hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr3907.txt

Episode: 3907
Title: HPR3907: My introduction show
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3907/hpr3907.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 07:49:44

---

This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3907 for Tuesday, the 25th of July 2023.
Today's show is entitled, My Introduction Show.
It is the first show by Newhost Rato, and is about 19 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is about me and computers.
Hi, this is your host, Rato, and this is my introduction recorded on 12th of July 2023.
What is recording, how I recorded, how I found HPR about me, and how I got into computers.
So let's get started.
How I record this, Todd Norris introduced to us in Episode 3496, how I record HPR episodes,
you'll find the link in the show notes.
An easy-to-use patent script to record show segments of your audio.
Since then, he has done some improvements on this software.
And so it is more than at the begin.
It is also capable to remove a noise of your device or such.
For example, the Samsung Q2U microphone, I'm using, unfortunately, has a low humming
on USB.
So by the way, if you listen or have an idea why hints are welcome, I'll continue.
I searched the internet to find a solution for my microphone, but I didn't want to do
try an error as there was no solution other than try this or try that.
So I told Zolokoss that the end combined the recordings and the noise reduction removed
the humming.
Brilliant.
So you see this software may be also very useful for you, give it a try.
How I found HPR.
I think I heard in the past about HPR, but I really got into it after I heard Chris,
we know from Linux in-laws, speaking on Floss Weekly 568 about Linux beer wandering and
HPR as well, if I remember correctly.
Since then, I found interesting stuff here, Ahuka.
Thank you for the series of LibreOffice.
You inspired me even more to use styles and I built my word template on writer thanks
to you.
And I use it now quite often as I have it available.
If someone wants to learn that too, look for the series which starts around episode 1149
and up.
Please you can find on the HPR website.
I also started to learn ARC, AWK here.
There is a series as well.
But I didn't get very far by now, it is hard to learn if you don't have a problem to solve.
However, I got the first touch and tried the examples thanks to Be Easy and Dave.
Last but not least, I loved the monthly flashback of Canon Dave and volunteers.
And many others of course, who do great stuff and inspired me now and then to try something
out or look into something I never considered to do.
Now a bit about me and how I got into computers.
My journey into computer started with games at the friends place with a Commodore 64.
Do you remember the Commodore 64, the summer games, the winter games, and so on?
Well, his mother was working part-time and so we could play for a whole afternoon when she was out.
I remember how we rather close the blind to reduce the reflection of the sunlight on the TV,
then going outside and enjoy the nice weather.
A few years later, I have saved enough money from working during school vacation
to buy the better Commodore 128.
However, I just wanted to play and so I always had to hold the button on the back
while starting the computer in order to boot into the 64 mode.
Like others, I tried writing code from magazine, which rarely ran afterwards.
I cannot remember any success, but how I lost hours of typing this code.
And as it didn't save my work, the program froze, or such, all was lost.
My next computer was an Amiga 2000.
Again, as before, with the Commodore 128, the smaller Amiga 500 would have done the job.
But I wanted to have two floppy drives.
Well, some games were on two floppy drives.
I guess that was the reason.
But I cannot remember exactly what it was, but it had to have two floppy drives.
It was an awesome gaming machine anyway.
Well, because I learned to take care for goods and the such, take care for the joystick,
I guess I learned to control my temper when I got furious of trying a thousand times
to finish a level in a game and missed it over and over again.
So it was a good training for me too.
Finally, I gave my computers away as I stopped gaming ever since,
apart from PlayStation 3 now and then.
The PC era.
In 1996 or 1997, I got my first PC.
Foster's hell with 166 megahertz and a 17-inch Nokia monitor.
I cannot remember the amount of RAM, 16 or 32 megabyte, my guess.
I got this PC not from a store.
I found an ad in something like classified newspaper magazine, which cost 425 Swiss francs,
which was back then around 3 to 4 US dollars.
Principle of the paper was expensive to buy, but free to place an end.
So I found this guy who sold pieces in parts and you had to build it yourself.
A friend helped me to assemble it.
I spare you the install hurdle of Windows 95, drivers on CDs and more gosh.
And how great Windows 98 felt back then, not to mention the second edition of 98.
It felt good.
My first touch with Linux was around 99 as a firewall server.
The firewall server was based on Debian and so I learned APT and RPM a little bit later.
My next computer was a laptop.
It was a Dell Inspiron around 2002 shipped with Windows Millennium.
I think I spent about 3,200 Swiss francs.
This is about the same amount in US dollar and didn't even need a laptop.
However, the idea that I could take my computer anywhere was attractive.
And this is where I got in touch with RPM.
I tried to get Linux running on this laptop.
I still have a box of Susie Linux version 8.1 of 2003, including 7 CDs and the DVD.
Plus two books, one for administration and the other for the user.
And these books are quite thick, but maybe 3 cm.
It's a little bit more than an inch.
I also bought the Coffler Linux feeble, maybe translates to Horn book in English.
The sixth edition with 1,300 pages.
Susie 8.2, including of the same year.
I kept all those books, I cannot throw them away.
A kernel version you can imagine, something with a leading tool if I remember correctly.
Lucky Strike, I could sell this expensive laptop a couple years later, so not all was lost.
This was before laptops got reasonably priced.
I just had the right moment.
While writing this, do you remember X386?
I just came to my mind while thinking about Susie Linux 8.1.
Suddenly out of nowhere, X386 changed its licensing model, or such, and X.org returned.
Do you remember how you had to configure the X server for the mouse buttons, monitor resolution, and keyboard those days?
Okay, I digress.
So after this laptop, I returned to TowerPC with Windows XP and LCD display.
An insurance company, where a friend was working, replaced their fleet, and so I got it for a bargain.
Around 2009, I used Linux or better Ubuntu with GNOME 2 on a regular basis.
I remember my disappointment when GNOME 3 was released, and Ubuntu's Unity was presented to the public.
Both had the same philosophy of full-screen Windows per program, and this was not what I like.
The near past, in 2011, I bought my next tower and switched 100% to Linux.
It was an Intel i5, two terabyte hard disk, four gigabyte of RAM.
I upgraded in 2013 the SSD, or I upgraded, I added an SSD for the most of the programs and for the system and for home.
While the two terabyte hard drive used as to collect all the data, like films, documents and such.
This computer was pre-assembled, I bought it in a very famous store that starts with A,
and the brand of the tower was medium, which I think is a company owned by Lenovo.
It was a noisy tower, not terrible noisy, but it had this constant noise from the fan.
I replaced the fan on or the fan on the graphics card, but it didn't help.
So I guess it was the fan from the power supply that created the noise.
And I didn't want to replace the power supply, as it was a system,
and I was expecting maybe some weird plugs and so on, so I didn't even give it a try.
Yeah, I lived with it for a long time from 2011 until 2019.
In 2019, I bought the parts according to a German magazine called CT, CT in English probably,
to build a quiet all-arounder PC.
Every year, they have, well, they use a lot of their knowledge to build different,
to make building blocks, maybe, to make different PCs,
like if you need maximum power, if you need no-rounder, if you need a simple office PC.
And they have very nice suggestions how to make that, how to adjust the BIOS,
how to adjust the fans and so on, and then you really get a lovely, quiet PC,
like the one which is running now next to me.
It has an AMD Ryzen 5 CPU with 6 cores and 12 threads.
16GB of RAM and an Nvidia passive-cooled graphics card.
Yeah, I know, Nvidia.
The hard disk drive I took over from the old PC, also the SSD.
And in the old PC, there was the generator, it was an Intel Sandy Bridge CPU,
but now I have AMD Ryzen.
And I just moved the hard disks and you know how comfy it feels when a system has all your customization you like.
And so I wasn't too keen to set up a while after building a computer to set up the whole system fresh.
And so after putting the hard disk, I started the computer.
I was surprised and happy.
It just ran like it was a fresh install on that computer.
I had nothing to do.
So I kept that system running until 2022 in December.
I changed from Ubuntu Mate to Ubuntu.
I was a Mate user for, I don't know.
Well, since the disaster with the GNOME 2 and Unity somewhere there, I moved.
Yeah, but I was always, I also liked the idea of the flexibility of the KDE desktop.
Plasma, how do you call it today?
I have a 16 by 10 display and on the KDE you have two options to organize the desktop.
You can organize it with a folder view and the other, which I don't know how to translate from my German box into English.
I use the folder view to keep icons all over the desktop.
Now, because I have a 16 by 10 display, as it is wider than I, I have the task bar with the programs on the right side.
And now something goes wrong when you start the computer.
You can put all your icons in order, how you like it.
Well, if you would just have it on the top line, that would be fine.
But if you have some on the top line and some on the, from top to bottom,
so how do I like it spread all over the desktop?
Maybe you have some clusters.
And then when this, when this bar moves in on the boot from the computer, it puzzles your icons.
And I have not found any solution by now.
If you have something similar and you know the solution or by accident you come across a solution to fix that puzzling of my icons,
I'm more than happy to get a message from you or a comment in the below the podcast.
So anyway, this move from from Ubuntu Mate, which is known or gnome, as you know, to KDE.
I wanted to switch the programs to that took me a while to find KDE software to replace the gnome software I used to before.
I didn't find a replacement for cheap order.
I searched, but cheap order does also copy podcasts on my USB attached sound disk MP3 player.
And this is something I think I know where found in such a comfortable way as cheap order does.
So this is one GTK application that I certainly have to use even in my KDE.
Also switched or replaced virtual box with QMU.
QMU is an idea of Martin Winpress and others helped to develop it further, I guess.
Virtual box, that's also the reason that I have 16kB in this PC.
Virtual box to make everything working, it was not enough you install it.
We had to have some extra software for USB and such.
And well, I didn't use it maybe for a couple of weeks, then there was an update.
And the next time I wanted to use a virtual box, it said,
oh, I cannot access this or that you have to get this software again.
You have to upload the latest version.
And as it was always some time in between, since I have done it the last time,
maybe it was one month, maybe it was three months, who knows.
I didn't know how to do that.
So it was really a pain.
Now I gave quick EMU chance and it looks so far really nice.
I guess I placed a link for it in the show notes as well.
You have the quick EMU and then you have even a GU,
somebody made a GUI for it.
You have to read into it how it is working,
how, but you have to add to get windows USB running or how to use and this one.
But as it is all with tools from within your distribution,
it does really update itself on all levels.
Thing I haven't found out by now, but I didn't dig into deep was to share a Samba folder
from a virtual Windows 11 into my KDE.
But the USB is working quite well.
I could update the pretty old TomTom device,
where you have the Windows software and such.
It's really cool.
You have a Linux PC running and you run Windows 11
and you have attached the device and it's just brilliant.
So this computer has no Windows installed apart from the virtual desktop.
So this was my introduction about how I recorded,
how I found HDR, about me and how I got into computers.
If you like, leave me a comment or send me a message.
Have a nice one.
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at HackerPublicRadio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HBR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording podcasts,
you click on our contribute link to find out how easy it means.
Hosting for HBR has been kindly provided by
an onesthost.com, the internet archive and our sings.net.
Onestodized status, today's show is released on our Creative Commons
Attribution 4.0 International License.