it to make it look like part of the thread gets very, very complicated.
I guess my question would be, why are you bothering with the digest?
I mean, how many people really need to be taking the digest?
There's not a whole lot of traffic on this list.
No, if it was a massively busy list, you would get in a message every 10 minutes.
I could understand the digest, but on this one,
I don't understand why, why it's switched on and why people are elected to use it to be perfectly pranked.
So maybe the solution is to, from the administrators and just get rid of the digest?
I've looked and thought I could switch this off, but I'm sure that would not be very popular.
There would probably be some unintended consequences.
But the question should be asked really, why do you feel you need to do this?
Do you not think it would be a good idea to move back to the ordinary list?
What we can do is respond to that digest post asking this question.
That might be a good idea, yes, yes.
I have two other issues, just two short things.
I did a show in the queue, 2036, which I did with Kevin from Touchjam,
and it's about the upcoming Glasgow pod crawl, which is going to take place on the 29th of July,
6pm in the state bar in Glasgow.
And because it's actually fair bit out before it actually comes up into the feed,
I thought I'd just mention it if it's something that might be of interest to you.
Go and check out the show because you can go and read the text and follow the links if you're something you might be interested.
Hopefully we're going to get a lot of people coming to this particular event this year.
So the other thing was, and I already mentioned this, we had some tags and summaries sent in to be added to shows.
Thanks very much, we haven't had many of these for a while.
We did have a big block of them at one point from a guy called Colin.
This was Matthew, who's a new host, who's also in the queue, but further on.
And he sent some in.
So thanks very much for that, Matthew, just make a public comment about that.
All right, that's me.
Very good.
I've got nothing else either.
Okay.
Well, thanks very much, John, for coming in and helping out.
It's been good.
Yeah, it's a pleasure.
And we'll, we'll not sing the, um, the, uh, join us now.
And, okay, we'll just.
I'm going to confess.
I don't know the lyrics to that song.
Yeah, I've got no interest in learning that song.
No, no, I've completely forgotten.
I might have heard them before, but I can't remember them for love and money.
So that's it.
I think the only person I've ever heard sing that song is Ken.
You might have, yes.
Yes, there's a rich guy called Richard Stolman, who's been known to sing it, but.
I mean, I know that he's done that, but I've never heard it.
I felt myself lucky.
Yeah.
Yes.
Okay.
Thanks, John, and thanks to everybody.
And hope it wasn't too long.
We're going to stop recording now.
Yeah.
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