hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr4165.txt

Episode: 4165
Title: HPR4165: A circle of Moss
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4165/hpr4165.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 20:38:16

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This is hacker public radio episode 4165 for Friday the 19th of July 2024.
Today's show is entitled A Circle of Moss.
It is part of the series interviews.
It is hosted by Ken Fallon and is about 28 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is Ken Interviews Moss Bliss, the Bard and the podcaster.
Hi everybody, my name is Ken Fallon and you're listening to another episode of hacker public radio.
Today we're going to have a quick interview with somebody who I was surprised was not already a HDR host.
It's Moss Bliss and we're going to be talking about the full circle podcast.
Good morning Moss.
Good morning Ken.
Not morning where you are.
Well, it will be in about 16 minutes so.
Okay, can you tell us what the full circle podcast is please?
Well, it is the full circle weekly news podcast and we do every week.
I get a packet of news from Eric the unready in South Africa.
I edit it to my liking and I record and produce a podcast.
15 minutes or less.
It doesn't matter how much less some of the only eight or nine minutes.
But and then I send it up to Ronnie Tucker who is in Scotland and he submits it to through his sources to the internet.
So that's just about you know what the full circle and all in the full circle magazine.
That's just a good to use is it?
No full circle magazine is for all users of Linux and especially for various distros who are.
Either forked off of Debian or Ubuntu, but it's the podcast covers all open source.
So you're likely to hear anything from the next kernel news or bug reports or stuff like that major or CSEs and stuff.
I don't usually do bug reports, but I do a new updates and new software coming out and they who writes the script again?
Eric the unready gathers the script.
He's in South Africa.
Okay.
And I usually mutilate it quite a bit before I do my recording because grammar is different.
And also the spoken word is a different format than the written word.
Yeah.
If I can't read it, I don't want it on the script.
There's a lot of times I don't know what I'm talking about.
I just read the bloody script.
Yeah.
How long does that take you to get ready?
Well, it takes me about 10 minutes to produce the script from what Eric sends me another 10 or 20 minutes to do the editing.
And it takes me 15, 18 minutes to record it.
And any were up to about 45 minutes to do the editing.
About two hours, I guess.
Yeah, but I do it in bits and pieces here and there.
Okay.
Okay.
It's an amazing commitment.
How long have you been doing that now?
I'm in.
You're not supposed to be doing it.
No, it was originally done by Ronnie himself and then Leo Chavez did it for a couple years, but he was not consistent at getting it done on a weekly basis.
And since he turned it over to me, I haven't missed a week yet.
Yeah.
There's a certain amount of pride in that.
Oh, yeah.
And also it's kind of required.
It's one of those things that if you don't produce shows, people don't subscribe.
People will take it off their list if it's not coming out regularly.
I have the benefit of it being such a short show almost anyone can listen to it.
Yeah.
Whether they understand it or not, they can listen to it.
You usually were able to fit in the 10 minutes on your bus stop wait or in the car commiserate or something.
Yeah.
That's great.
I've been listening for a long time and I'm surprised at the information.
Sometimes it's like, well, didn't didn't realize that was going on.
Good stuff.
But you're not new to podcasting at all.
I think Tony Hughes was.
I know Tony from the visiting him about companies also active on the radio.
So you worked with Tony for a while.
Yeah.
Back in September of 2018 Rob Hawkins was getting tired of doing mint cast and asked for new hosts.
And he got about eight or nine people show up.
We eventually settled down to six.
And Tony was one of those and I was one of those.
At this time, only myself and Joe Boyle and are left from that group.
But we have other hosts moving in.
Which podcast is this?
This is mint cast, which also is not just about Linux Mint.
It is.
As we say, it's from the Linux Mint community for all users of Linux.
Yep.
A popular and a very popular distro.
And then in April of 2019, Tony and I decided it was my idea that Tony.
I couldn't have done it without Tony.
Tony and I decided to do distro hoppers digest and that went on.
I did 51 episodes of that and it's currently on episode 54.
That happens about every five weeks.
Yeah.
That's a fantastic podcast.
You just basically tell people what the what the premise of the podcast is.
Well, the premise is that we each we've got a set of what we are reviewing out of a distro.
And we we write it all up in advance and say, OK, I tried this distro at work.
If it didn't work, we throw it in a part of the show called beautiful failures.
And but yeah, we usually give it a full review.
And I know now that Dale Miracles on the show, he is very thorough.
And now we also have Eric and not remembering his last name right now.
I should have written that stuff down.
But so Eric's in Florida, Dale's in Ohio.
And when I was on it, I'm down here in eastern Tennessee, which is something we hadn't covered yet.
Yeah, right.
Well, let's cover it.
I am a short drive from Knoxville.
Yeah, you into into country music then, Eric.
Not particularly, but for that matter, Nashville itself is not just country music.
It's it's very widely spread through pretty much all genres.
I am a folk musician from way back.
I say I'm an old folkie and you'd better get that K right.
I've been performing over a long period of time.
Basically, I got into podcasting in the first place by trying to talk Chris Fisher at Jupiter
into letting me do a show maybe with him on desktop Linux and how much it's come along to where you really don't need to open the terminal anymore.
Sometimes it's fun to open the terminal.
It's sometimes faster to open the terminal, but you don't need to use the terminal these days for most distros.
And Chris wouldn't go for it because he and Noah Chalaya had tried a similar podcast and nobody listened to it.
And I'm going, yes, but you guys are total geeks and you don't talk to newbies.
We want to show that the newbies can listen to that they can say, do I want to try this?
Yeah.
So after failure object rejection, what happened?
Well, then again, I heard the open call for host Son Mintcast and I joined that and I am still on that.
I sometimes take a sabbatical, but I've done almost 110 episodes at this time.
And that's every two weeks.
And is that easier to do than the distro hoppers?
Oh, no, it's much harder.
It was easier to get away from distro hoppers because I've got such great people on the show.
But Mintcast is a lot of work.
We have meetings every Saturday at 3 p.m. Eastern time.
The one that's between shows and I said we record every other Sunday.
The Saturday between shows we actually open it up and all of our listeners can come join us on the show.
And we do that via discord and YouTube.
And then on the alternate Sunday, we record the show that we have a Saturday right before the show that we make sure all our ducks are in a row.
And there's other time spent filling in our parts of the show script and everything we do run off a script.
Well, that's every weekend.
Every weekend.
That's why it's hard to get new hosts because they realize that they have to let their weekends go to pot.
Yeah, no, I can.
I can understand that.
All right.
So you mentioned that you're.
That you're a musician down there in Nashville.
Not in Nashville. I near Knoxville.
Not in Nashville.
It's it's.
It's.
It's.
No.
It's.
It is.
It's split into three segments and Nashville's in the middle and it's over two hours away from me.
Yeah.
Yeah, Knoxville.
Yeah, Knoxville.
We're in the West.
What we're famous for is the university and football team.
Okay.
I'm not talking football the way you're talking football.
We have this funny oblate theory that we throw around the field a lot.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So you.
But you are a musician.
I am a musician.
I've been playing just about every instrument.
I took piano first.
I then played breast instruments through school.
When I was in college, I was in my sophomore year.
I was first chair of the French horn section at my little bitty college.
But I've been playing mostly guitar since I left school.
I've got several guitars.
I've got a few other crazy instruments.
I've got an Irish lap harp.
I've got an auto harp.
I've got a few penny whistles and other whistles and noise makers and whatnot.
But I mostly just play guitar.
I see a handle is barred boss.
I have been made a bard in the triad bardic college.
And since nobody else wanted to do anything, I found myself being made chief bard of triad bardic college.
But it's a largely more of one school since I took over.
I have not been able to revive it at any rate.
But I have a legitimate claim to the status of bard.
Very good. Very good.
So what type of music are you into playing instruments?
Well, most of what I play is folk or a variant of folk that features a lyrical content from fantasy or science fiction, which is called Philk.
Philk. Philk.
And I'm in relation to folk at all around it.
There is a very large page on Wikipedia about Philk because we made our dent on the world, so to speak.
It can be any music style, but most of us is folk.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We frequently steal whatever tune is lying around or sometimes we write our own new tune.
I don't know how soon you want to get into that, but well, that was a great time.
OK. Well, this is a song I wrote in 21.
It's sort of a based on the first vignette, so to speak, in the Firefly saga.
Oh, and let me get.
Should have been another series of us.
There should have been.
There should be another movie, but on the other hand, Joss Whedon has turned out to not be very well thought of these days for some of his actions behind the camera.
All right.
Anyhow, boy, I sound a little scratchy here tonight.
This is vaguely bluegrass-ish.
It's called the Angels Never Came.
My troops fought hard and the land was good and scarred.
One more day of light chosen rain.
With one more shove, I could free the land I love, but the Angels never came.
The Angels never came.
The Angels never came.
We fought on and on, but the chance to win was gone and the Angels never came.
We refused control and the evil that it holds.
Our brown coats with blood were stained.
Our numbers thinned the Elias pouring in, but the Angels never came.
The Angels never came.
The Angels never came.
We fought on and on, but the chance to win was gone and the Angels never came.
My choices were few I could either cheat or lose.
The Valley burned with flame.
I downed an alliance ship with their homegun, but the Angels never came.
The Angels never came.
The Angels never came.
We fought on and on, but the chance to win was gone and the Angels never came.
We were fighting for the Angels praying for the Angels.
Waiting for the Angels, but the Angels never came.
May have been the losing side.
Still not convinced it was the wrong one.
Thank you.
Creative Commons, I hope.
Yes.
Everything I write is published Creative Commons.
Why is that?
Because I have had no luck trying to sell them and there's so many people making music these days.
It's really not worth it to get a copyright for something I may only sell 200 copies of.
It's really not worth it to get a copyright for something I may only sell 200 copies of.
It's really not worth it to get a copyright for something I may only sell 200 copies of.
It's really not worth it to get a copyright for something I may only sell 200 copies of.
It's really not worth it to get a copyright for something I may only sell 200 copies of.
Of course, it can be found on my website, which you already have a link for.
I didn't give you a link for my music site, which is more duis.bandcamp.com.
Links for us will be in the show.
I will pass it to you.
Yes.
Thank you very much.
Is there anything else we should have covered in the show that we didn't?
Well, I don't know.
The last show was the last time we tried this, it went a little longer, but I can talk to you.
That's true.
There were my work away.
It's your bed awaits for you.
I also do substitute teaching in the local school district.
Good.
Let's see.
My whole career has been one of going from job to job to job.
They just don't seem to have a position that I can fit into and work my way into.
I just have to do what's available until it's not available anymore.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I don't think we covered my travels across the country.
I was brought up in the Los Angeles area and went to college in Sterling, Kansas.
And from there, I passed the South Jersey in then Denver.
And from there, I moved out to, let's see, from Denver.
I had a stint in Alabama for a year back to Denver.
And then Colorado Springs, then Detroit.
And then down to Greenville, South Carolina.
And from there to Asheville, North Carolina.
And I lived there for 12 and a half years before finding out that I had more friends on the Knoxville side of the mountains.
And so I moved over here.
And that was a little bit of a joke around.
It's my U.S. geography since.
Yeah.
I've lived in 12 states and I visited 38 as well as three provinces of Canada and a couple states of Mexico.
It's tough.
Big country.
Big country, America.
Especially when you don't have any money.
Yeah.
Let me tell you, doing Mintcast saves my life in a number of ways.
Yeah.
I have been so accepted by the Mintcast community.
People keep sending me stuff.
I've been sent several computers.
I've done some trades.
I've done some purchases that usually much reduced prices.
And I just know that the sound box I'm on right now, Scarlet Solo was purchased for me by a friend.
The wavelength that I use to keep my backup drives in.
And also I can make copies of various ISOs and whatnot on the USB from or even on the SD cards.
That was given to me by a friend.
My microphone was actually purchased by full circle magazine.
We didn't talk about the magazine much, did we?
Oh, no.
Yeah.
We should have.
The magazine is published monthly online.
It usually has at least English and French translations.
We had as many as six different language versions.
And as they say that it covers.
Basically everything that has anything to do with Ubuntu.
If it uses Ubuntu core or Debbie and they will talk about it.
Okay.
I'm not.
Did the world started us or, you know, presumably.
And say they are really having trouble getting writers.
I think just like HPR is having some problems filling their schedule.
They have trouble.
They have room for short stuff and they have room for long stuff.
They've had some series that went on for like 32 or 40 episodes.
And just one episode per month.
And they could certainly stand a few more of those.
You can find the magazine online at full circle magazine.com.
And you can see where the blank spots are just by reading an issue.
You can see where they love to get people to write stuff.
There's holes in the magazine most months.
Okay.
Anything else that we need to cover?
Hmm.
I don't know.
I think that covers everything.
It's a little more disjointed than what we did last time.
Oh, I don't think so.
Well, other than technical problems.
But we sort of covered things in more organic sense.
Yeah, that's true.
But you'll always have the one you go through.
I'm trying to take those issues for you.
Yeah.
I am.
I am.
I have ordered a pine time.
It's a digital watch made by pine 64.
I should actually get that in the next day or two.
And I intend to do a review of that.
Yeah, that's good.
Always.
We're all kind of to have to.
I haven't done a review for on anything.
So I should probably do that too.
That's also good.
Keep them coming.
But don't don't overextend yourself.
You're already doing quite a lot.
Well, that's why I left distra hoppers because that was really my biggest thing.
I stopped doing so much for Mintcast.
The other people have filled in the jobs I was doing at Mintcast.
So I can take a week or a month or a few months off at any time.
And they're happy to have me back.
I'm very glad to say.
I have had a lot of parts in my life where people didn't want to see me anymore.
And I'm very happy you have found a place where I'm welcome.
Yeah.
That's a kind of beyond the stage of the importance of not in some of this love.
Okay.
I will.
If it's okay with you, I'll wrap it up there.
We won't we will be hearing from you again.
Okay.
Maybe next time I'll get a mention of Bode Linux in there with.
I am also one of the main contributors to Bode Linux.
And on their team.
It's you.
Hmm.
What do you mean you contribute to Bode Linux?
I give them a monthly donation.
I also donated my T540p because the lead dev was working on a 2009 sager and it was
dying.
And so I at least got him a 2014 machine that's an excellent, excellent shape.
And for that matter, the T540p also had both Intel and and video graphics on it.
So it's good for testing different things working on on any gesture.
What is Bode Linux?
Bode Linux is basically Ubuntu core with mocha desktop, which is a fork of Enlightenment E17
with some features brought in from later versions of Enlightenment.
Okay.
And it's the most lightweight desktop out there.
I mean, other than things that just use tabbed window managers or something like that.
I've known people if you take away some of the handrails on Bode, you can get it down to 100 megabytes of RAM being used with nothing running.
Wow.
Well, yeah, you open up Firefox and you're up to 700 800 with anything else you open up Firefox.
You're at 1400.
So it's really great for older machines.
We have a Ubuntu base and a Debian based version.
We don't have Debian going because that's the only way now to do 32 bit.
We have a 32 bit version that's still in beta.
We have a what what is called devotee seven, which is 64 bit Debian based in beta.
But it's a beta that runs.
There's nothing wrong with it.
I can tell as a user.
Yeah.
It's a Debian committed to the three at six.
They may not be, but for now they are.
I've had a small laptop.
And they sort of inspire one one of the original ones.
It's got perfect size.
I was on the EPC 701.
They have lovely keyboards.
The form factor is just ideal for putting in your pocket.
It's so old.
I can't run anything on it.
And the batch is dead.
Well, my personal laptop is a T580 think pad.
And I can't think of a better machine to be running because it's it's reasonably modern.
I've got 16 gigs of RAM on it.
I've got a NVMe drive on it.
And any of the touch screen, which the seller didn't even know about.
I was a pleasant surprise, I imagine.
I'm not that big on touch screens, but anything you get that that's usually $100 extra on a machine.
That's true.
I have a IBM yoga 370, which my youngest has their eyes on.
So yeah, I may have to pass that on.
What I run as my desktop is a think standard T M700 tiny.
It's smaller than the old time DVD drives.
So could you do a little review on that because I'm looking for some.
I just did a show on that encouraging people to go for M700.
If they're looking for a new machine.
Oh, yeah, so you did. Sorry.
Yeah, my first show on HPR was actually.
I didn't get a number for it because we were running on Tony's number in our first.
Distrohoppers digest was repeated as an HPR episode.
So I've been around also when we joined Mintcast, we were using the HPR mumble room.
And we did for a couple of years there.
Yeah.
We March 7th.
Someone knows those HPR mumble.
Well, we first got our own mumble room and then we moved over to discord and right now we're doing our.
We can our meetings and we can Saturday shows on discord and feeding it to YouTube.
But we also do our regular show right now.
We're doing it on VDO.Ninja, which is a web based video thing, just like Jesse is.
Yep.
How do you find in discord?
I like discord.
I know it's not fully open source, but it's usable.
We haven't had any leaks or any problems that we know of.
I basically use discord telegram and master on.
And if no one's on that, they don't get to talk to me.
I do not use Facebook.
I do not use.
Consider.
Yeah.
Let's sit there.
Yeah.
Have a look at the show notes.
See if we missed anything there.
All right.
Well, I will.
I will make sure that you've got my massive on feed if you don't have that.
Yeah.
And I'll make sure that you have my.
Bandcamp page.
So people can actually listen to my music and buy some.
I am poor people.
You got to help me out.
Good music though.
I like.
I like just on.
Thank you very much for that.
Thank you so much.
All right.
Let's wrap it.
That's what happened.
I need to go into work.
You need to go to bed.
Children tomorrow for another exciting episode of Hacker.
This is where you sit public.
Oh, I do.
Okay.
Yeah.
I was waiting to see whether.
Why you want tomorrow for another exciting episode of Hacker.
I like.
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