Pretty good episode on the speculative execution stuff that Intel and others are dealing with. And don't feel alone, I also run OpenBSD as of late! Been dabbling with the BSDs since 3 years ago and, of all of them, OpenBSD is closest to my heart. I'm running OpenBSD-current on an old Toshiba Portege M400 convertible tablet PC as well as on a ThinkPad x230 at work. Yeah, certain things like wireless aren't up to par yet as they are on Linux or even FreeBSD (which I also run on a laptop at work), but it is a great OS with great security and support. Another HPR contributor by the name of Sigflup also runs OpenBSD, and to be honest, her use of it was what piqued my curiosity to the OS. So, rest assured, you're in good company as an OpenBSD user on HPR. ;-)

The Linux desktop gives up and coming sysadmins a playground to learn Linux - which they will need to know for server administration.

Love this cast and your own personal podcast off this network!

That being said, I wanted to say something again that I said in one of my podcasts, and that is that the desktop is dead. Not dead in the sense of no longer being developed, but the whole concept of the desktop is outmoded. For most people, they're day-to-day is their personal tablet and/or smartphone. I know many people who no longer would want a desktop or laptop. For me, my companies computer techs have such a bad system setup that most of the rank and file will use any phone app they can get on they're hands on in order to avoid using the shard desktop machines our company provides.

I love my personal desktop environment, and the lack of customization for windows and mac keeps me on linux. Every time I consider going back to windows I eventually end up wistfully checking the status of things like BB4Win and searching for alternative gui shells. If you care about your personal computing environment, you need linux. It's like this, in America a car enthusiast would probably want to be in California because California has a "car culture." If you want your environment to respond to what you think it should be for you, you have to do linux.

---
DeepGeek

Knightwise, I respect your knownledge in computers. But I disagree on one point. You said something like, when you need to get things done, only windows and Mac can do it. Maybe so for you, butI can do many things in Linux at least for my needs. I've been using Linux for 21 years.

Thanks for the feedback and the podcast recommendation! I’ll definitely be adding it to my queue.

There is a lot to agree on here. Thank you for the podcast! I certainly agree that the distro-obsessiveness is absurd, and there should be more of a focus on applications. And there is so much overlap and duplicated effort in every area of software in the Open Source world.

I tend to think that Microsoft's recent dalliance with "openness" is just a case of Embrace, Extend, Exterminate. Essentially, an attempt to get Computer Science students and Programmers to think of the Command Line, and Linux as an esoteric extension of Windows. But who knows what they are thinking.

Hi Knightwise. While for the most part I agree with your arguments about using cross platform applications, I think the title of this comment is as valid as the title of your episode : I can run Audacity on my linux desktop, I can run firefox and freemind and Visual Studio Code. So, my question is, should we dump Windows ?
And the answer is obviously "no", because both our questions are flawed. Should __I__ dump Windows ? Should __you__ dump linux desktop ? Now those are valid questions. I have personally made the choice to ban Windows from my house, because I can do everything __I__ need on a linux desktop. You said that you can't write documents or make presentation on Linux and that is a perfectly valid reason for __you__ to dump the linux desktop. But as a general rule, no, __we__ should not dump any desktop, be it macOS, Windows, Linux, or any of the exotic ones. As you said in this episode, it's all about choice.

Also, you mentioned OpenOffice in this episode. I really hope you meant LibreOffice. Because OpenOffice... well... need I say more ? By the way, LibreOffice runs on windows, mac, linux and android. Another great example of cross platform software.

Anyway, thanks for sharing your thoughts, and even though I don't agree with all of them, I appreciated your point of view.

This was a great episode. Lots of listeners including myself are interested in the legal aspects of hacking. Thanks for the deep dive.

One of my _other_ favorite podcasts is related to this episode - http://faif.us/

I am aware of the conference, but frankly I haven't seen anything in the schedule that would draw me there. It's a mix of corporate promotion, blockchain and random student projects ... nothing about languages or development frameworks or services, which is what interests me the most. I don't feel a free software pulse there, no work toward building a Hong Kong free software community.

Hi clacke,

Yes, thanks for the link. I thought "I put that link in my notes", went and looked and found I'd messed it up, so I just fixed it :-)

The show is number 15 in the series and is now on the site as https://hackerpublicradio.org/eps.php?id=2824

I heard your comment again on the Community News and discovered that you were talking about awk coprocesses also, not just backticks. :-)

I didn't know about them! Looking forward to the episode.

For anyone wanting to read ahead of the class, the documentation page is here:

https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/html_node/Two_002dway-I_002fO.html

I didn't mention Hugo Weaving because a superhero movie is a credible source for accuracy, but for reference because he happened to be accurate. :-)

This is the kind of episode I'd love to have played on NPR or some de facto talk radio station. On the one hand, it's "preaching to the choir" here on HPR, but then again, the topic is actually bigger than just podcasting. Where have all the blogs gone? the little indie websites and fansites? The Internet in general is a lot more cookie-cutter now than I think it was ever meant to be. As Dave Morriss says in an earlier comment, it's up to us to keep grassroots alive.

Yes, that's why the dollar-paren was introduced. Backquotes can be nested too, but that requires escaping them with backslashes and we don't want to go there if we can avoid it.

Apart from the nesting thing, I find dollar-paren easier to read, especially when enclosed in double-quotes, as it usually is.

I thought that one difference between the two is that dollar-paren trims any trailing newlines, but it turns out I was wrong -- they both do that, so the difference is purely about quoting and readability.

This is a great rant, Knightwise, but you don't spend any time talking about what Adam has been up to lately, which is EXACTLY the kind of podcast you are encouraging all of us to create and explore. From your handle, I assumed you were also a Knight of the No Agenda Roundtable, but you failed to even mention Adam's twice a week podcast done with the cranky geek himself John C. Dvorak. You need to hit more people in the mouth about the No Agenda Show (http://dvorak.org/na) Noagendashow.com

Consider yourself clobbered, dude!

Hi Knightwise,

Interesting show. I started listening to podcasts in 2005 or thereabouts. I'd just bought our first family PC (Windows, yuk!), signed up to my first ISP, and had started looking for stuff to listen to. I bought my first MP3 player that year, an iRiver iFP-899, and was using Juice or similar as my podcatcher.

Yes, I listened to the Daily Sourcecode and to Dave Winer (originator of RSS). Some great times!

I also remember Pirate Radio from the 1960's. I was at school in Norfolk, in the east of England, and we all listened to Radio Caroline (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Caroline) and Radio London (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wonderful_Radio_London) from ships off the east coast. I'd listen to Veronica at times, but not a lot since it was in Dutch and the signal wasn't as good as I recall. Also good times though!

Thanks for the memories ;-)

Though I hate the Capitol Onr commercials, they have something new and notable. Their ENO product is a credit card that gives you a new credit card reference number for each vendor you buy from, so if your credit gets stolen, you only lose the one reference number, and all the other bills you pay with your credit card are unaffected. On top of that, you know which vendor compromised your credit card.

you have the cable and case, but you need a USB-C hub / dock to connect your old usb stuff, you can get them at various websites:
https://www.usb-c-adapters.nl

Now that mandatory pirate speak has been done, I can comment. There's market for both kinds of podcasts, grassroots ones and more slick and commercial ones. Latter ones won't disappear as long as there's money to be made, so it's our task to keep the more grassroots style alive.

Thanks clacke, I enjoyed this a lot. Nice to be on the receiving end of the Bash info for a change ;-)

Command substitution:
It's my understanding that the newer $() form is an improvement on the older `` form largely because the substitutions can be nested. At least, when I found it years ago I was excited to be able to nest them! I assume it's nestable because the new form is easier to parse.

coproc:
This seems cool, though a little involved. I'd looked briefly but hadn't really thought about the feature. Thanks for covering it.

Since b-yeezi and I have awoken the Awk series from its hibernation recently, I'm going to cover redirection and Awk's coprocess feature as well. Episode 15 is almost ready to be recorded and uploaded.

Dave, sorry it took me so long to respond to your very thoughtful comment. I appreciate the link to the self-playing instruments video podcast. There are some really good ones in there. I'm especially impressed by the Self Playing Steinway Duo-Art Piano - recorded by Sergei Prokofiev. That one is nearly as faithful to the actual playback as the Yamaha Disklavier, but is limited by the length of the paper that is recorded on. It's an analog equivalent, incredibly accurate in its reproduction. There were earlier ones, too. That whole phenomenon would merit an entire series but I don't know that much about it haha!

Hi Windigo, thanks for the comment. Yes, I did work at the Library of Congress in the summer of 1993 as a "Junior Fellow," a paid internship that was quite prestigious. I don't know if they still have this or not. It was an amazing gig for a musicology nerd to get to work in the Music Division helping to process the recently acquired archives of Aaron Copland. Maybe this *is* worth an episode of its own!

First of all, this has been one of my favorite shows of all time. What a fascinating musical instrument, not to mention a cool piece of technology!

But then you drop this in nonchalantly:

"I was working at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, one Summer..."

Dude, it's possible that you've covered this elsewhere, but I'd listen to a whole show about how that happened. It's always great to hear from you!

I love listening to this series and started wondering, how applicable and/or easy would it to adapt these topics in non-fictional story that isn't a story at all? If there's a book that teaches readers about programming, can some of these topics be still relevant? Could a study book build towards some climatic revelation that is hinted more and more as it comes closer and then revealed in all its glory?

Great start for the series! I love learning how people are learning new skills like programming languages.

Glad you found it useful. While you can use it alone, it's also useful with tools like PsExec from the Sysinternals suite. I might do an episode about that particular command as well. That suite has so many tools but PsExec is the one I use the most.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/

You could probably create a batch file or Powershell script to go through a list of hostnames and have them reboot/shutdown remotely.

Whoops I thought I said hundreds or thousands, not hundreds *of* thousands. ^_^

You said you could listen over the internet no mater how many 100s of thousands of miles away you are. What moon/planet would that be? :)

Sorry, I could not resist.

It was an interesting show, thanks.

Hi Jon,

I loved this! It's a magnificent instrument. I never knew there was anything quite so sophisticated.

I watched the 'Music Machine Mondays' on the Wintergarten Youtube channel a couple of years ago. They visited the Speelklok Museum in Utrecht and looked at the marvels there (playlist at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLLYkE3G1HEBO1slIc1RRfcfSsGyv2oMu) but this Disklavier is a significant evolution of these machines.

Listening to your show I was reminded of a thing I liked to listen to when I was a kid: 'Sparky's Magic Piano' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparky%27s_Magic_Piano). It was often on the radio on Saturdays on a children's music programme. This was probably in the 1950's.

I was slightly puzzled by the pronunciation of "Disklavier", thinking it should be pronounced the French way. A bit of Googling proved me wrong - and you right of course! In my defence I used to live in an area of rural England with many villages named after Norman French families which were pronounced strangely (to my ears). My favourite was Little Hautbois, an easy cycle ride away, called by the locals 'Hobbis'! (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Hautbois)

I’m not by far music “literate” but the technology in this is so mesmerezing. I’m wondering it the tech exists for other types of instruments, i.e. wind, percussion.

But remember, in 1722 Bach wrote Das Wohltemperierte Klavier, and at the time the "piano" as an instrument did not exist. It had to mean either keyboard or harphsichord or clavichord. Keyboard is most generic.

Thanks for the insight. There's a scheduled power outage at work next month, and with this I can make sure everybody's workstation is shut down properly without running around and looking at power lights.

Hello folks,

Diskette is the German word for floppy disk.

Klavier is the German word for piano.

Tastatur is the German word for keyboard (at least in terms of computers).

A pianos keyboard would be called Klaviatur.

So Disklavier can be split into Diskette and Klavier.


Thanks for the fine show :-)

Music to ears, literally. That disklavier must be really high tech as it can replicate playing so well. And watching the video of disklavier playing was really nice bonus. This reminded me of time when as a wee lad I made a trip to museum of mechanical music and they had completely mechanical piano that could play different dynamics, flourishes and what not.

Take it from someone who records shows on their mobile phone: Your audio quality is great. :-)

More on what local variables are and how they work in episode http://hackerpublicradio.org/eps.php?id=2807 .

As a Scandinavian, I can say that your pronunciation of Yggdrasil is entirely accurate, and if anyone doubts it, they can hear Hugo Weaving pronounce it in much the same way in "Captain America: The First Avenger", which by coincidence I saw only a few days later.

Thanks for the podcast. I learned a lot. These protocols are fascinating, because to the end user, a few bytes here or there seem to be insignificant. But across the entire network, a few bytes here or there can add up to millions of dollars.

Oh, and the audio is great.

Thank you for the comments and episode idea. Haskell certainly is drastically different language compared to many others and learning curve can be steep. Sometimes it feels like I'm reading a math paper when I want to check for some feature or learn a new thing.

I'll make a note and record an episode "Why Haskell" at somepoint in close future. There's quite many Haskell episodes in the queue and I don't want Hacker Public Radio turn to Haskell Public Radio, so it might take a month or two.

Hi Knightwise

Whenever we are in the market for a new computer I think we inevitably want to get as close to the latest technology as our budget will afford. However, I think that can lead to a subconscious over-specification of our requirements as a way of justifying the purchase.

A few years ago I had selected a very nice Sony laptop that I convinced myself was exactly what I needed to support my work. Unfortunately an unforeseen breakdown of my car meant I had to spend roughly half of my budget to get it fixed and back on the road.

I still needed a new laptop but the Sony was now out of the question. I revisited my requirements and realised that many of my "must haves" were really "would like to haves". If it took a minute or two longer to rip a DVD did it really matter? If it took an extra few seconds to open a very large image-laden document was that really the end of the world?

By adopting this approach I found I was able to purchase a Dell rather than a Sony with what was left of my budget and its few relative shortcomings were almost immediately forgotten.

I've been writing software for over 30 years but I find the syntax of Haskell anything but intuitive - in fact less so than any other programming language I have looked at. Thanks to your excellent show notes I can make sense of it but I have to say I would not like to have to develop a project using this language.

Obviously I am missing the point as nobody would design a language with the intention of its being difficult to use. Perhaps you could produce another episode addressing the question "Why Haskell?"

An excellent episode for all that.....Thanks.

long time listener almost first time comment.

I wanted to say I've always enjoyed your podcast. I don't read books or play d&d but I do watch a fair amount of TV and movies.

You can hear the amount of passion and what you're explaining and I personally feel almost smarter when I can go back and understand why a story I remember was great or horrible!

Interesting. I am right now learning how to use Wireguard for end-to-end encryption. Wondering how it works in IPv6. Different approach but similar goal.

I have not used Gentoo on well over 10 years. Could you do a show about why you are using Gentoo and how it compares to debian/ubuntu/fedora/...?

You expressed some concern about your microphone, but there was no problem with your audio. Loud and Clear.

Great show. I hope you do more podcasts on any of the topics you mentioned in the show. Don't hesitate to give detail!

I hadn't ever heard of CJDNS or Yggdrasil before, so I learned more today (and I'm not even done with morning coffee). I would love to hear more on what one could do with mesh networks (broad topic, I know).

Nice job, man. I never knew about the different charging levels for different types of vehicle batteries. I always just bought one that fit, and threw it in.

I'll be more careful next time.

This is sure to come handy. We're driving only short distances with car and while it hasn't yet damaged the battery, I suspect it will eventually do that. I'll have a look at the type of the battery and see if smart charger would be a good idea. Thanks for the information, I wouldn't have learned this otherwise I think.

Thanks Klaatu, this really made my week. I try to work on the game at least a little bit every day, but sometimes progress feels super-slow. I do like building mechanisms that mimic places and their inhabitants and hopefully eventually allow emergent stories to pop up. Until that day, it's slow work of adding one more cog to the machinery.

This is just so cool. The worldbuilding part makes me want to write a script to generate random solar systems with unique planets and constellations.

I love this project, keep going!

klaatu, remember that inertia is the most powerful force in the universe.

I guess I could have looked up fdisk. Thanks for overlooking my laziness.

Very enlightening about the C drive! I can respect extreme backward-compatibility, so I don't mind that they don't reclaim A or B. That said, the scheme is pretty stupid. I'm surprised it stuck around, but I guess once they'd made the decision, they just figured it was too late to change. It seems the more I learn about the historical Microsoft, the more I feel like it was started with no prior research, but then again maybe I'm biased because we live in such an open source world. After all, maybe back in the early 80s you couldn't just call up Bell Labs and ask if the way you're programming disk detection made sense or not.

Klaatu mentioned he wasn’t sure what the ‘f’ in ‘fdisk’ stood for. I had always been positive it stood for “format” because DOS had an fdisk command and that was pretty much its main use. However, I looked it up just now and turns out I was wrong, it stands for Fixed, as in Fixed Disk Setup Program.

He also seemed unsure of the reason why the main hard disk is usually C in Windows machines. PCs would originally boot off the floppy drive, which was always A, and for convenience, a second floppy drive was often added and it was always B. So the hard drives started with C. I don't think there's any technical reason A and B haven’t been reclaimed, but when I read `A:` or `B:` in a path, I still think “floppy disk”. At any rate, the whole scheme is sad and dumb!

There is an open source project called LessPass that is trying to solve the password management problem in much the same way that you are describing. Passwords are generated in a deterministic and algorithmic way using a master password, some known values related to the site, and some cryptography.

There are two challenges that I see with this concept. The first one, that you made reference too, is how do you write an algorithm that will generate a password that will be acceptable to the policies of any site.

The second is, how do you deal with sites that insist that you change your password from time to time? In order to do that, you about have to change your algorithm, which means that all your other passwords will be broken.

If these two problems can be solved, I'd be all for this type of password management.

It's been a while since I set up my email - server with SPF, DKIM and DMARC. Since I'm about to migrate it to another server this has been a valuable reminder of what SPF is about.
I also think it is much clearer than every guide I read at the time I had to set it up.

Well written by deepgeek and well read and extended by Klaatu - Thank you two!

I used this episode to help me understand why some of my email was ending up in people's spam box. I added an SPF record, and now all is well! Thanks.

I'm glad this helped, Steve.

You're not the only one this episode has helped. I've referred back to it at least fortnightly since posting it!

Page 19 has 3 tables (2-1 through 2-3) with a summary of bonus values for race, themes, and class.

I think two lessons learned:

0. use the official character sheet when building a character for the first time
1. actually read

This was way deeper episode than what I expected after listening couple more minutes. Really great, albeit sad at the same time (just like life) show.

Reminds me time when I started role-playing games and how I as a dungeon master couldn't bring myself to actually get players killed, but had to always come up with a some way to save them. Players had fun, but challenge wasn't really there.

NO, NO, NO!

This is likely to be an accessibility nightmare and might well render it impossible for blind participants like me to read the notes at all.

I admit I rarely consult the notes, except for shows with a *strong* hacker twist, like the shows about xsd or Dave's bash series of shows.

Anything which is likely to have links, such as links to github repositories, or fragments of code I might like to copy and paste and fiddle about with.

I can't imagine that other people who refer to show not3es for clicking on links will be helped by embedding text into media files either.

And while on the subject, I have not seen this yet on HPR I think, but when anybody includes the output from cli stuff in show notes, posting screen-shots of console or terminal output also makes it impossible for me to access the text.

Keep the show notes as separate text please and don't embed them into media. If you do, maybe we can have them as both.

Haha Sorry, Bill! Please do the show anyway. I think the foot pedal is actually working fine, it's just that I didn't realize it was switched over to the other channel while I was working on the amp and the foot pedal wasn't actually plugged in at the moment. I realized my mistake when I plugged the foot pedal in and stepped on it and suddenly saturation was working because it was on the right channel.

Thanks for the tip on the cleaner / lubricant. I think I will check with my audio engineering faculty guy and see if he's got a can sitting around that I can blast some into the pots without having to pay twenty bucks for a can myself. :)

Stealing a show I had planned, Jon!

http://media.gunmonkeynet.net/u/nybill/m/winter-to-do-list-fix-this/

All right, all right. You beat me to it fair and square.

BTW, there is contact cleaner that is specifically made for music gear and it does contain a lubricant. Its made by DeoxIT and the line of products is called Fader (Their font choice on 'Fader" looks awful familiar!

Also, I would say your saturation is not working properly, if at all. That thing should give you all the Hair Metal distortion you could ask for. :P

You might have a problem with the foot pedal. I had this same issue in the past. You might be stuck in NORM GAIN. And the pedal is not switching into LEAD GAIN (where the Saturation is).
The problem I used to have is, the 90 degree jack for the foot pedal does not retain/grip the cable in any way. Any tug on the cable can break a solder joint inside. Its something to check out. Its only a couple screws.

Good luck! And get some hair spray!

Hi Jeroen,

thank you for your talk about AS/400 systems . I was working with those magical machines for about a decade and I must admit it was truely enjoyable experience. Thanks again for bringing back good memories. Cheers. treboR

P.S. I don't know how about others but for me those machines will always be AS/400 no matter what new marketing name IBM would invent for them iSeries, System i, etc... ;-)

Great episode. The question is how to get the target audience (the people who'd be fooled by this kind of transaction) to listen to this. I think part of the problem is that people who are fooled by this sort of thing have no interest in learning about it.

Then again, maybe people-who-can't-be-bothered aren't the audience.

Either way, thanks for the walkthrough of the investigation. It's great to hear an example of methodical analysis.

Alison, I've been pleasantly surprised here in Hong Kong that if I ask the store clerks, they will generously allow me to boot from my USB stick to see how well Linux runs, no complaints whatsoever.

And that's lucky too, because last spring and summer when I was shopping for a new machine, I tried like ten of them before I found one where screen, Wi-Fi and touchpad were working without glitches and the machine didn't crash after a few minutes.

Just wanted to say thank you for this episode. I needed to reduce the size of a PDF today, and I knew right where to come and the necessary command was in the show notes. Worked perfectly.

Thanks for the comments, VulcanRidr, very glad to hear you enjoyed the episode. I've seen the RT-909 that you mentioned in catalogs and on eBay, and that would be a great tape deck to have. Takes considerably more space than the 707 and probably would not fit in my stereo rack because it would need room above it for those big reels to spin. I'd love to have one, though! I believe the YouTube Techmoan host has an RT-909 in his collection. If you do pull it out of storage and set it up, I hope you will do a response episode about it. I would love to hear that.

I listen to hpr on my android phone using antennapod (available at f-droid) and can see the shownotes and the links in the show notes take you to the website. Great application!

I listened to your RT707 podcast this morning on my way in to work. What a blast from the past...I have the RT909 (https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/uPsAAOSworNcRKPc/s-l300.jpg), the 10" reel version of the same tape deck that you have. I picked mine up in the mid-to-late 80s. Now I am racking my brain to figure out where I can pull it out of storage and set up. I want to go back and listen what I put on some of my tapes...

Comparing traditional music formats, LPs, reel tapes, etc to mp3s and oggs is like comparing "dead tree" books to e-books. With books, you have the physical sensation of a paper book...The smell of the book, the feel of flipping pages. Meanwhile, with music, not only do you have the spinning tape reels and the movement of the tonearm, but more than that, analog music has more depth and richness, and is generally a warmer ambience than digital music. But at the same time, I can put several hundred thousand digital tracks onto a device which fits in my shirt pocket, and only need a pair of headphones to partake.

Anyway, it is gems like this show that make me enjoy HPR. Thanks Jon!

--vr

This was really fun episode to listen to and it made me kind of want to play some roleplaying game again. The comment about charisma being least useful stat made me think how it depends on the game being played and the group. Some like shooting (or hitting, or magic missiling) everything that moves, while others like politics and intrigue. Probably best to have a chat before game to set expectations what kind of game people are generally looking forward to.

thanks for a wonderful episode

Wow, Dave, I REALLY wish you still had that Clarion tape machine! I love stuff like that. A portable reel-to-reel tape deck is definitely on my wishlist of vintage audio. Incidentally the YouTuber Techmoan did an amazing episode about the tape decks of Mission Impossible, featuring the Craig 212. Thanks for the feedback. :)

Thanks Jon. This was a wonderful voyage of nostalgia.

As a teenager I had a portable Clarion tape deck (https://www.radiomuseum.org/r/gbc_clarion.html?language_id=2) which I'd bought from my cousin. It got a lot of use and I learnt how to splice tape and make tape loops back then. I'd record the latest hit records off the radio to share with friends and family. I did some basic repairs on the player, and learnt to solder when the leads and plugs needed fixing. The Clarion died eventually and probably got junked sadly.

I always wanted - but never acquired - a big reel-to-reel player like a Grundig, Philips, TEAC, or whatever. Great to hear about your adventures in this area!

Thanks for your comment, Bookewyrmm. It's too bad about your Edison disc. If you enjoyed this episode about open reel tape, then you might enjoy one I did a few years ago about my Victrola in episode 1339.

Incidentally I recently discovered a guy on YouTube who does amazing videos about Legacy audio formats, a user called Techmoan. These are just awesome. I highly recommend subscribing.

I just finished listening to the episode, and wow! I love finding and listening to older media. The "Crown Jewel" in my collection is an Edison Record. Sadly it came to me broken, but I do have all of the pieces and the cardboard storage cylinder is whole, so even if I do ever find a player, I couldn't play it.

For those interested, here's a link to info on Edison Cylinder records

http://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/history-goldmoulded.php

Follow-up: research on the issue indicated that a non-functional tape counter in this machine was about 99% likely to be from a broken belt. The reels are direct-drive but a belt turns the counter. I got a replacement belt from eBay and installed it today, and I'm happy to report that it works perfectly now.

I spent probably most of the first half of the eighties playing Elite on the BBC micro. Or Donkey Kong, or writing code for it.

Last time I used one, or was it two, was to calculate the position of the Moon and steer a huge VHF antenna array to point at it, late eighties and early nineties. Wasn't ideal since the ADC port was only 11 bit, so no great accuracy with the Moon's position, could not have pointed Jodrell Bank with sufficient definition.

I could see back then.

I am very jealous of all of those classic 8-bit classic games at your fingertips. And all loading fast.

You must have been sick when the PSU blew up.

Last question...where can I find a wife like that?

Thanks for this wonderful episode. The bbc seems like pretty cool machine. more episodes on this please!

Cool, thanks for sharing! Very interesting episode.

Good episode!

Thanks for the show Andrew.
My first contact with any computer was the BBC in the "Big" class (Final year) at primary school. I can vividly remember playing Granny's Garden [1] when I was 9 or 10.
Then at secondary school while everyone was messing around with the new windows 3.1 i386 machines I spent _days_ on the only BBC left in the school typing code in from a magazine called quest [2]. The code was some sort of database programme but it never ever worked and so far above my skill set to debug it just sat on my 5 1/4" floppy destined to stay in my school bag until the end of time.
I actually gasped and swore when you jogged, well set a nuclear bomb off in my memory with the two words "Star dot". I had forgotten how simple the commands were.
Anyway please please do a follow up show. I would love to hear more about the BBC and see how much I can remember.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Granny%27s_Garden
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quest_(British_magazine)

I LOVED this episode! I like anything about retro equipment, making old stuff work again, using legacy equipment/formats. This was great. My own interest is mainly audio, but it's great hearing about any of these old tech products that are still usable or are being refurbished and loved again. Thanks. :)

Great episode. I'm jealous. So much nostalgia.

I actually bought a BBC Micro in about 1981(?) having previously owned an Acorn Atom (I think). What's more I still have the Beeb, though it's mouldered away many years in the attic. I bought the Z80 co-processor, the "Prestel adaptor" (modem in a beige box), a dual floppy disk drive and a bunch of other stuff including the RGB monitor. It was my main computer for many years.

It's been something I have been meaning to do for some time - resurrect these devices. The replacement of all the dead electrolytic capacitors might be more than I can manage, but I'll have a go. If not then I know I can buy a properly refurbished one off eBay ;-)

I hope you'll do more shows about your experiences with this magnificent machine.

I never actually owned BBC, but read about them a lot when I was kid. Especially Elite was touted as the best space game ever and BBC version being superior in every possible way. Thanks for making the episode, it sure resurrected bunch of old memories.

Hi Klaatu, I took some advice from our friend Dave Morris he suggested I might like to use the RSS feed to keep track of comments. I got hold of a simple RSS feeder on the Android play store. It seems to be working out great as I was alerted to your comment. Without the reader, months may have gone by before stumbling across your comments. Mashpodder is ripe for modifying especially since it's so well written with loads of good comments. I have plenty of unfinished projects so I can relate to what you are saying.

All the best
MrX

I've resumed using mashpodder for podcatching just recently.

The audio jack on my mobile failed (rending my mobile functionally useless as a podcast listening device), so I dug out an old media player loaded with RockBox, and I use it as my listening device. For one day, I tried loading it manually with podcasts, and then realised that I needed something to manage show downloads for me, and mashpodder is what I turned to.

I started modifying it so that it would run an arbitrary script (such as a conversion script) but got distracted. Maybe later....

Hi LnB,

Loved this show as ever. It got me thinking that I enjoyed "The Usual Suspects", and "Fight Club" as two well executed movies. Both had me going back to watch it again to see how they fooled me.

I would like to argue that "The Sixth Sense" took the premise of the unreliable narrator(s) and did something unique to set it apart from the other two. Namely they produced two entirely different films from the same series of pictures.

The first time I saw it I watched a Horror Film starring Bruce Willis, and saw a story about a man who discovers the truth.

The second time watching it I saw a Drama starring Haley Joel Osment, and saw a story about a boy struggling to accept he is different, having to deal with difficult situations and learning to trust again.

After listening to your show, I realised that this was only possible because both characters were Unreliable Narrators, one unknowing and the other using it as a tool to help.

Ken.

I'm one of the folks listening through the HPR back catalog (in descending order). Older episodes are often still relevant, and those that are a little "dated" are still fascinating from a historical perspective.

Like Ken mentioned, this is also a fantastic way to flesh out the tags and summaries on older episodes. It only takes a few extra minutes per show!

Thanks Yannick, I really enjoyed listening to this. Very well done.

It was also great to hear Jeroen on the Community News again. For the record the HPR "muggers" at OggCamp 2018 that suggested he join us were JWP and myself ;-)

I caught something a bit like flu just after Christmas - but it can't have been flu because I had my flu shot. Anyway, the notFlu, or its aftermath, is still hanging on three weeks later.

A very informative episode. I hadn't realized how different the shutdown command functions on illumos-based operating systems is from the BSDs and Linux. You've also inspired me to make an HPR episode on a similar command with the same name in another OS I have to use from time to time.

Hi yes indeed wonderful microphone, unfortunately, I've never had the pleasure of using such a mike myself. The picture was actually to show an example of a radio with a moving analogue tuning needle that moves across the front of the radio, the microphone just happened to be in the picture.

The AVO meter is indeed a classic and something I have personally used on numerous occasions many years ago, they look like something out of an old horror film and are very heavy, built to last.

Best wishes MrX

Many thanks for the comment much appreciated
Very sorry for taking so long in replying I'm not very good and checking for new comments probably for the same reason that I didn't include the interesting noise from my tuner. Afraid it all boils down to time or lack of it as I would have had to set things up and make a separate recording and I was just keen to get the show finished my apologies, again the same reason for not giving audio examples of the noise blanker. Also thanks for the information on relays having never owned a modern HF radio I assumed they would be silent, thanks for the clarification

Best wishes MrX

Joel H,
I just read your comment and looked at "The Stanley Parable". I think this would work just fine in a first person exploratory game. As I've thought it about this and games more, I can't think of a game type this wouldn't work in, actually.

First person mode would be interesting in the thoughts could switch from initially being in the native language but switching to the new language as progress is made. That's sort of the ideal situation I suppose in general. If you can think in the new language I suppose you've won.

Yes, I just saw that on Mastodon. Thanks for the heads-up.

Oh boy, lots of fun for me, infinite vistas of tedium for my audience ;-)

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-bash/2019-01/msg00063.html

BASH 5,0!!!

Thanks for the comment and offer, Scott. I'm more a coffee drinker, and rarely in Cincinnati any more, but drinking and talking about tech is pretty much my favourite pastime. So if I'm in the area I will absolutely broadcast it on the HPR mailing list so I can take you up on your offer!

This is a very cool feature which I use a lot!

I'd approach your example with a little script, 'pathparse' which shows you don't need 'dirname' or 'basename':

$ cat pathparse
#!/usr/bin/env bash

path="$1"

directory="${path%/*}"
filename="${path##*/}"
prefix="${filename%.*}"
suffix="${filename#*.}"

printf '%-9s: %s
'
'Directory' "$directory"
'Filename' "$filename"
'Prefix' "$prefix"
'Suffix' "$suffix"

$ ./pathparse /etc/apt/sources.list
Directory: /etc/apt
Filename : sources.list
Prefix : sources
Suffix : list

Nobody emailed me revealing that they found the hidden object. To be fair, there wasn't much time, it was around the holidays, and people are busy. I should look at the server logs to see how many people actually downloaded the sample PDF containing the payload.

I believe that most listeners consume HPR from RSS and never see shownotes (and all of my subtle hints that there was more than meets the eye about this mini-series were only in shownotes).

Anyway, it was a fun experiment, and interesting data about both steganography and the PDF format.

Didn't know about Substring manipulation

Also found out why the following works


filepath=$(dirname -- "${source}")
filename=$(basename -- "${source}")
extension="${filename##*.}"
filename="${filename%.*}"

Solid work klatuu, if you're ever in the Cincinnati area, I'd like to buy you a beer and pick your brain - Scott

Great episode. I have already started using this tip in my Tiny Tiny RSS instance.

Thanks for the informative episode! I've bumped up against the AS/400s a few times in my life, but never managed to find out what they were all about.

I feel this was a great intro, and I will be poking around the museum to learn more.

we need to know.

Quilt sounds really neat. I can't wait to try it.

Thanks for a great episode!

https://docbook.rocks/
Is a neat site talking about docbook and how great it is.

This was a fascinating peek behind the scenes. I love hearing how open source musicians produce their music, and I loved the samples of the music at the beginning. Very cool!

I've asked, I've skimmed wikipedia pages, but until you explained the isolation of the main CPU, with controllers for other tasks, I never understood exactly what a mainframe was. So thank you.

Also, thanks for the clear explanation of how to get started with this. I heard about the Open Mainframe project (https://www.openmainframeproject.org) and kinda poked around there, but I think I'll give Hercules a go before Open Mainframe's Zowe.

Great episode on Slackware, thanks.

I have written a guide on the post-install process here:
http://slackermedia.info/handbook/doku.php?id=user

I should probably go to the Slack wiki and merge it into the official docs, but I'm not sure what the protocol is for total re-writes of someone else's content. Anyway, it's available in the Slackermedia handbook, and covers most of the absolute necessary tasks as well as some GUI customisations.

Nice one, this will come in handy. Thank you for posting

Many years ago I was told by a professor that all really important questions come down to epistemology, i.e., how do we know what we know? I have come to see the truth in that statement. I'm glad you also see that Klaatu.

Thanks for the comment, Klaatu. I guess this works because I always pick topics I am interested in, and I suspect that is what makes it interesting to others.

This ought to be required listening for everyone before they are allowed on the Internet, or out of their front door.

My Illumos response is episode 2725. Enjoy, and thanks both JWP and ClaudioM for the comparisons.

I don't encounter CSV all that often, but this is a great tool to know about. Thanks!

I'd heard of odroid, but this has been a great review of one, with lots of useful hands-on information. Thanks for this. Eventually, I assume my Pocket Chip will die, and since the company that created it is no more, I can foresee wanting a replacement. These ultra-portable systems (some Pi-like device with a screen and some method of input) are really really useful on the 20 hour flights from New Zealand to the East Coast of USA that I end up having to make once or twice a year for some tech conf.

Thanks for yet another straight-forward and informative episode, jwp. I always wondered about the `halt` thing, since on Slackware I'd learned (probably from the Slack book) `shudown -h now`

ClaudioM: OpenIndiana uses the original Sun shutdown command (at the time of this writing, at least; I know a lot of CDDL stuff is is systematically getting replaced, but I'm not sure if 'shutdown' is on that list), and its options are pretty basic.

Oh heck, I'll just go record an episode about it.

Listening to this episode made me feel really smart, mainly because of all the science-y terms like "control group" and "double blind". Once I past feeling like I was now an expert in scientific studies, I realised that this topic is actually a broad topic and can even, in many ways, be applied to a lot of things in life, possibly software testing and usability studies. I'd love to get a job some time where I could just test people's reactions to various interface designs, or to arbitrary limitations imposed on software, and so on.

Thanks for this series; I never thought of myself as being interested in health care and science, so it's been unexpectedly intriguing.

I love this retro version of the intro music. Really cool episode, too. I was not familiar with AS/400, and I don't know much about mainframes, so this was a fascinating overview. Thank you!

Thanks for this excellent overview. I find steganography fascinating but never thought about the workflow. This episode is a great way to focus on the steps and tools involved.

Thank you for this to steganography. It is a topic that I've heard of and gave it little thought until this show. I'm interested in what you will come up with for your next episode.

It was a Novell server.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/04/12/missing_novell_server_discovered_after/

Thanks for this.

I just listened to the show and immediately thought of several applications of xsv in what I do. I have installed it and am learning my way around it. Definitely a great addition to the toolkit.

On the Heartland Info Web Pages, I've posted:

"Radio Shack 150-in-1 Science Fair
Electronic Project Kit

"RECOMMENDED PROJECTS, sorted by difficulty...
with
"Additional tips..."

at: http://www.harris1.net/info/sci_tech_health/RadioShack_150in1kit.htm

It's my "Quick Guide to the best of the 150 projects in this kit, with the list organized from most basic to most advanced, of the 69 best projects for people learning electronics."

This should help electronics beginners and novices, struggling to learn electronics from the poorly organized manual -- which starts with rather advanced topics, and scatters the basics all over the place.

As a tech instructor, looking to hand my old kit of to a newbie, thought I'd take the time to sort it out for him -- and this is the result.

At bottom of chart is a lengthy collection of "tips" for novice experimenters, whether using this kit, or not.

Comments and (civil) corrections welcome.

~ RH of harris1.net

As usual, Klaatu does an excellent job in presenting software. I particularly enjoyed when he said "You could do this, but you shouldn't." This is true in so many situations.

I wasn't aware of odroid-go until listening to this episode. Thanks for recording it and spreading information. While games are fun (I like gaming a ton), I would imagine coding for this device is where I would have the most fun. For a long time I have been fascinating about idea of taking my programs with me and carrying them around, using them when I want to.

What a brilliant tool and a great show.

This has come at a good time for me as I am deep into a large screen-scraping project which is yielding complex CSV files with many columns.

Like b-yeezi I frequently get involved with textual data manipulation in all kinds of formats. I did not know about xsv and have often had to guess the ordinal position of specific columns, and have to do all kinds of slicing and dicing operations.

Not easy at the best of times, and time consuming. All the more so if you can't easily guess the column position because you can't see.

So the timing of this show is great for me. And this is real hacking.

But I'll answer very quickly here:

1. Invoice in fiat, cryptocurrency as a medium for transfering value.

2. Yeah, that's why we didn't do that. If currency needs to be all of medium for value transfer, store of value, and unit of accounting to be currency, then most raw cryptocurrency simply isn't currency.

3. Hoo yes.

Ah I see. I always referred to the Over the Wire link I put in above.

There really isn't any other way to know what is expected of you for the level. Some levels leave you in an empty home dir. Some Levels you need info from the OTW page you'll copy/paste in.

Yes, I bet you were having quite a hard time without reading that!

I know I said, if you get really stuck, there are web sites out there with full bandit solutions on them. But, I don't feel reading the OTW web site for the level goal, then researching commands or tools to solve it on your own is cheating.

How else did we all learn any of this stuff. Figure out what needs to be done, and how a thing works, then manipulate it! Hacking. ;)

A nice, succinct episode. One thing to note, though, is that the switch for poweroff on BSD is "-p" (lowercase p) which is different than it is for Linux which is "-P" (uppercase P). Not sure what it is on illumos-based distributions since I haven't used those yet.

So I approached it from the point of view that this was a system we needed to access and had to figure out the answer without clues. I don't know where I got this idea, but I thought I heard someone explain it like that. "If you get stuck then go to the website".

So I was stuck on six for a long time as a result.

Now at 11. The problem now I searched for "some tool I know I need" plus "something I need to answer". The result was obvious but I now feel like I cheated. So am deciding if I should come up with another solution ?

I'm not sure what you mean here, Ken. Its not a question... if its a statement, I do read the website at the start of the next level.

BTW, if anyone got up to 27 last time. Well, they changed 26. So, there is a nice extra bit of challenge to that level now too.

Currently stumped on 32... for 3 days now. :P

Good fun!

You are Supposed to read the website at the start of the next level.

Sorry, Alison, I only just saw your comment.

Network Proxy configs: I don't have trouble with it, but I also have a VPN available to me; maybe that gets around some wonky network setups. I have not had a problem in airports, universities, hotels, conference centers, or really anywhere that I can think of.

Test-drive Linux in store: I do this as a matter of habit. If I'm in a store with computers for sale, I usually reboot at least one PC to Linux just to keep tabs on what works out of the box these days. It seems rare for UEFI of display models to be locked down, so I open the UEFI UI, disable Secure Boot, reboot to Linux, test stuff, and then re-enable Secure Boot to avoid what would be vandalism (I have no interest in giving Linux geeks a bad name - "keep an eye on that one, he'll break our display models until corporate sends somebody to fix them")

I've only been approached/reprimanded once for doing this. I calmly explained that I was testing Linux, which I require for work, because I was considering a purchase. The salesperson did not stand down, so I calmly rebooted and later sent an email to the store manager telling them that Linux is a real OS that real people in the area use at work, so the sales team ought to be made aware of it. I haven't had a problem since in that store (Warehouse Stationary in NZ, for the record).

Otherwise, no one has ever bothered to approach me about it. I guess if I was nervous about it, I might try to find a sales person and explain what I needed to do, and why, and then ask if I may demonstrate the process, walking them through everything as I did it. Throwing fancy words around, like "programmer" and "software developer" and "C++" might help dazzl le them into submission.

Either way, it's worth a shot.

Thanks, I'm kind of fond of the idea too. Ideas of course are cheap and actual implementation is the tricky part. But I'm trying to get at least very minimally working system up and running at somepoint. Main idea is just to explore idea of writing such a game and learn a bit Haskell and Elm on the side.

This sounds like it would be kind of an amazing game, actually. I hope it happens. If not, it's still a neat idea.

And thanks for the taste of Haskell. I've been mildly curious about it for a while, so it's nice to hear something substantial about it.

I'm glad I could be of help. My purpose in this series is to say that we can take charge of our health rather than be passive victims. Then I can offer some tools to help in that. You just need to make a decision.

Glad you found the show(s) useful and are using Bash regular expressions and capture groups.

Parsing JSON with Bash is a challenging task to take on though, I use jq to do this myself - or the JSON module in Perl of course ;-)

Very good episode about some functionality I always vaguely knew was there, but never considered using or even looking into.

Lo and behold, within a week after listening to it, I have already made use of my new-found knowledge to parse some predictably-formatted JSON!

I ran into issues with quoting the expression, and worked around them by assigned the expression to a variable and referring to that variable in the conditional.

Now I'm listening to #2669, and I understand exactly why it went wrong.

For the sake of readability, I actually think the assignment workaround was the best way to express it.

Found this and, of course, this is NOT a new idea.

https://youtu.be/SlgOsqlInpc?t=794

That I often face Ahukas shows with trepidation given I know what he's likely to say and I'm not wanting to hear it. The old "head in the sand trick worked for grandpa so it's good enough for me". But then you listen and the advice is always good and doable. Now I just feel guilt for not doing it.

Ahuka,
I have a couple(3?) of the conditions you've described and I found myself being more and more convinced as this episode went on I could make lifestyle changes, too.

Thanks, man.

Thank you for being so open with this.

I'm absolutely going to do this at home!
Thanks a lot!

Wow.

Ha!! Hilariously short, sweet, and to the point! Thanks, Ken and kids! :-)

I've never made much use of 'live' media except for installation and system rescue, but I found the ideas shared by Klaatu particularly thought-provoking. I have been travelling and wanted to perform some simple task like airline check-in from a lobby computer but hesitated over using Windows of any flavor for anything. It would be fun to at least try to reboot these machines as Linux, but don't things like network proxy configuration screw up such attempts?

It would also be fun to test-drive Linux on PCs or laptops in computer stores, but don't staff wander by and tell the perpetrator to stop? And doesn't secure-boot stop such attempts anyway?

I'm curious therefore, Klaatu, on what kinds of systems has this approach been successful? Older, pre-secure-boot PCs?

Hi Fifty,

Oh yes, English is difficult. It's rich and interesting (to me anyway) but it's a beast as well.

Yes to affect/effect. I thought it was in my list, but it was not.

British vs USA stuff: As I have aged I have tried very hard not to do the finger pointing and criticising of US English. I try to be critical across the board...!

In the 1980's I went to a conference run by Burroughs (when we had a mainframe at my work) and the speaker (from the US) said the word "instantiate". Some British guy interrupted and criticised him, saying it was not a word, only to be shot down with a dictionary reference. He looked a fool I thought, and vowed to myself never to do that!

Ken illustrated my point well. Boston Dynamics might have scripted Atlas' latest test, but there is still nice progress in the last couple of years. Seems clear to me that soon he'll be able to navigate things as they come. Same with Watson. It won't take many doubling cycles before he stops making those types of mistakes.

And with AI, robots, automation, whatever you want to call it, the knowledge is transferable. Whereas, often us meat sacks, have to repeat the mistakes of our predecessors to relearn as they did.

Seems odd to me to look back at the tech improvements in just the past 20 years and not think these areas will be vastly improved upon, too.

Loved the addition of RMS' rendition. However, I didn't not intend to replace Ken's version.

OK, probably more than one, I can see why English is so hard if it is not your first language. Amazing we forced it down the world's throat as the universal tongue, over Latin and French. Yeah team Anglo?

Anyway, in a future episode, you should reference affect/effect. I also learned something else. No American would think of using tenant as a verb. That's another elephant in the room. In the US, we reference ourselves with a term that applies to an entire hemisphere. The topic abounds on YouTube, British vs USA culture. Maybe we should open this up internationally and ask for third parties to tell us why we are both farking nuts?

This is a respond to hpr2562 :: "I bought a laptop". Tangential to the main topic, I was intrigued to learn you are paid cryptocurrency. You did not mention which type, but given the volatility in the better known cryptocurrencies, I’m curious how that might effect one’s income. I’m sending this to your e-mail referenced on the HPR website, but I’m also posting these questions to the show comments, so any listener who gets paid in cryptocurrency can weigh in. I’d rather hear from community members whom a significant portion of their income comes in the form of cryptocurrency, but maybe someone who makes extra money from a hobby or side project can contribute their tales of fortunes won and lost. At this time, I’m not asking for stories from miners or people who lost their stash do to alleged malfeasance (i.e., Mt. Gox).

1. You said you were paid in cryptocurrency. Is this in the form of you get the equivalent of X Euros (replace with relevant national currency) a week based on the current exchange rate or is it fixed at Y units of cryptocurrency?
2. If the latter answer to #1, what happens if the bottom drops out of said cryptocurrency? Are you under contract, stuck working for nothing? I guess the corollary would be what happens when cryptocurrency goes so high the company can’t afford to pay you?
3. Has volatility in the cryptocurrency market effected your financial status. In other words, have you ever made plans based on a sudden uptick in your cryptocurrency savings, only to have them dashed when the bubble burst?

Almost a year ago, my non-techie friends started asking me about Bitcoin. By that time, Bitcoin was in it’s first stages of it’s upwards ramp. I really hadn’t been paying attention, but suddenly Bitcoin was all over the news as this magical money tree that no-one knew existed. I warned my friends that I thought the bubble was speculator driven, and would burst as fast as it had inflated.

I noticed that on my shows you kept saying "we'll get back to that", but I don't think you ever did. Did you have a comment to give?

I'm glad you found this useful. That is why I record shows, to share with the community.

Thank you for two excellent tips, both how to manage youtube playlists and the Iridium plugin. It works great!

The audio is goo quiet

Wonderful mic, and VERY classy meter! Great ep, over all!

I just wanted to leave a quick comment about this show!
I think the ideas and theories you presented in this episode are very good. With the contents of this episode alone, I believe someone could make an excellent video game. You've done a good job at working out edge cases and small details to encourage learning.

A point-and-click game sounds OK, but I was wondering about what you think of these ideas in a first-person exploration game, something similar to "The Stanley Parable"?

Thank you for doing this, I love these episodes. They keep me smiling and occasionally screaming at the podcast player. You can be such a sadist, you know? :-) When describing the tuner: "It's quite interesting to hear" - "I'm not gona do that..." Please let us hear! Sure you could find a way, like letting it tune up a dummy load or something.
On the same token, please use the radio in front of you to create audible examples. How does a signal sound, that is suffering from spark distortions and how is it improved by engaging the noise blanker?

Please don't get me wrong - the one who puts out shows is right. Your show, your choice. Please keep them coming the way you like to do them.

One more comment to the content: Hearing relays clicking is not necessarily attributed to the age of the transceiver. Even in modern gear the filter in the high power transmit path are switched by relays. I have seen "Relay switched band filter." for receive as a selling point to indicate that there is no negative impact from the switching diodes. These can affect RF performance under certain conditions.

Regards,
Michael

I install and use pdftk on Slackware, so far without any issue. It's good to know about its availability in snap packages, though...just in case.

Apologies Dave, It's a bug in the screen reader: reading one ampersand where there are two.
[I must dump all this proprietary as soon as possible.]

I don't see evidence of ampersand eating. Could you point to an example?

My earlier comment #5 had ampersands galore and they are all visible, unless I'm missing something. They are being turned into HTML entities of course, but that's what you'd expect.

It's eating ampersands too! Grrrrrrrrrrrrr!

Yes, there's a bug in the comment code (or what I call a bug).

I think that, in the spirit of avoiding the "Little Bobby Tables" error the comment text is being sanitised, but the sanitisation includes backslash removal.

You can include a backslash at the moment, but you need to double it: backslash ''

We'll have a look at this issue.

Dave

Thanks to Mad Sweeney and Stuart Little for commenting on this issue.

In the light of your comments my simple tests were these:

$ [[ 'axb' =~ a.b ]] && echo "Match"
Match
- The RE on the right uses '.' as a metacharacter

$ [[ 'axb' =~ a'.'b ]] && echo "Match"
- The "meta-ness" of the '.' is removed by quoting, so no match

$ [[ 'a.b' =~ a'.'b ]] && echo "Match"
Match
- Proving that a literal match works

$ re="a'.'b"
$ [[ 'a.b' =~ $re ]] && echo "Match"
- Now the match fails if the RE is in a variable

$ eval "[[ 'a.b' =~ $re ]] && echo Match"
Match
- Following Mad Sweeney's lead, the 'eval' substitutes in the contents of '$re' so it looks to the extended test like the literal string we used earlier, and thus it works.

My working hypothesis is that the Bash logic processing this can deal with quoted metacharacters in a "bare string" but isn't used when the RE is in a variable - or maybe in any case where expansion is needed to provide the RHS argument.

You'd have to think this was a bug I guess.

The quirk Dave refers to is that you can remove the meta-status of a character in a literal RHS by quoting it so abc'.'def only matches abc.def but not abcxdef, and that it seems there is no way to do that using a regex in a variable: in a variable you only have the traditional backslash escape which you can also use in a literal regex.

--Mad

Re: the previous comment by Mad Sweeney:

You can quote portions of variables on the RHS just fine, but for the match to work the overall pattern you're trying to match must not be enclosed in *outer* quotes. So for instance, the following modification of your script works fine (matches):

---
server="hackerpublicradio.org"

for re in
publicradio"."org
do
echo "Using regular expression: $re"
if [[ $server =~ $re ]]; then
echo "This is HPR"
else
echo "No match"
fi
done
---

Note that there are no outside quotes on publicradio"."org.

The issue was visible from the echoes given out by bash. When you received the message

Using regular expression: ^(hacker|hobby)publicradio"."org$
No match

you can see bash was searching for actual quotes around the period, which of course are not there in the string $server.

It also seems like HPR comments eats backslashes!
Here's my comment showing where backslashes should be.
Would be good if there was a preview comment option:

It seems the rule of quoted literals doesn't apply if the RHS is a variable. So a variable with a quoted "." would try to match a quote followed by . followed by another quote.
If you wanted to match a quote in a literal RE you would have to write {backslash}"{backslash}.{backslash}"
A literal RE "." would be like unquoted {backslash}.
The following Bash snippet illustrates:

#!/bin/bash

v=0
for r in '^a{backslash}.b$' '^a"."b$' "^a'.'b$"; do
((v++))
# matches var 1 only
[[ a.b =~ $r ]] && echo match var $v
# matches var 2 only
[[ 'a"."b' =~ $r ]] && echo match double quote $v
# matches var 3 only
[[ "a'.'b" =~ $r ]] && echo match single quote $v
# all 3 match
eval "[[ a.b =~ $r ]] && echo match eval $v"
done

Hi,

It seems the rule of quoted literals doesn't apply if the RHS is a variable. So a variable with a quoted "." would try to match a quote followed by . followed by another quote.
If you wanted to match a quote in a literal RE you would have to write "."
The following Bash snippet illustrates:

#!/bin/bash

v=0
for r in '^a.b$' '^a"."b$' "^a'.'b$"; do
((v++))
# matches var 1 only
[[ a.b =~ $r ]] && echo match var $v
# matches var 2 only
[[ 'a"."b' =~ $r ]] && echo match double quote $v
# matches var 3 only
[[ "a'.'b" =~ $r ]] && echo match single quote $v
# all 3 match
eval "[[ a.b =~ $r ]] && echo match eval $v"
done

I find the numerous ways of testing in Bash confusing. I have to look up the manual every time I come back to Bash scripting. I hope posting about it will help keep it in the brain.

--Mad

I haven't played MechWarrior online or the new BattleTech computer game (although the latter one is on my list of things to try out at some point). I love seeing new games coming out for the BattleTech world and getting new fans into BattleTech universe.

Love any show that talks about slackware. The network setup you suggested is the best way to go about it but if you want to use wicd you first must install it. If you have the slackware disk its in the extras folder and can de installed using installpkg. You don't need to go out to a repository its in the installation media, just not installed by default. Thanks for doing a show about slackware, support Pat!

I'm rather confused about why there's a reliance on any particular java runtime, but at least on debian, if i request pdftk to be installed, pdftk-java is installed, and yeah, no screwing around required.

It's a shame that PDFtk is basically going away because the GCJ runtime has been deprecated by most major distros. PDFTK still lives on as a Snap. Also, there is a fork that uses openJDK instead. You can reference this Stack Overflow post:

https://askubuntu.com/questions/1028522/how-can-i-install-pdftk-in-ubuntu-18-04-bionic

Sorry about that.

If you have any particular systemd problems, I could be poked into recording a show to help out with them?

Its an interesting topic you bring up. personally I am appalled by scarecrow tactics. I'd like to offer a different view. There is lots wrong with capitalism. First thing is that capitalists believe their system is the only answer. The hangover after our last industrial revolution gave us shorter working days, safety rules and employee rights at work. Currently there is lots of demand out there for sabbaticals or people taking a break. so hell yeah, give me a robot who does my job so I can recover from stress, spend time with my children or travel, do volunteer work. Why do we doubt Basic income? currently those breaks are only available for the rich or singles or childless. Have you seen a happy cashier? Have you heard a mine worker shouting: yes - let's continue ruining my lung instead of giving me proper training so I can work in a solar panel farm. and for the doctors! I have met so many who were an utter waste of my time. yes, give me the Watson system. I had to retrain in my job 3 times over the last 6 years. it has been hard. it doesn't have to be! As you say, Robots give us an opportunity to focus on the things that matter in life. We dont have to run anymore all the time. Robots guarantee a basic level of productivity. We can find better and creative solutions to provide proper pay for people who work in the care. We can focus on figuring out why our society still struggles with all kinds of abuse, why we do not trust anyone, why we feel the need to destroy our beautiful world. we have a universe to explore and the complex systems in our world. and if there is the odd person not willing to work, then that's okay too. People have reasons! Capitalists only know the word more. When will you read all the books that keep accumulating on your bookshelf because you shouted MORE. There is no time because I have to be social, I have to take care of children, because I have to declare taxes, have to have that lawsuit with my neighbour, have to go to work, have to cl

Here's another show I've recorded but didn't publish. I am in the process of editing this one though. You do a better job than I do, however. Perhaps I should sit back and revel in the fact that you're pulling my weight!

I enjoyed the show, and obviously agree. I'm still going to submit my episode; but will edit it touch on things you didn't.

I really do wonder if people can look at the rate of change in the rate of change and not think that it's accelerating and just about everything that looks too pitiful now to take over our jobs, will continue in that state forever.

In my mind you only need to look at Boston Robotics. People were citing the fact that Atlas kept falling over as evidence that he'd never perform as well as humans. A couple short years later and he's performing feats similar to parkour.

Can we really not imagine how a couple of cycles of Moore's law's worth of improvement looks?

What an improvement! I confess, I couldn't even finish the last ep due to the audio quality (and my standards are low), but this episode has fantastic sound. Great job!

Thank you for your comment! I'm glad that this episode still makes sense over five years after it was recorded.

Great tips. Seriously.

I need to temper this show with our HPR motto of "any audio is better than no audio.". We always put content over audio quality.

While this may loose us listners, it gains us hosts.

Sure always try and record the best you can, but dont ever let it get in the way of submitting the show. Perfection leads to procrastination. "It aint a show unless its on the server."

Do you have any ideas on how to solve these problems? I'll crawl under my rock now.

Great show, it's good to know there are other fans of Battle Tech out there! Do you also play MechWarrior Online and howndonyoi feel about the latest entry in the Mech Warrior single player game?

Jonas, thanks for sharing your method. I like the way you put the cinnamon right into the batter, instead of using it as a topping. I also liked your tip of using a cake decorating bottle.

lostnbronx, I am glad you got a good breakfast out of my episode.

I never thought of making the cinnamon sugar with brown sugar! I have always used white sugar. I'm going to try your way when my cinnamon sugar container is empty.

This is so good. Thanks for the show. I always wonder how other people make similar things I like.
As it happens, I just made crepes yesterday.
I have no idea why my Texas mom started making crepes, but I just remember having them at home as a kid.
I don't know if what I do is technically called a crepe but it's very crepe like, or maybe more super thin pancake like.
I'm not much of a measurer. I typically start with 1 to 1.5 cups flour and add a couple table spoons to 1/4 cup of sugar depending on the day. I also add lots of cinnamon. 1/4 teaspoon to a half table spoon. Again depending on the amount of flour, the sugar and cinnamon increases.
This is basically a dessert crepe.
After whisking the dry together with a 1/8 teaspoon of salt or or less, I add 3/4 cup of milk. If the mix isn't watery enough, add more milk until pretty thin. Then add an egg and beat in completely.
I have a gas stove, so I put the flame on to just above as low as it can go without going out. I let that heat a stainless pan for several minutes, while putting the other things together. More flame if you know what you're doing. You want the pan to be the right temp before putting in the first drizzle of batter.
I like to use a cake decorating bottle to put the batter in the pan. Get the bottles at Ross, a discount store, or at the dreaded Wal-Mart. You could probably enlarge the opening on one of the $.99 ketchup/mustard squeeze bottles, but they are not clear like the decorating bottles.

Just before putting the batter in the pan, swirl around then end of a stick of butter just enough to wet the pan. Start at the center of the pan with a splash of batter making an ever widening circle until you cover 2/3 of the pan. If the batter is thin enough it will spread itself. Otherwise you can pick up and jostle the pan to flatten more. I generally cook until the edges curl and the top starts looking less wet, then flip and cook the other side 10-20 seconds to firm up top side.

I just made a simple breakfast using your recipe. It was easy and delicious. I used brown sugar and cinnamon, and it was a hit. Great content, thanks for uploading!

This is a fine beginners list. It hits all the "big pieces" of the tools set and forms a solid foundation for continued learning. This is neat, succinct, and is an outstanding resource. Thanks for putting this together.

Top Man!
Many thanks for posting your information regarding systemd services. I've been pulling my hair out trying to work out why my pre-shutdown script would not fire. Then I found your post.
A very big thank you to you.

Hi NYbill many thanks for the comment glad you liked the show, yes as you could tell from the show I didn't know what a few of the controls did, so it will indeed be bewildering to start with. I've tried to fill in some of the gaps in the show notes,

All the best

Mrx

Hi thelovebug, many thanks for the kind comment glad you enjoyed the show, yes I couldn't believe what a difference it made swapping microphones.

Hi there,

i just listen a second time and say "Thanks for the effort made."

Ken, are you just now getting around to listening to this episode? Whoever thought this old thing would get brought back from the dead haha! Anyway yes, counterpoint is the art of combining melodies. :)

I never listen to my own shows via the feed, so I never listen to my whistling outro either.

As I hear it now, man does that bring back memories. I remember exactly where I was walking on the way to my bus to work as I was recording it. That was three homes, one country, three offices, three kindergartens and three years ago.

I can feel the chill from the November morning fog around Järfälla Church on my cheeks as I'm typing this.

I know that I accidentally set the sample rate too low when I recorded it (11.25 kHz, I believe), but hearing it now that sound quality is worse than I remember it. :-)

We could still allow people to add arbitrary intros, and just not do TTS-over-intro in those cases. But the idea to do TTS-over-intro on a list of prepared flexible-length intros is really cool.

As for me though, as you have noticed on my shows, I really like having a standardized intro as the unified HPR brand, while allowing some variation at the end.

I think I have to do a show on the whole issue of loops in pipelines. It's been in the "topics to cover" heap for a while but now it's being re-prioritised! I'll probably make it show 14 in the "Bash Tips" subset.

While it is true that we hosts could do more to manage our sound levels, the facts on the ground are that the intro music is louder than the average show.

I have thought often that the intro volume should be a bit lower, but never said anything.

That explains why it's a "stoop sale"!

(which is a garage sale, which is like a yard sale, if you live in Brooklyn ...)

I've stopped listening to Kvack! too. I like the people, and I enjoy listening to them hanging out, but in the limited time I have and the massive amount of content out there, that's not enough to put the podcast in the queue. It's too much opinion and too little education and insightful analysis.

I quite like http://theesp.eu/ as well, but it's also far from SGU levels in relevance and production values. Unfair perhaps, as SGU has over a decade of podcasting under their belt, but that's how it is.

Excellent pronuncation, Dave! You're spot on.

Compared to "kvalificerat hemligt", "skeptikerpodden" is trivial to say. :-)

As Dave points out, the while loop you describe would work if it weren't for ls issues. Here's what doesn't work:

items=()
produce_items | while read item; items+=( "$item" ); done
do_stuff_with "${items[@]}"

Oh, how many times I have made this mistake.

"items" gets updated just fine, in a subshell, and then after the pipe has finished executing, execution continues in the parent shell where the array is still empty.

Null-terminating and giving "read" the appropriate parameters is an HPR episode of its own, no doubt already made by Dave, or in his pipeline. ;-)

Hi, Ken! The following link will tell you more than you ever wanted to know about bagged milk. :) This is how milk is generally sold in Ontario, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick, and probably in the other Canadian Provinces and Territories as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milk_bag

touché

@Ken and @Dave
Take your comments and make a collaborative show of the material ;-)

I actually wrote:

_ffmpeg() { printf "ffmpeg %s %s %s
" "${@}"; }

but something removed the backslash.

I think the thing to take away is: Don't use 'ls' for this purpose. I might have said that before ;-)

One way to debug your problem (should you feel that avoiding 'ls' is not enough) might be this:

1. Create a function to display the arguments:

_ffmpeg() { printf "ffmpeg %s %s %sn" "${@}"; }

2. Run your pipeline thus:

ls *.mp3|while read i;do _ffmpeg -i "${i}" "${i}.wav" 2>&1;done

I tested things like this:

$ cd /tmp
$ touch {a..f}.mp3
$ ls *.mp3|while read i;do _ffmpeg -i "${i}" "${i}.wav" 2>&1;done
ffmpeg -i a.mp3 a.mp3.wav
ffmpeg -i b.mp3 b.mp3.wav
ffmpeg -i c.mp3 c.mp3.wav
ffmpeg -i d.mp3 d.mp3.wav
ffmpeg -i e.mp3 e.mp3.wav
ffmpeg -i f.mp3 f.mp3.wav

The names like 'a.mp3' are all coloured blue.

If I use the real 'ffmpeg' I get (output heavily truncated with only one file shown):

ffmpeg version 4.0.2-2 Copyright (c) 2000-2018 the FFmpeg developers
built with gcc 8 (Debian 8.2.0-7)
configuration: --prefix=/usr --extra-version=2 --toolchain=hardened

[snip]

libswresample 3. 1.100 / 3. 1.100
libpostproc 55. 1.100 / 55. 1.100
?[0m?[00;36ma.mp3?[0m: No such file or directory

The codes before and after 'a.mp3' are colour on/off codes.

Your environment will certainly be different of course, so your failures may not be the same.

Clear?

Polyphonic had a video about Scarborough Fair/Canticle: How Simon and Garfunkel Created a Timeless Song, and it struck me what counterpoint was.

I'm not sure you're cleare enough about using ls.

It fails as it only does one mp3, while while does them all.

ls *.mp3|while read i;do ffmpeg -i "${i}" "${i}.wav" 2>&1;done

You don't say how this fails, but there are several reasons not to do things this way:

1. It's unwise to feed a 'while' loop thorough a pipe because the 'while' runs
in a separate shell which can lead to problems

2. Never use 'ls' to get a list of files for consumption in a script. Unless
you can be completely sure that the 'ls' you are using isn't adding suffixes
like '@' for links, and '/' for directories and isn't adding colour codes to
the names, don't do it. Much better to use 'find'.

My test with this pipeline returned colour codes which 'ffmpeg' didn't like,
and it failed that way.

for i in *.mp3;do ffmpeg -i "${i}" "${i}.wav" 2>&1;done

This doesn't use 'ls' it simply uses file expansion therefore no additional
filename garbage!

Did I mention: don't use 'ls' as a way of feeding filenames to a loop or
whatever?

The first example would have worked if you'd written:

while read i;do ffmpeg -i "${i}" "${i}.wav" 2>&1;done < <(find . -maxdepth 1 -name "*.mp3")

The '-maxdepth 1' option prevents 'find' from going into sub-directories. The
'find' is inside a process substitution which is redirected to the 'while' so
the 'read' inside it can obtain what is produced on its STDIN channel.

Also, if it had been me I'd have written:

ffmpeg -i "${i}" "${i}.wav"

as:

ffmpeg -i "${i}" "${i%mp3}wav"

to avoid the output files being called 'xxx.mp3.wav'. I spoke about this in my
"Bash Tips" show http://hackerpublicradio.org/eps.php?id=1648

Dave

This fails

ls *.mp3|while read i;do ffmpeg -i "${i}" "${i}.wav" 2>&1;done


This works

for i in *.mp3;do ffmpeg -i "${i}" "${i}.wav" 2>&1;done
,/pre>

Yea, do continue this series. I recently got my Tech license. I'll go for the General soon.

Its nice to have someone explain what you might see if/when you get an actual radio. Because, walking into this cold, it just looks like a lot of buttons!

What pray is a milkbag.

Also soundscape tour of the falls please

Yes, I did listen to Skeptikerpodden and I miss it. For some time I listened to Kvack! after it ended, but that's not really a good replacement. To be honest, Kvack! is one of those podcasts I meant with "got tired of".
We really need some podcast in Swedish (and German too) in the tradition and quality of SGU.

These troubleshooting shows are one of my favourites. I did tinker just a tiny bit with electronics at school, but never invested enough time to really understand what electricity is all about. Especially the analog electronics is sort of black magic to me :)

But I love listening when someone is working with it, explaining what they're doing and slowly working their way through a problem.

Ha ha, nice job Ken. It made me smile when I heard you happy it was finally blinking. And we got some live troubleshooting as well! Good stuff.

You know how I remembered which way a LED went way back when... One leg of the LED is cut off. 'Cut Off' starts with a 'C'. So does Cathode. The short leg is the cathode. If you had your leg cut off, that would be a pretty negative thing. The short leg is negative.

Just a little mnemonic device I made up to help me remember. I still think of it to this day.

Now, you just need to build one of the oscilloscope kits. You know, to see how fast your LED is blinking.

See how I did that? Its how we get more shows. ;)

Ken: Yes the arithmetic stuff evaluating to true/false is a bit counter-intuitive I think. Yes, grep is quite a powerful tool for use in scripts.

johanv: Glad you found the show useful. I'm trying to explain things that I never fully understood before, and to share what I have found as I do so.

I hadn't listened to HPR for a long time, but a couple of days ago I had some spare time, and I decided to listen to this episode. I liked it a lot, and today I am a little more aware about what I am actually doing while writing if statements with those square brackets in bash, and checking return codes.

Thanks for the interesting show!

I'm a tool person, so I really like the idea of using your tools to push yourself forward in your language learning. It's hard to say how it would turn out in practice, but I'm optimistic.

As you mention, mixing vocabulary in languages that have very different grammars could become a bit strange, but code-switching -- that is, jumping back and forth between languages - is common and frequent with bilingual people, and it frequently happens mid-sentence, so I guess that just shows that people are pretty good at making it work even in radically different languages.

The area where I live has mostly Chinese Hongkongers, but many of them speak a lot of English in the office and at home, and it's pretty fun to listen to the kids on the playground and in the playroom talk to each other -- it's a real soup of Cantonese and English.

Thank you MrX for that lovely accordion outro. Hadn't heard it before!

Oh, and I love Kvalificerat hemligt (and I love that Ken or Dave is going to have to pronounce it when reading this on the community show).

Did you listen to Skeptikerpodden back when it was active and CJ was one of the people involved? That was a very good show, and I miss it.

Now that's how you don't waste a good opportunity to make an HPR episode. I am observing and learning.

Never heard of Q before. Very cool! I will very likely find use for this.

Not a very googlable name, but I found it here: https://harelba.github.io/q/

Good to hear from you again. I really enjoyed this episode, the audio quality was definitely on point... those little lapel mics are great!

Don't worry too much about the structure of this episode, you were recording to make a point and you made it really well.

With Nix 2.1 ( https://nixos.org/nix/manual/#ssec-relnotes-2.1 ) reading TOML files has become a builtin function in Nix, just builtins.fromTOML /path/to/the/file.toml .

I can't imagine this being unrelated to Mozilla's implementation in Nix.

I installed Ranger after listening to your show 1756 (http://hackerpublicradio.org/eps.php?id=1756) but never used it and completely forgot about it. I was surprised to find it on my system and have been playing about with it a lot since listening to this show.

I'm a long-time text and command-line user but I tend to use Midnight Commander for the times I want to do a lot of file searching and manipulation, though I have to admit I use Dolphin sometimes in two-pane mode when I'm doing things like copying files off an SD card. I shall add Ranger to the mix too I think.

I agree with Ken: we need shows about all of the tools in your list!

Anyway, this was a very welcome episode. Thanks.

I'm a die hard vimmer and have never heard of Ranger. I'm looking forward to using it more. I asked a couple of my online Linuxey buddies and they used it years ago when they had less substantial machines. I still love the command line stuff even with my best machines. Everything is super quick in the terminal.
Thanks for the mention and your great shows.
I need to explore jq for sure. I work with a database that saves a couple columns in JSON. It would be nice to query the exports in a more friendly way.

I'm a big fan of plain text and CSV files, as they are probably the formats that will last conceptually forever - unlike the Office formats we use today (including ODS/ODT etc). You may lose the layout information but the "meat" is always preserved.

The PDF to Text converters only work with documents which have been generated from a WP application. Scans of a printed document generally only produce an embedded JPG image.

A few years ago I created a system that employed many of the commands you mention in your episode to convert a document into pure ASCII text, then create a non-repeating list of all the words it contains, along with an instance count (using SQL). By applying this to the contents of a document library the database was used to populate a "search by keyword" system for that library.

Populating the database from several hundred Word and PDF documents took only a couple of minutes. The subsequent keyword searches were very fast and produced a list of relevant documents ranked by the number of instances of the keyword. It was very easy to combine keywords using SQL "AND" and "OR" qualifiers.

Always knew I needed spaces now I know why.

The evaluate zero thing seems strange.

Note to self: stop using wc -l to count grep output.

Those that I know I use literally every day. Can't wait to try the rest out.

Please do a deep dive series on each. No pressure.

very interesting. i love xoke's stuff

Thankyou Ahuka for your bravery, honesty and openness on this subject.
HPR has a broad spectrum of listeners though one suspects many are people who, though younger than yourself, are acutely aware of a family history of certain cancers. This show gave a great insight into what one should expect if a diagnosis becomes a pressing concern, particularly with the state of modern medicine.
Also thank you for reiterating, one should always consult a medical professional for advice upon which to make a decison about treatment or any other course of action.

Ohhh... this episode brought back pleasant memories when PCs were just “toys” made to run WordPerfect, Lotus123, Harvard Graphics and Attachmate Extra TN3270 emulator. Thanks for the ride.

Code for this episode is now at Notabug.org

https://notabug.org/archer72/CD-DVD-ripping-on-Slackware

Hey, just wanted to let you know I thought it was a fun and interesting show.

Thanks also for the mention.

Hmm, can I do this...Just wanted to add my two cents on the front notices to podcasts. I like the espeak announcements. Considering I'm a blink that may be why. The theme music would be nice to have alternating versions to make them less tedious.

Hey, just wanted to let you know I thought it was a fun and interesting show.

Thanks also for the mention.

Your descriptions were excellent and enjoyable. Thank you very much
for sharing the trip through town with us.

Enjoyed the show but given they fact I'm a long time hercules user and a grey beard mainframer I'm embarrassed I didn't do this show! Actually, I recorded this show more than once but thought it wouldn't make sense to someone new to the mainframe.

I think you handled that problem well. Maybe this will inspire me enough to create some mainframe shows.

I agree the moshix youtube channel is worth checking out for anyone interested in the mainframe.

A "stoop" is a set of cement steps up to your front door - not as big as a "porch". Hmm, not sure if it has to be cement.

If this ain't what hacking is about, then hacking ain't worth a plug nickel.

But what the hell is a stoop? Think we need an American/English dictionary here :-)

Thoroughly enjoyed this episode. Due in large part to remembering the times read or listened to people talking about similar things in my youth. I did try some of them out but mostly read or listened to people describing the experience.

While I listen to ALL episodes of hpr, Sigflup is on my 'must watch NOW' list. This one delivered in spaces for me. Not only was is fun to listen to, but I have similar equipment I've been meaning to do something similar with.

There goes my last excuse.

My only regret is that after the excellent real hacking phone shows from the last two days, my horrible by comparison drivel is up today.

Sorry about that.

The best part of this wonderful hack (IMHO) is that you created something and then used that something to record an HPR episode.

This is the definition of hacking. I loved how you described your problem solving process. More of these, please!

Seriously a joy to listen to.

Brilliant show. This show is the real definition of hacking.

If I have this right, you found some Cisco phones in the garage of a neighbour and set about getting them to do something useful.

The joy of getting something to work is obvious from your tone of voice and your dialogue. Something that we all no doubt can identify with.

All the more satisfying when it is resurrecting something previously discarded

baffled,
You make fewer screw ups than I do.

I'll take a look at the Michell Thomas Method.

I would definitely put time into developing this out if it seems like there's enough people willing to spend some time. Two might be enough. A couple more couldn't hurt.

Encore!

This is my first time commenting so I apologize in advance for any screw ups.

I believe your point one to move to the new language as soon as
possible is an excellent idea. I'd also be interested in helping with
developing and discussing it should you decide to persue the notion.

There is a great book "The Future of Learning - the Michell Thomas
Method" by Michell Thomas Where he discusses his perspective on
education that I recommend as an interesting read.

This was a great episode, thanks!

Yesod seems like a great option for high-concurrency web applications. Thank you for introducing it to me and the rest of the HPR community.

Did we forget to include the script itself ?

Hi klaatu,

Thanks for this heads-up. It *is* a confusing feature of awk, but it's the same for sed (so at least the authors are consistent). I don't think we have emphasised it enough, on reflection.

It was highlighted in show 2 of the Awk series (http://hackerpublicradio.org/eps/hpr2129/full_shownotes.html#more-about-awk-programs) and has been used many times thereafter, but hasn't been emphasised.

So, thanks again for the feedback. It's most appreciated.

Dave

Thank you for this, I appreciate your openness and the details.

So glad you enjoyed this. Once you start looking around on the internet at vintage tube radios you find that there are TONS of these things, and the photo galleries are serious eye candy if you like mid-century modern industrial design. They also have lots of tube-powered clock radios like you described. Wish I had the money and the space to start collecting these things!

Steve, Glad you enjoyed the show, it was an enjoyable interview to record.

What an awesome looking radio. You brought back several memories for me. I vaguely remember my dad having an old stand up unit in his barn/workshop. I had several push button channel selectors. Also, I once had a table top tube am radio with a clock (about the size of a toaster). Then lastly, your station playing "Dark Lady" Wow, I had that on a 45 (if anyone remembers those kind of recordings. Thank you Jon for the memories!

Thanks for doing this interview. "Concrete Dog" looks like someone I could get along with quite well.

This is a quote from Klaatu today on Mastodon.

"Also, English is the worst language. I wish we'd migrate away to something constructed and better, like Esperanto."

MegaMek and MekWars I completely forgot as I was do excited to talk about the game. Truth to be told, there's so much to tell about the game that it's almost impossible to fit all of it in one episode even in a very superficial level.

For a complete rundown on the when, what and how of SparkleShare, see klaatu's http://hackerpublicradio.org/eps.php?id=2609 .

Excellent show as always! What SparkleShare is and how to use it at different expert levels, and when not to use it at all, is all thoroughly explained without the episide ever feeling long.

But most of all, thank you for paying off my episode debt to the community for me. I guess I owe you personally an episode now instead.

I haven't listened to the podcast yet but I have it queued for my morning walk. I hope you mentioned MegaMek and MekWars. As an avid btech fan, it's about the only way I can play these days because it's hard to get a tabletop game together sometimes.

Thanks for this episode. I've heard of processing, but never knew what it was or how it could be useful. I will probably turn to this after scratch for my kids.

Yikes. I really don't have much to say. I used to run away as a kid to get treats from the store next door, no trains nearby though..

Brenda,
That is annoying! What I try to remember to do is to ask in the format of "Don't spend time on this but do you know off the top of your head?"

But recently, I asked someone a question I'd already spent a lot of time researching and it appears that I couldn't do what I wanted to do.

But, as I said, if I think something should be possible, I won't let a 'No' remain so and will ask again every few months. Even if it's a 'No' now, things change quickly.

Anyway, I forgot to add 'off the top of your head' and I'm afraid 1-2 hours might have been spent searching for me to return the first bit of text my researching revealed.

I feel so bad about that slip of the tongue.

I totally agree.

And another thing that is annoying is when you ask a question and the person doesn't know the answer but either tells you a bunch of generalities that anyone would know, and/or tries to find the answer while you stand there, when you could go back to your desk and look for yourself. What I would like is a quick answer, even if it is "I don't know" or even "I don't know off the top of my head". They could throw in some keywords to search for, if they think it might help.

Haha! I hadn't quite looked at it like that, but you are right.

I like looking for logicality in language. Sometimes it's a vain search (as I'm sure @klaatu would say), but a fair bit seems to conform to _somebody's_ idea of logic.

There are lots of issues with how we ask and answer questions but related to humiliation specifically, what makes me really sad is when someone tells me they don't want to ask a question because the person or people they'll be asking humiliate them.

One of the reasons I will not publish the asker's name if they don't me want to.

I first this seems like a weak person, but I've had managers tell me the look down on people who don't know things. So I understand the hesitation to ask questions in an unfriendly environment.

There's a lot to learn and we might all be better off if we realize the person has skills, just maybe not in the same area you do.

Enjoyed the podcast.

I find it to be very frustrating asking technical questions because a lot of guys want to humiliate people who ask them questions. Like Nick Burns. And I find that these guys often don't actually answer the question, because they aren't listening. They just listen until they hear a keyword, and then go into a rant.

I won't hear this till tomorrow, while driving at work. But, it is fitting that it happened to come out during the Hackers On Planet Earth conference. :D

I am fascinated by etymology. I learnt a lot of spelling and pronunciation by understanding word origins as a youngster, and spent a fair bit of time looking stuff up in a dictionary to find etymological information. I will try and share some of the historical context as I go for certain.

I studied what was being called "Comparative Psychology" at university, and this involved looking at some of Chomsky's work. I wouldn't say I was very familiar with it now 40+ years later, but I'm prepared to have another look.

I expect these shows will become a series soon, and you will be very welcome to contribute to it. You are welcome to contribute now!

I loved learning that the ownership-form of the apostrophe is really another example of a contraction.

Thanks for this podcast. I've run into the same problem. Once I cleaned my remote about three times it was done. The "gunk" in the remote that gets on the circuit board is generally some kind of silicone lubricant or solvent. Apparently, the button pads have to be cooked after they are made to get all the silicone gunk out, and most manufacturers don't bother any longer, as they assume you will only use the remote for a year or two before losing it (or you'll just buy a new one?).

The actual, physical act of pressing the button pushes the silicone gunk out of the pad.

Thanks for the guitar pick trick!

I am pleased you responded with more etymological information. For some reason, knowing that kind of history really brings these things alive for me. I am enjoying the series.

I hope at some later date there might be a connection to regular grammar and regular language. I've always been fascinated by the connection between Noam Chomsky's linguistic work and the simultaneous development of Lisp at M.I.T.—both endeavors being obsessed with recursion.

The Fraunhofer Institute's US patents on mp3 have expired, so the mp3 format is no longer problematic in connection with free software.

The only reasons not to use mp3 these days are because it's two decades behind in codec evolution (e.g. Opus is strictly better in every aspect) and in envelope evolution (e.g. Matroska has better metadata and streaming facilities).

There's no doubt (in my mind anyway) that English is weird and difficult; annoying (at times) and illogical. Possibly because I was a bad student at school in my teens, I have never properly understood the whole issue of grammar, parsing sentences, past participles and all of that. However, I have always had a fascination with words, their meanings and their origins, and I think it's English that has led to that interest.

Other languages also have their problems. I learnt French at school (and did a few years as an adult too) and never got to grips with the genders of nouns. Why is a table (furniture) feminine for example? How is it possible to remember them all? I still enjoy attempting to speak French nevertheless.

You point to the deficiencies of English with regard to the meaning of "free". Absolutely. That's a shortcoming. However, many other languages have their own idiosyncrasies. I worked at a university with a campus in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Bahasa Melayu, the local language, has a very different grammar compared to English. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malay_grammar for some aspects of it. I remember having conversations with Malay speakers, suggesting a English way of expressing a thing, to be told that that was pretty much impossible in their language. This led me to believe that English might be more subtle; though perhaps on the other hand it's more suitable for circumlocution, evasion and indirectness!

At school my French teacher was also an advocate of Esperanto. I wonder if that sort of language was what you had in mind instead of English? I don't know enough about its benefits to judge, but I wonder if a constructed language can really be as rich as a "natural" evolved language - even with all of its clutter and detritus.

Thanks for your comments - they really got me thinking.

Loved this episode, Ken! Wish I would've thought about this before purchasing TaoTronics TT-BA07. I like my little device but I prefer the DIY way!

My rockbox sansa device is still alive but my dad's bit the dust. I'm hoping mine keeps going, though I am often using my android phone and this adaptor these days.

This is such a great series. I can honestly say that, having spoken fairly proper English for my entire life, I hate the English language. Of all the languages poised to serve as a global language, there could not be one more undeserving than an amalgamation of Germanic forced through a filter of Latin. It's inconsistent, confusing, over-complex, and yet also insufficient (see the FSF's struggle with the lack of an adjective form of "free" for an example).

I really wish a sensible, constructed language would be adopted in English's place.

Anyway, nice series, although your efforts are surely in vain, because English will never make sense.

Great episode. I loved your use cases, and the walk-through of using the tool. Also, I tried nmtui out for myself and it is actually quite useful. Network configuration is such a bother, so it's nice to have an "easy" button with tools like these that still don't depend on a Xorg/Wayland/whatever.

Thanks for the comment, Klaatu. I'd like to hear more discussion about this, too, especially any arguments about whether saving money is really necessary or not. I have at least one colleague at work who rides his bike 4.5 miles each way (and has for the last 20 some years), and he says that he does not save for retirement because his retirement plan is to get hit by a Suburban on the road. I think he's only half kidding.

I've seen lots of miniatures in the past and wondered what goes on in the mind of those who point them. Now I know. Thanks for the insight.

You make some really great points. Thanks for taking this discussion farther. I'd be interested in hearing about more people's experiences with saving money, too, because I don't think there is just one right answer (or, arguably, the obligation or ability to save at all, if somebody wants to argue those points). The morality is interesting to me, too. It seems like the only way to "grow" money requires either contributing to something one doesn't actually want to support, or else taking advantage of others.

Basically, this is a huge topic and it's one that is getting more interesting the more I hear other people talk about it.

I'd never seen an on/off switch on an electirical outlet until New Zealand. Here, every electrical outlet has a dedicated power switch so that you can plug in a device and then power it on. It's really useful.

In the USA, I think the only way to simulate this is to use a power strip (sometimes a surge protector, other times just a splitter, which often have switches on them.

Haha!

Isn't that like that line from that Star-Trek-Wars film: "Leverage the Force Luke!"?

No, I'm wrong, that's a verbification I think...
https://this.isfluent.com/blog/2010/are-you-stupid-enough-to-use-leverage-as-a-verb

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/noun

Thanks for this episode. I'd heard of Edge of the Empire but have never played. I really like your character build process, and this was a nice overview of how characters work in this system. Thanks1

I see amazing painted minis at my local hobby shop, and it always makes me want to get into creating dioramas and battlefields for games, but I don't feel like I have the time,money,or space for it. Thanks for letting me live vicariously through your hobby in this episode.

see, vision, eyes - get it ?

John, how weird that I pick a random podcast to out of the lineup to listen to and find this one on feedly. I didn't even see the Juiced Penguin in the title this morning when I started listening. Heck, it's not even something that I think about these days.

The Juiced Penguin was an idea that I had, and knew that I couldn't pull it off alone. - The Late Great Lord "D" assisted me with the original effort. It took a lot of time to find the music, and Klaatu assisted with offering up some content for it also. I found that it was really time consuming, and Terry F took over for a period of time until it fizzled out.

The main idea that I had was to get more OGG content out there, to help expand the awareness of the OGG format, due to restrictions of the MP3 format, and that many MP3 Players didn't support it. - Today, most people are listening to content on computers or Android devices, most are able to listen to the ogg format, if they wish.

If my ol' memory serves right, even Mark Shuttleworth has stopped worrying about the MP3 format being a real problem, even tho' it's still a closed file format. Granted it's not open, but the threat of being sued doesn't seem likely after nothing happening after all of this time.

- FWIW, when I AM online I'm easily found over on G+ aka randynose.com Also over on Mastodon.Rocks @randynose.

Thanks for reminding me of some good times years ago...

All hail the Juiced Penguin. :)

Thanks JWP, I'm glad at least one listener found it useful, having been using it for a good couple of months now I can say I am very impressed and have even found a work around for the usb utilities I use in mint. I have installed Mint 19 beta into virtual box and it seems very good and once the stable release is out it will still be my go to distro for installing for family and friends who are not Linux gurus. Ubuntu Mate will probably remain on my main box until the next LTS cycle as I try and keep that as stable as possible and change OS on it as infrequently as I can get away with.

...I found this out by accident in my youth. You can also point the remote at an electric guitar pickup while its plugged into an amp.

dit dit dit dit dit dit dit!

Add distortion or reverb to your liking. :P

Great show - only one point.

We do not "approve" shows, we process them. See

http://hackerpublicradio.org/stuff_you_need_to_know.php#not_moderated

Your show will not be moderated.

We do not vet, edit, moderate or in any way censor any of the shows on the network, we trust you to do that. Aside from checking snippets for audio quality/spam checking, we have a policy that we don't listen to the shows before they are aired. This is a long standing tradition arising from the fact that HPR is a community of peers who believe that any host has as much right to submit shows as any other.

hpr2210 :: On Freedom of Speech and Censorship describes the agreed approach to this topic.

Hi klaatu always interesting to see what you will bring up.
I to for a long time when cash only. I do keep a card in the glove box or bring it traveling but I find I spend less if I just use cash.

Also if you can -- I really enjoy many of your topics. -- Might you get a better headset sometimes its hard for me to hear exactly what you say. (Audio quality between Jupiter broadcasting and Dave Morris quality would be greatly valued.)

Tony always so nice to here from you again.
Sadly I am driving any Mate right now. Only two 16.04 boxes maybe after 16.04.1 thanks so much for the update

Thank you, Clinton Roy!
That one I didn't know. I found their page http://omegataupodcast.net/ and shall give the dual-language feed a go on my serverlist: http://omegataupodcast.net/category/podcast/feed

I quite like the omega tau science & engineering podcast
podcast, it comes in both english and german forms, I don't think they translate the content, it's just different stories for the different language podcasts.

Love that concept.

In my case I use tab groups to keep useful and related web sites together to make "context switching" simpler. For example, in Pale Moon I have a group per HPR series or project, and when I'm in the mood to prepare a new HPR show I run it on my right-hand monitor with Gvim on the left.

I usually have Vivaldi, Chromium and IceWeasel running on different XFCE desktops as well, and all of these have pinned tabs so I can easily visit various HPR pages, the most used pages on my local MediaWiki instance, GitLab, GitHub, archive.org, Telegram groups, and so on.

It's probably (barely) organised chaos, but I like it ;-)

That's a great suggestion. I spent some time looking at the etymology of the words I was talking about, as you can tell from the links, but I didn't consider talking about the subject. I'll mention such things in the future if it seems relevant.

Thanks for the feedback.

Apparently I didn't explain what SparkleShare is!

It's "DropBox for git". You tell it where your remote git repo is, and it keeps an eye on it and keeps a local directory in sync.

Whenever anything happens in the remote repo, it pulls that change and makes your local sirectory the same.

Whenever you add, remove or edit a file in your local directory, it creates a commit for your change and pushes it to the remote repo.

Any conflicts that occur are resolved by creating a file named something like "myfile conflicted on 2018-06-15T16:57:45.txt", so you never have to understand anything about git to use SparkleShare. Just play with your files in your directory.

That's why it's so good for dads.

It seems this is the month of clarifications, judging from the feedback from Ken and Dave on the Community News. :-)

I'm adding a deeper Stow show to my future shows tag.

But for now, here's what Dave was asking for:

Stow doesn't use any configuration, it's all simple, hard-coded behavior. When it stows things it puts things in the parent directory of the stow directory:

If your are in /home/clacke/stow and you do stow foo, any stuff in e.g. /home/clacke/stow/foo/lib gets symlinks in /home/clacke/lib .

I forgot to mention the killer feature, which is why we use Styx, apart from our great love for Nix: The ability to easily include content from remote sources.

As Styx uses Nix for getting its inputs, it's just as easy to build a page off a file in your local repository as getting a file from a remote repository, http URL, a whole bunch of files, or anything you can compute or get from a network, really.

In fact, even the default templates in Styx are fetched this way: If you never use them, they never touch your computer, but if you include the standard templates in your site definition, Styx knows to go out and fetch them and put them in the right places.

We use this to get documentation and changelog from our code repository into our web site.

As noted on May Community News[0], the laptop I'm still queueing for is the PineBook[1].

[0] http://hackerpublicradio.org/eps.php?id=2566
[1] https://www.pine64.org/?page_id=3707

I've never looked into tab grouping, because what I do, if my tabs start becoming unwieldy, is that I drag one of them out of the window, and it becomes a new window. I may drag other tabs into that new window if they belong together.

You people who use tab grouping, do you do this as well, giving you two-dimensional tab grouping, or does grouping replace multiple windows?

Interesting! I'd like to hear a little bit about the origins of the mixups when it is historically interesting... Like, perhaps, one word comes from French and the other from German. But not necessary, viewing Communication as the problem and English as a flawed tool to solve it is a good route to take. Looking forward to the next one.

Glad you liked the episode.
I'm amazed by the number of times I see the then/than and there/their/they're errors in forums, YouTube comments and similar. I don't know if it's an autocorrect problem or what it is, but it's very common.
I'm actively collecting similar problems, so I hope I'll have enough to make a few more episodes!

Thanks for starting that series!
While the first examples were quite obvious to me, I can see how they can be helpful on a global scope, given the diverse international HPR community.
Fort the last bit, I have to admit that those were actually two new words I learnt (make that three with "learnt" :-)).

Regards,
Michael

If you are interested, one of my _other_ favorite podcasts just did an episode on Social Security.

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/06/06/617662100/social-insecurity

I just migrated from github to gitlab. So do a s/hub/lab/g in above links.
For those who didn't heard about it, on the following link you find the cause for the migration: https://blog.github.com/2018-06-04-github-microsoft/

Great show and it sounds like a great way to delve into one of the mainstays of human life - sharing it and the world around us with those around us. Thanks Brian for giving all a way to connect and learn.

Nice to hear Slackware 32-bit still coming in useful. I don't mind that so many Linux distros are discarding 32-bit as long as somebody keeps it around, because while 32-bit hardware is fading, there's still a LOT of it out there.

Nice summery of the GDPR, Ken. I was wondering what this was all about. And I have noticed everyone and their brother sending out policy updates these days. But, as I doubt the GDPR pertains to my little servers I wasn't really paying much attention.

You did the deep dive for me. ;)

BTW, you might want to do Noise Reduction, then Truncate Silence. This one sounded a bit like a guy on radio keying up the mic at random times while talking. :P

From http://hackerpublicradio.org/about.php

"Anyone who has shown a long term dedication to the project and is trusted by the community, can become an admin."

How very appropriate that this would be released precisely for May 25th. :-)

I started participating in RPGs several months ago but did none of the things mentioned in this presentation prior to actually playing the game.

My GM took the small gathering of curious gamesters through a couple of relatively short scenarios/stories which kept the interest up and the mechanics of everything mentioned in this podcast at a double arm’s length away. We didn’t know it then but it kept us focused on the game rather than too many details of characters. Sure, we still built characters but it was a very abbreviated process. Not until some months and many game sessions later did I actually do my own research and discovered parts of what this podcast brings together very succinctly. And now that I know a bit more about the whole process, this podcast is all the more interesting.

Lostnbronx and Klaatu have done a splendid job of laying out a very understandable and approachable process for those curious about taking part in an RPG. (The sound production was stellar too.) Well done, gentlemen.

Yea, the Espeak kind of butchers my nick. I bet 'En Why Bill' would sound about right. Hey Espeak, I live in New York! ;)

Good luck your scope build. 25mhz will be right in the wheel house of the kit type scopes.

I too have a secret desire for an oscillascope. I'm building a wee one from a kit just now but that's mostly for fun. I'll need one that can handle 25MHz clock signals for troubleshooting my poorly Amiga 3000, hence my interest in this show.

Also, the HPR robot calls you nibble too! :D

This tickled all of my private places. Ok. just the references to free culture.

Loved the reader's voice. Liked the story.

I agree with pokey about the timing of things regarding can food, MREs et al. But it didn't keep me out of the story. I thought it was strange that people had forgotten so much in so few years. But I've some real life situations where people weren't taught anything for a generation and it is a bit like this.

I liked the 'glitches' these guys mentioned.

I can confirm that the issue with the ogg files is the album art. I didn't listen to this until after I listened to the audio book. I had the same issue. Downloaded fine but wouldn't play in rockbox. A little searching lead me to a suggestion that if an ogg file plays ok in vlc other other players but not rockbox, the album art is a likely culprit.

Removed them with Audio Tag Tool and all is well. If memory serves, the rockbox folks says it's because it only has 1mb for meta data.

Linux newbie here. I am working on a new project and last week, as a requisite, needed to install Git for Windows. I was wondering about the voodoo magic behind Git Bash, so thank you for the explanation.

By the way, cool alternate "beatbox" version of the HPR outro. :-)

First off, thanks for the mention, good sir! :-)

Secondly, thank you for this episode. As much as I use Cygwin at work, I despise...DESPISE...having to use the Cygwin Installer to install/update/remove packages. MSYS2 is what I've always wanted from Cygwin: an integrated, command line package manager for updating packages inside of the POSIX-compatible environment, just as you would do on any Unix-like system.

I'll have to start backing up my configuration files in order to make the big switch on my Windows PCs at work.

No butchering of "fractalide"! We pronounce it lile you do.

Now, "tertiary" and "tuturto" on the other hand ... ;-)

Your show was very quiet. I had to go 100% on the volume to understand you. I partly would blame the wind screen. Because, when you took it off, you got louder.

I misspoke, getting my POV names and distinctions mixed up a bit. I think I give enough examples in the episode to make it clear what I'm really talking about, though, and still stand by my observations about how they affect story construction.

Thanks for the correction!

What does the FLOSS landscape look like for fantasy games?

It occurred to me that from what I know about Chinese, in particular Cantonese, most of what you are saying about these nuances goes away.

You say that by just this little change in tense, you've already communicated something about the whole situation. In Chinese you can't really do that. If you try, you're making your text just unnatural and cumbersome to read. Must be a real challenge for translators in either direction.

From my personal conversations I also know that even pretty accomplished speakers coming from Chinese languages don't pick up on these cues when speaking English. All tense just goes through type erasure in parsing.

I think you might be a bit mistaken about 2nd person POV. My understanding is that it's not a distant pronoun (he or she)... that's still 3rd person. 2nd person is almost exclusively using "you" as the subject of the sentence for an action from the main character. So, useful in writing interactive stories... tougher for pure narrative.

Great episode about TLS 1.3! I just chuckled with the IETF comments about adding a decrypt function.

First of all, welcome to HPR. This is an excellent first episode!

Thank you for explaining the general problem solver. I haven't encountered this in my time as a programmer, and found the concept - and your introduction to it - to be very interesting.

I look forward to any other episodes you have planned!

While listening podcast about network design was interesting in itself, the soundscape of the episode is what sold me. It was like listening to Joy of Painting again with Bob Ross calmly explaining what he's about to do in such a friendly way.

Where is the wisdom from outer space when we need it the most?

I am indeed living the dream. I am working on cool software, it's all free software out in the open, and I'm getting paid.

Communicating what it is that Fractalide does is obviously something we need to work on. I know that when I saw it the first time two years ago I read the homepage at the time, and came away no wiser as to what was going on. Now I'm cursed with knowing what it is and no longer capable of experiencing what it is that a newcomer will need to now.

I heard you stumble over whether to call me "Ahuka" or just "Kevin". I believe that if I had to do it over again I would just use my name. When I joined it looked like people were using pseudonyms so I did as well, but it is not like I am hiding anything here.

To be clear, the HTML that had the divs in it was the asciidoc output, which I have just recently started using. The output from hashify.me has been nice and clean with no risk of having Ken pull his hairs out in frustration.

Our shared adventures with asciidoc, which played out in the comments, on the Fediverse and in private e-mail are fodder for a future episode on my new shownotes workflow. Yes, I owe you one.

If the question is, "can you do 3D modeling with OpenSCAD?", then the answer is yes. However, as I understand it, considering OpenSCAD an alternative to things like Fusion 360 and SolidWorks and others, is a bit tough. The open source world also has Blender, with which you can do 3D modeling too. But again, as I understand it, the way these options work is a lot different and they lack many of the features present in the commercial products.

It is worth mentioning that there are a few 3D modeling options out there that are not open source, but do work with Linux due to the fact that they are cloud/web based. OnShape.com comes to mind.

So, while there are alternatives, sort of, Fusion 360 seems to be becoming the software of choice in "Maker" circles.

I am a beginner at this, so these are mostly just my perceptions. Eventually, I may be able to speak with more authority, or at least more experience.

http://www.openscad.org/about.html

About OpenSCAD
OpenSCAD is software for creating solid 3D CAD models. It is free software and available for Linux/UNIX, Windows and Mac OS X. Unlike most free software for creating 3D models (such as Blender) it does not focus on the artistic aspects of 3D modelling but instead on the CAD aspects. Thus it might be the application you are looking for when you are planning to create 3D models of machine parts but pretty sure is not what you are looking for when you are more interested in creating computer-animated movies.

OpenSCAD is not an interactive modeller. Instead it is something like a 3D-compiler that reads in a script file that describes the object and renders the 3D model from this script file. This gives you (the designer) full control over the modelling process and enables you to easily change any step in the modelling process or make designs that are defined by configurable parameters.

OpenSCAD provides two main modelling techniques: First there is constructive solid geometry (aka CSG) and second there is extrusion of 2D outlines. Autocad DXF files can be used as the data exchange format for such 2D outlines. In addition to 2D paths for extrusion it is also possible to read design parameters from DXF files. Besides DXF files OpenSCAD can read and create 3D models in the STL and OFF file formats.

I neglected to name the author, because his name wasn't on my mind at the time.

Styx was written by Eric Sagnes, and if you look at his repositories on github[0], it's not really surprising that he would be the one to write a site generator in Nix. :-)

[0] https://github.com/ericsagnes?tab=repositories

It seems that when I countered that your setup didn't seem massively overengineered, I was simply insufficiently informed.

Now that this has been somewhat remedied, I agree with your assessment.

Thanks clacke,

I have used 'entr' in the past, actually to refresh my note-viewing browser when the notes change. I now use Qupzilla because it does that all by itself, which is very cool!

I will think about using 'entr' or 'watch' in future, but for HPR shownotes I have several 'make' targets, so I'm not sure if I want to automate them all.

For example I use 'make final' to generate notes with HPR links rather than the local ones I use while developing them, and I can only do that once I have chosen a slot and know what the HPR links will be. Of course, I could trigger the 'make final' once the slot has been selected.

Anyway, thanks for the idea :-)

I'm glad you enjoyed it. The project that I referred to in the episode didn't go quite as planned, but I'll give it another try at some point. Several other projects in the works as well. I'd be interested to hear about some of your projects.

I am an avid rocketeer and enjoyed listening to your show.

How have your future rocket projects been?

Doesn't sound terribly overengineered to me, it's just that my web editing workflow is minimalistic almost to a fault.

I have an engineered piece you can add to your solution: Trigger the builds automatically with entr[0]. That allows you to even skip the make step in vim. Just save and things happen.

Actually what I often do is I just `watch make` in the directory where I'm editing, or `while sleep 5; do make; done`.

Hi clacke,

A couple of interesting finds. I use both Markdown (Pandoc flavour mostly) and ASCIIDoc (via Asciidoctor).

I write all my HPR shownotes with Markdown, using Vim on one monitor and a browser on the other, building the output with Pandoc via Make, using Vim's 'make' interface to do it.

I also like to write a journal per project and use ASCIIDoc for that because I can generate much more interesting documents with colour, side notes, icons, good tables and so on. Again Vim lets me type the document with syntax highlighting, build it with 'make' and display it on my right-hand monitor using a dedicated browser (I like QupZilla at the moment).

My solution is probably massively over-engineered but I like it :-)

If you like ASCIIDoc, you can type your shownotes on https://asciidoclive.com/ and then do the same thing as I described above with hashify.me.

Just like hashify, asciidoclive allows you to type on the left, see the result on the right.

I pulled the name the_remora from Glenn Cook's Garrett PI series of novels. The Remora is a nickname of a tertiary character from the later books in the series.

Steve Saner gives a good tutorial on a way to add Windows to a Linux computer. I found the part about getting data from his old encrypted drive most interesting, as I have been a bit afraid of encrypting a drive for fear of finding myself locked out.

I am glad that he was able to use some information from my HPR show from last year on the subject of adding dual boot to my laptop.

Also, very good show notes for someone following his lead.

Enjoying the series. I am doing a tutorial on creating a LisP in C (which I heard about on HPR) and it uses Readline. So I came back to listen to this series. I always learn something. There's always an "Aha!" moment. Thanks!

When uploading the other shows I noticed that they had some weird clicks and jumps in them. Apparently I had turned on "skip silence" when I played with the settings. My recommendation is: don't.

Interesting "Space: The Next Trillion Dollar Industry"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiRBQxHrxNw

klaatu and Ken were discussing the merits on Markdown and the horribleness of the multitude of markdown flavors.

Here's what I do for shownotes: I write on hashify.me.

Markdown on the left, live rendered text on the right so you can easily Ctrl-click links to check them etc. Then I mark the text on the right, right-click and choose "View selection source" (this is on Firefox). It opens a new tab with the source almost correctly marked. I mark it, copy and then paste into the show notes textbox and choose HTML5 as text type.

Great podcast.

I've been using git for a few years now but there is something new even for a seasoned git user in this series.

It's a subject that needs clarity, because a lot of the online stuff about git is complex and confusing.

More please. And more about this kind of DevOps related stuff, and more server config and admin

I think China is our biggest chance for competition, in the long run, but they aren't moving quickly. That may change. I hope it does.

I also believe that the commercialization of space is the only real future it can possibly have. If people can't at least hope for a better life out there, they won't bother. China may be a big player here too, since it has no problem sponsoring large-scale commercial ventures.

Looked at from that point-of-view, though, business people like Musk and the others may turn out to be our last best hope for humanity, after all. I sure wouldn't mind being wrong!

Thanks Jan, Clinton Roy and clacke.

I'm glad you are finding the series useful.

I had known of Readline's existence for years, and that there were some features that might be useful, but had never spent the time to find out what it could do. I am most surprised at the amount of work that has gone into this library and the great features it offers.

I expect to be able to get another couple of shows from it before I'm finished, and there's scope for others to contribute too if they work out cool things to do with it!

Bought it, built it! Surprisingly straight forward, thanks a) to your advice nybill, and b) the link you couldn't get to worked first time for me had a pretty detailed picture guide.

"It's a bit clicky," says the wife, so all the more reason to use it.

So, here is a PG-13 picture of the calculator in action:
https://next.thelovebug.org/index.php/s/apL8pxrX7Spd6Bc

(I managed to break my GMG instance without even knowing about it! My next project, perhaps?)

Musk isn't the only one. He's the one who got the furthest, and who has the grandest master plan. But don't forget about Bezos and Branson and their space ventures.

So, I don't think we're pinning our hopes on one man. But my answer reveals something else. We're still pinning our hopes on Great Men (as in the Great Man theory of history). Musk, Bezos and Branson aren't geniuses in the sense that they are sciencing and engineering all this stuff when nobody else could, they're just hiring the people who do.

Still, I think people fawning over Musk is awesome, because it means people are pinning their hopes on research, engineering and entrepreneurship, because that's what he symbolizes. And hustling the money and funneling it in the right direction isn't nothing either.

It's far better than people admiring people who literally don't contribute anything, or are contributing negatively, to furthering the knowledge and power of the human race, like David Avocado Wolfe, Dr. Oz or Gwyneth Paltrow.

Ok, so we're not at the mercy at a single man, but we are at the mercy of three men? No. Don't forget about China and India, and old spacer-travelers Japan and ESA, and even Russia! They're also further into space than Bezos or Branson, and on some axes further than Musk.

I'm not overly worried. Humanity will get our eggs in a second basket before the century is over.

I warn about a few small pitfalls I ran into while building it. Hope it saves you the same trouble.

I haven't even listened to the episode yet, but I've just ordered myself one of those calculator kits from Amazon!

Correction to correction: No I didn't misspeak anything, we just misunderstood each other. Sorry for the confusion. :-)

This was an interesting discussion, maybe because of the disagreements?

Also, thank you for the audio notes.

I went into this thinking "bah, readline, it's C-r, C-a, C-e, some kill and yank, what's to learn?". But it was Dave, and somehow there was a Part 3, so maybe there were something useful in there?

Wow, I was so wrong about knowing everything there is to know about readline. I don't know how useful the capitalization things are, and C-t I already knew about and I think it's mostly useful for when you have pressed C-t by mistake ... but M-b and M-f, OMG.

I have needed these for years. I usually hop around with C-left and C-right, but when you're one mosh, one tmux and one su down, usually all arrow keycodes are long gone, and it's all misery. Now with M-b and M-f my life quality will drastically improve!

Also interesting to know what the args thing is for. I've been vaguely aware of it as it's easy to trigger by mistake, but I think I will use it more now that I have been taught exactly what it does. Maybe for counting the length of git commit messages, for example. You want a 60-character max commit message length? M-6 0 C-b after you typed your message will show you by how much you overran the limit!

Thanks, Dave. As always a great contribution, even for those of us who may think we already know everything.

Firstly, after hearing the title of this episode I thought you were going to be discussing how much three-dimensional space your thoughts took up. That's not something I've ever considered before.

Secondly, when you actually discussed the "loudness" of your own thoughts and what types of sounds successfully caused you to lose track of them, it was ALSO something I'd never considered.

Well done, Sir. Well done.

Hi Michael, many thanks for the comment, glad you enjoyed the show and your probably correct that a bit of commentary might have been a good idea. There was a couple of reasons that I chose not to add any commentary first it made the podcast easier to make but the real reason was that I was trying to create a bit of mystery for people that had never heard the strange sounds you'd find when tuning around the amateur radio HF band which I thought might be the case for a large portion of the audience.

When I was a young boy I remember listening to old second world war valved receivers that I occasionally had access to and was fascinated by the strange sounds and voices having no idea what I was listening to I thought initially giving no explanation would create more intrigue for those that had never heard HF before and if there interest was gripped then they could have a look for some show notes. I'll probably add some commentary next time if I do a similar show.

PS many thanks for deciphering the Morse code (CW), and yes that was some incredible set-up DF2BO had certainly beats my half wave dipole flung in the loft :)

Hi Dave I'm not surprised you didn't know about this as there are not many amateur radio rallies held in these parts I only know about it because I was a long time ago a member of the Cockenzie and Port Seton Amateur Radio Club. This event is a mini radio rally it originally went under the title of junk night but has since gone up market, it's held at Cockenzie & Port Seton Community Centre usually around the beginning of August, I've been going there for a number of years now best bit about it is meeting up with old friends and sampling some of the home made food. On the haul I usually end up with very little I just happened to be lucky this year.

I was not aware of the comment/decomment commands, they might be useful.

Hi Dave!

Thanks a lot for Your effort.

If a machine is under heavy load and therefor kind of not responsive anymore that readline-magic comes in handy. Same goes for a slow link between a users terminal and a remote machine.

Thanks Clinton, I'm really glad you enjoyed the episode. The last 10 years have really been a blast, and I can see many more podcasting years ahead!

I've had a few people call me "professional" and, whilst that isn't strictly true, I'd be lying if I said I wouldn't want to be!!

or a yard sale or a garage sale or maybe a ...

https://hooktube.com/watch?v=bFOPwL32UvI

What a great story! I'm not into music podcasts at all really though (can't speed them up ;) but this was a fascinating look behind the scenes of a professional.

I do listen to a lot of podcasts, but one thing is that I speed them up by 70%, and the other is that I listen during many activities: driving, washing the dishes, going shopping, working out at the gym; they are all opportunities to listen.

I love the idea of tuning around and simply demonstrating what you can hear. However, I would suggest to add a bit more of commentary to make it more meaningful to those who not already know what they are listening to.

Let me add, that the morse code (CW) signal in both cases was a french station F5IN. Calling CQ DX, a general call for far away stations, in the first bit and just finishing a transmission in a contact in the second one.

When Tom, DF2BO, described his antenna set up, this left me mouth gaping. Yagis 2 elements on 80m (3.5Mhz) and 3 elements on 40m (7Mhz)! These are monsters, way beyond what any "normal" amateur will be able to put up. Just an amazing configuration, that almost makes me drool, when thinking about...
I think this is the kind of background information that makes sense to add, to put the audio in context.

Regards,
Michael

My question is, how many hours per day do you spend listening to podcasts? And are there that many hours in a day?

Thanks for the episodes. Quite the list.

https://pudding.cool/2018/02/waveforms/

Tricky bastards...

Thanks, I had not realize that I really don't need the gmail app.

Most of the time it was just annoying, I am almost always in front of a computer, so I would have find out about the new email a few seconds later. And for some reason the spell checker does not work if you updated it.

You have just freed me and my ram.

& # 1 2 4 ;

Will escape the | character !

The link to the Dutch book is http://duidelijkautistisch.nl/

I envy your finds! I didn't know there were such events in this part of the world.

Got word from Stewart (and he's https://twitter.com/sj_mackenzie btw , and Fractalide has an account at https://twitter.com/fractalide ) that I misspoke on something: A node won't have an info.rkt, it's one fractal, one package, and nodes are pointed out internally within that package.

For more on what all this means, what a fractal is and more, look forward to my interview with Stewart whenever we get that in order.

I hope you find the script useful. Suggestions for improvements and enhancements are welcome!

I hope you enjoy some of the channels I mentioned.

You could contribute some of your own recommendations at some point. I'm sure they'd be appreciated :-)

Alright, I made it a comment to spare you the work of correcting the original text and then you went and did it anyway. :-)

So I'll mail you the next time.

Oops, sorry I didn't notice the error when I processed your notes. I'll hand in my proof-reading badge...

I have fixed the error. Feel free to contact HPR admins via admin at hackerpublicradio.org if this sort of thing ever happens in the future.

Thanks Dave. I have a half dozen Pi's myself. This script will go directly into my script toolbox. Your mind is a treasure trove. Please keep digging!

"Larger than I thought*"

Hi Klaatu, many thanks for the kind words, glad you found it enjoyable and sorry for taking so long to reply, I only just noticed the comment I really should check for comments more often.

Sitting in a train, listening to a podcast of someone in a train.

Congratulations! That is a milestone I can work towards.

I can't wait to look into these youtube pages. So many interesting subjects. Thanks!

The Toronto subway trains have steel wheels. The Montreal subway trains have rubber tires.

More details here - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber-tyred_metro

I recently moved to Atlanta, GA USA and it had been years since I used the local subway. Here they call it MARTA - Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority. It is a combination of subways and buses. This past weekend I decided to give MARTA a try. The Toronto subway sounds just like the Atlanta subway and no I didn't fall asleep. I rode the subway for three hours and only saw one person asleep.

Thanks for the tip! I am also very distract-able, and find myself rewinding HPR episodes constantly to catch what I just missed. I tried looping an episode (this one, in fact) and saw a real difference in what I remembered.

I was curious about the roosters, but didn't mind them too much. Perhaps just list them as a co-host next time? ;)

Quite a topic for a first episode!

I enjoyed it, and look forward to your next submission. :)

It's been many a year since I was in Canada: are these the rubber wheeled ones?

I would just like to publicly say thank you to the admins to fixed my mistake, in a way that will force them to read it aloud ;)

1. Yes you describe why I hate forums.
2. Why did you not record a show describing the peoblem? I know several hosts that have ffmpeg foo. We have the exact same needs for hpr itself

I've somehow managed to upload both interviews in the one show :(

I haven't even edited the second interview yet.

I really enjoyed this installment of the Audiobook Club. It was great hearing from the author, who was thoughtful and articulate, explaining what sounded like complex concepts and making them clear. I'm really excited to listen to this book, spoilers notwithstanding.

Great job, guys!

I meant to remove the roosters but forgot. In the Philippines and there are roosters everywhere.

As soon as you said Star Trek, it made me think of TNG season 7, an episode called Masks . In that episode both Data and Picard wore masks and had altered roles.

Just wanted to say thanks to operat0r for bringing tron-script to my attention. I hate maintaining the windows boxes at work (5 windows boxes and 7 linux boxes). I have run tron-script on 3 of the machines so far and they are running a LOT quicker now including one of the win7 machines which got stuck installing updates a while back and even after hours of searching for a solution to the problem, nothing. Tron-script has resolved the issue and the machine is now up to date :)
It looks like tron-script has been around for quite some time and has remained under my radar. So thanks again for the episode and bringing it to my attention.
I wonder what other tools HPR listeners use that I or others have not heard of?

The repeal of the Individual Mandate was covered in this last episode, I believe.

Does the removal of the individual mandate justify an update?

I meant to say that when I'm walking around I prefer to listen sped up not normal speed.

Excellent discussion.

One fact I would contribute is that women throughout most of history have been treated as property. Much of what you all said about the status of women before prohibition was reflective of this. I'm old and I can remember when, in the USA, a woman could not get a loan, a mortgage, or a credit card without a male cosigner, if she could get one at all.

And, as we can see from current history, many men still view women as property, indeed, as playthings.

In addition, as a lifelong reader of Playboy (and at the risk of starting something), I must, with some trepidation, question how Playboy pictures can be conflated with pornography, unless the conflator believes that nudity is inherently pornographic, a position I do not share. I would argue that said person, at the least, has never seen a copy of Hustler. nor an image of the Venus de Milo.

Why for that matter, do you think the great masters of painting have painted so many nudes? I guarantee--as Justin Wilson used to say--it wasn't solely because of an abstract appreciation of color and form.

Once more, an excellent discussion.

I've enjoyed every episode of this series, and find your explanations of the concepts behind these policies invaluable.

With so much rhetoric and propaganda surrounding the healthcare debate, a factual explanation is just what I needed to hear.

Thank you so much!

How did I miss this from Hasbro Interactive? Cool.

As for making a new console which will play the old cartridges, I don't think that would be economically feasible and doubt many would buy them. In my experience people who want to play on real hardware, want the actual hardware.

Perhaps this will change as more and more old systems die out. In the case of the 2600, while I lost countless hours of my youth to it, there are only a handful of 2600 games worth playing.

I don't see any major player creating such a system. Perhaps a small, expensive runs, which would make most people use emulators on machines they already have.

Loved listening to this series. As someone who wishes they had more free time to get into Pathfinder/D&D/etc. (picked up the Pathfinder Beginners Box, but currently it's collecting dust bunnies) I hope this idea/series continues!

jif will always be a micro liquid...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4im-mENeBmg

Do you plan to continue recording more of these? I hope so!

This sounds like one those long-tail tools that you never knew how much you needed, until you came across them. I have a few like that (and that's one of the topics I have in my 'one day when I make a HPR recording' ideas), ShareX might go in that list if it works on my potato of a laptop.

(But making an informative, quality podcast episode doesn't excuse your proud mispronunciation of 'gif', Xoke. Please repent by sharing ten gifs of adorable kittens/puppies online.)

I am a fanatic about the Lensman series. In fact, my e-mail address comes from that series.

Yes, maybe I should have provided an easy-to-download temporary version of the game, plus the full rules. Thanks for the idea. If I try again, maybe that's something I'll try.

Qapla'!

The last time I heard an audio performance this good was at the Yes concert in Denver. Sadly, the band couldn't make it but the opening act was pretty great.

Thank you for these two episodes (2446 & 2461)!

I have been using git at work for over 5-1/2 years on two desktops and one laptop (1 Windows XP and 2 Linux) using ssh keys that I have manually put in place on the various machines.

I currently have over 60 unique repositories of which some are customer configuration specific and some are globally common.

At this point in time, I need to allow access for other developers to "my" repos. It took me around a day to implement the method explained in episode 2446 and less than a couple of hours to replace that with using gitolite! Managing the keys and wildcard repos within gitolite is so much easier than the manual requirements of the method from episode 2446.

I also had problems with MobileOrg, but found another solution. I have an owncloud instance where my orgmode directory is mirrored. On the android device I have installed the owncloud client-app and orgzly. Orgzly is syncing to the local owncloud org directory and the owncloud client is then syncing with the server. It sound harder than it is in RL.

I somehow missed this comment until the monthly show read it aloud.

Agreed, Frank. yum (and dnf, now) really is a great interface to packages. I have found zypper in openSUSE to be pretty neat, too.

-r

Hi Brian -

Thanks for your feedback!

As far as I know, we’re not being or striving to be anything funnier or smarter or longer or Kickstarter-supported than being the Alien Brothers Podcast hosted on Hacker Public Radio, at their consider help, support and bandwidth/space largess.

Our over-used phrased is this is the Alien Brothers Podcast, and not some other one.

If we’re “terrible”, we invite a lucid critique because, I mean, we already know we’re terrible. It’s the Alien Brothers Podcast. I can only assume by your use of that single word you mean “tremendous” as in “Oz the Great and Terrible”.

Casper and I have had conversations acknowledging our segments are too long.

Keep coming back! -r
[1] although I believe length is important is certain contexts, but I know Casper and I are conscious of the fact our submissions are almost certainly too long

From the about page "There is no restriction on how long the show can be.."

We have had 71 shows longer than one with the longest running 02:36:58.

Ok I gave it a try and listened to the complete 3rd episode of alien brothers and I think this series of podcasts is terrible. If these guys are trying to be funny, they aren't. If they are trying to be smart, they are not. If this is a kick starter like attempt to gage the market for a podcast i think that's a poor use of hacker public radio. Please put these shows in the emergency queue so when we start hearing them we'll know the end is near.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/umatrix/ogfcmafjalglgifnmanfmnieipoejdcf?hl=en

NoScript, but done by the guy who did ublock so they play well together

There is a learning curve so I don't recommend it for my family, but does work great for techies.

I was surprised and very happy that my episode about pdmenu resulted in you becoming an HPR contributor. I hope you feel motivated to contribute more!

It was a great episode. Also, as a Perl enthusiast I'm delighted to hear that's where pdmenu originated :-)

If this episode doesn't warm your heart, you don't have one.

I just realised I still have a little metal scoop I made at school. It was made from what I think is tin plated sheet steel bent in a box bender with tabs that had to be soldered. Getting those tabs properly aligned and soldered was a challenge and there are some *wide* gaps where the solder just didn't bridge them.

It wasn't a show-stopper, because I remember learning to braze some tools for the fireplace later and making tyre levers at the forge. Fun times :-)

A wonderful conclusion to this excellent series of RPG episodes! Looking forward to more of these. Kudos to all involved, including those who contributed the sound effects provided by Klaatu.

Klaatu: the moral of this story is that you can never please Ken Fallon. :-p

Thank you for the feedback.

We are committed to doing better work in the years ahead. We do not want to hijack the community, only provide content and contribute to the community to keep it moving along.

We are working to cross-collaborate with other members of the HPR community to better tune our delivery.

This is the best description of ssh public/private keys that I have encountered.

At about the same time I created this episode, I got a monitor from AOC. You can access the settings menu via 3 physical buttons on the from of the right bezel. The problem is they are those buttons you can't really feel. There are labels on them but those labels are hard to feel, too.

This resulted in numerous failed attempts to make needed adjustments. Frustrated me enough I've used one monitor for the past couple of weeks.

Today I finally got around to solve this problem. At first I put the monitor on it's back so I could get a good look see. With good lighting I was able to see the buttons clearly and make the necessary adjustments and have dual monitors again. Hooray!

In on of the most epic DUH! moments, I thought ot this episode and added landmarks to those buttons. So far so good.

Generalization:
If you have something that would benefit from tactile landmarks, superglue might be the answer.

Regarding "101," 102," etc.

It is common, but by no means universal that U. S. colleges use this means of numbering courses. Generally, 100 refers to Freshman (first year) courses; 200 to Sophomore (second-year) level courses, up to 400 and above for advanced or graduate-level courses. Generally, the more advanced the course, the more narrow and in-depth its focus.

"101" is usually a basic intro course, "102" the next intro course, and so on. A first semester U. S. History course would be History 101 (say, colonization to Civil War); the following second semester course would be History 102 (say, Civil War to Present). (As an aside, judging by what's happening domestically in my country, I have concluded that those courses are no longer taught, but that's another matter). History 412, just to pick a random topic, might be an exhaustive dive into the Early Federal period (roughly 1790-1832).

Again, this is not a universal system, jut a very common, perhaps the most common system.

I do not know the origins of this system.

Here's a more detailed article from Cal State--Northridge: https://catalog.csun.edu/policies/course-numbering-system/

I also learned to solder at school with the thing we're talking about thrust into the heap of clinkers heated with a gas torch.

The first thing the metal work teacher got us to make was a tin-plate tray. This involved cutting a V out of each corner of a square of tin-plate, folding it up slightly and running solder into the mating of the edges to make the tray.

Unfortunately, I never managed to cut the Vs accurately, and ended up trying to solder across a gap after bemnding the cut outs back and forth to break them.

After about six months the other kids were making hasps and staples, or paint scrapers, milling stuff on the milling machine, and I was still trying to get solder to bridge a one millimetre gap :-)

Hi Mike,

I bought myself the solder station Ken was mentioning having seen it on Big Clive's YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtM5z2gkrGRuWd0JQMx76qA). I recommended it to Ken and he also bought one.

The link I sent him was: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Digital-Electronic-Soldering-Station-Temperature/dp/B00KBPN1ZU

I also bought a few extra handles and a load of spare tips, which I found on eBay. I can send you eBay links by email if you want, but they may not be current any more.

Thinking of the big lump of copper on the end of a rod, that's what I learnt to solder with at school. We used a gas heating unit, so we'd advanced a bit from the hot coals :-)

My ears pricked up when Ken was extolling the virtues of a 25 dollar temperature controlled soldering iron. Somehow I have missed that recommendation, if it was ever aired.

What is the make and model of the iron?

I hear a loud cry of 'why does a blind man want a soldering iron?' from the land of clogs and windmills...

I do solder occasionally, especially things like PL259 coax plugs, and even components into vero board. But more recently I have decided my fingertips are too valuable to me for me to risk them, and anyway the plastic surgery bills were eroding my beer fund.

But, I regularly take stuff to the local Linux User Group, where my good friend Tony Wood, AKA 'soldering slave' solders stuff for me under my guidance.

Unfortunately Tony's soldering iron is only one step short of being a big lump of copper on the end of a steel rod which he plunges into hot coals before bringing it to bear on the legs of a surface mount AVR micro-controller.

I have been thinking of getting a temp controlled iron I can stuff in my rucksack and lug to the LUG (see what I did there?)

I sort of drifted off a bit during the talk about how to embed show notes and other stuff in video, so I may be a bit off track here.

But I caught sentences that included talk of oscilloscope traces of the frequency distribution of the host and other stuff, like the HPR logo etc.

This made me think of a mantra I have always used in my professional life, and that is, don't promise to, or start to, provide something periodically on a regular basis that you are likely to regret.

I don't know about how other people consume HPR, but I typically do it in bed with my iPhone. Typically, if the show contains stuff I need to look at, like Dave's shows about bash, I will go to the site the next day and copy and paste stuff from Dave's notes into a markdown file which I then file away on my RAID system.

Some shows I delete just given the subject without even listening, typically anything which looks like a 'how I make coffee' or 'how I make a glass of water'. Other shows I listen to right through without any hesitation because of the reputation, in my own mind, of the quality of the hosts past shows.

But, on to my point...I would not recommend you make a rod for your own back by promising stuff like video embedded show notes, oscilloscope traces or any other stuff that is incresing your work load further than before.

Maybe I'm biased here by the fact that video is pointless for me because I can't see. And I have to admit to being scared that the next step will be to ONLY have the show notes embedded in a video, and then I'm sorry but I will have to shoot you.

Hi Klaatu,

I forgot to tell you that I added the link you mentioned to the notes. I also updated the show notes on archive.org to include them.

For future reference you can let us know about any changes you need to be made to the notes by email to admin at hackerpublicradio.org. Since we don't propagate comments to archive.org (well, not yet anyway) changing the notes and propagating those gets any changes to the wider audience.

You brought back a lot of old memories when you mentioned Transmeta. I thought it was a unique potential game changer in the CPU market but it no push to be able to really break into the monolithic market forces of the time. Bummer!

Thanks for sharing your find, the story, and that it still works!! ;)

I noticed that you mentioned that you are not a sales man and described a person you knew that was great a creating hype about a produce which may go against your personality. But I would say that to get best results from other people's stories about any Kickstarter like service, is to to have a prototype ready to go. It shows that you have something besides an idea and some direction which is why you need the money to bring it into production. I don't like selling either but if you believe in the game idea, had a prototype (rules, card layouts, etc.), then the IDEA will sell itself. People will see value in the what you are trying to achieve thus you are not selling anything but creating something people WANT to bring to fruition because it intrigues them as much as you.

I just wanted bring another perspective.
"Ideas sell themselves because people see value in it."

Great suggestion.

On my list of future Bash topics I have Regular Expressions, quite near the top. That episode would include BASH_REMATCH of course.

I have mentioned one or two of the other Bash variables in passing such as FUNCNAME , but there are many more.

Thanks for the feedback.

By the way, with our new comment system we strip HTML but take measures to try to ensure all other ASCII characters pass through unhindered. So dollar signs ($) shouldn't be a problem.

How about some shows about the various built-in variables? I have made use of BASH_REMATCH (dollar sign excluded because I assume it might break something), but I assume there are more I have missed.

I failed to include the link to the source of the story:
http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/229831/Job-inSecurity

The two of you came across as arrogant and I feel like you tried to hijack the HPR audience. I am not "your listener". I am a regular listener of HPR and it is pretty apparent that neither of you have listened for any length of time. If you had then you would have heard klaatu a hundred times or more. You would understand what is meant by "open source" and "free software" for this community. You would have realized that most of the hosts are just as "f****** smart" or smarter than you claim to be.
That being said, I did appreciate some of the topics that you touched upon. You could do a whole show on the Bally Astrocade instead of a just a brief diversion. The Huawei background and info could be another show.
Anyway, thanks for contributing.

I do intend to write some notes on this topic. I have no useful links; this episode exists because I can't find a howto online that's any good; they all presume the reader is familiar with how a certificate infrastructure works, or they assume the reader knows all about network routing, and so on. So for now, the audio version of the shownotes are embedded in the ogg file. Eventually, I'll write something up. Ideally, I'll write down the entire server series!

I'm glad you found something of interest in the episode.

This is really a Unix thing. The echo command writes to STDOUT by default, and Awk reads from STDIN unless you tell it otherwise, so joining the two like that in a pipeline (as it's called) achieves a useful result very simply.

It is strange what people pick up on in a tutorial. For instance, I'd never run a program using: echo nn | ./program.awk ... It's a very handy little construction. I even popped the divisor program into my bin and named it "isprime" so I can just ask "echo 913 | isprime"? and get an answer.

It's often the little off the cuff details that catch attention. Thanks!

Do you have links or other notes ?

Glad these are turning out to be useful.

I have always been fascinated by what I guess can be called 'command languages'. I have worked with the GEORGE operating system that had a fairly basic one, and VMS, which which had DCL (Digital Command Language), which grew to be fairly sophisticated during my time using it. However, in comparison, I find Bash to be considerably more sophisticated. Still not a true language with features like those you describe, but nevertheless worth working with I think.

It's this that motivates me to describe what can be done with Bash, and I amuse myself trying to do things that stretch my imagination a bit :-)

Dave

Keep it coming Dave.

I do a lot of bash programming, mostly because I work on the assumption that if I need to type the same complex command-line more than twice it should be a script, to cut down on typing, trying to remember stuff, and to cut down on errors.

I don't enjoy bash programming very much. Mostly because I hate not being able to use normal language constructs like:

result = function(argumments)

So the more tips and ideas from anybody else who faces the same questions the better

Thanks for the comment, I'm glad you found it helpful in your studying. Linux Books can be quite dry and daunting with all the unfamiliar language when your first starting but worth persevering with.

You don’t need any special skills to record a show, just a digital audio recorder or PC, Phone, Tablet etc, and the ability to send that audio file to HPR via the net. All the rest can be taken care of by the wonderful team of volunteers who do such a great job with little recognition.

As Ken and Dave often say, you now owe us a show, LoL.

Got the kit but it has surface mount components - PANIC.

I'm glad you found it interesting, and hope this series proves to be useful to you. I plan to do more shows on Bash functions and Bash features in general in the future.

Dave

I ha e a habit of studying in a back room of my house with only the hum of a fan or some music in the background. I enjoyed putting this on and looping it while trying to trudge through a very dry book on learning Linux.

That reminds me, I should do an episode on more mature adults seeking their first degree. Maybe. I don’t know. I’ve never done anything like an audio recording,,,, but I had never attended a community college before last year either.

I would love a show on retriever training! That would be so interesting. I think diversity is needed a bit. I mean, people are submitting great and wonderful tech, gaming, and discussion shows, but some rather odd the wall stuff would be wonderful.

I have worked with DOS and windows for twenty five years now. My only nix experience was with phone systems and hotel systems with which I administered through step by step procedures. I am now starting to learn a bit more command line Linux as I have started playing with raspberry pi computers and switched a couple of laptops to Xubuntu and Mint XFCE.
As you probably guessed, a lot of the show went over my head, but it is fascinating to hear the possibilities for automation that are available if I could learn more of Bash commands. This series has been very helpful to me in developing a desire to learn more and find things that I could try to automate.
Thank you very much for your hard work.
Shawn

You could have split this into two shows !

Seriously ?

"I don't think anyone on HPR would be interested in retriever dog training - I guess we won't be doing a show about that ?"

Words fail me.

Ken.

Happy Birthday !!

I think if you put what you suggested in the notes (that inside a print statement, Awk interprets a comma as OFS) that would be perfect! When learning any language, context variation is a consistent bugaboo. Wait, why does a semi-colon mean one thing here, and something else entirely there? So doing it deliberately, and then pointing it out is definitely beneficial, and points out the internal workings of the language.

Just wanted to say thanks for this, I really enjoyed the episode and some of the music. I find it kind of hard to find new music so this was pretty great!

Whew, thanks, Bill! I still have trouble sleeping but at least it's not b/c of that motherboard. ;)

A fascinating and timely discussion.

Great show, as always. I have a few command line access and programs I've written using yad that would be great to group together in a menu. I'll check out pdmenu for this. Thanks.

Well, its been a long time. But, I thought I'd just pop in here to give a little closure. The motherboard sat on a shelf here for months. I realized I probably would never use it.

So, I brought the motherboard/CPU to our LUG and gave it to a buddy, Rusty1.

Today I get this message:

https://imgur.com/PXHmClW

So there you go, the cap repair worked! Jon can stop staying up nights wondering. ;)

Hi ZZ,

I had a listen to this show again, and the content came through loud and clear. Sure there were some artifacts in this show, but if you listen to other shows from b-yeezi, you'll see that this is not typical of his setup.

We all have a "bad audio day" but I would prefer to get shows that are imperfect, over not getting perfect shows. "Our golden rule is Any audio is better than no audio."

Thanks for listening, and taking the time to comment. We are always interested in hearing from our listeners. Perhaps you could do a show and tell us your tech story, or any other story you like "as long as it's of interest to hackers".

Ken.

Klaatu, I'm moving my comments to the comment thread, so other people can see/respond as well.

Thank you for your continued efforts in demystifying our mystic arts. I feel like this set will be a good resource for on boarding folks interested in going from "I use Linux" to "I manage Linux Servers".

PLEASE do something about your sound quality. It is just painful to listen to constant pops, clicks, squeaks, booms... etc...

Enjoy that cup! I, myself, am steeping some coffee as I write this on a tiny screen mere feet away from a real keyboard...

I've found over the years that once you move to a French press, its really hard to go back to a drip coffee maker. I never had the stomach for 'diner' coffee. And in all fairness, I never appreciated coffee until leaving the deep south for the great white north. Mostly due to EVERYTHING being bad coffee.

I have to admit, most coffee I come across here in NZ is so amazingly good that there's a part of me that misses the really bad coffee of me youth: drip coffee that's been sitting on the burner for 2 hours, or the percolated coffee that's steeped in itself for 45 minutes, the bad petrol station coffee that you have to dump all kinds of flavour into so you can manage to drink it.

The plunger does make a big difference, though. I

For the record, I do *not* use a plastic plunger. I found a nice all-metal one, and it's super durable and really good.

Off to go make some coffee.

Thanks for the comment.

When I wrote this example it never occurred to me that it could be confusing, but now you point it out, yes it is. I think I was keen to show that -F on the command line is the variable FS in the script, and having just shown an example of -F "," just continued to use it!

I was also keen to make it clear that the comma in a print statement is where Awk puts the contents of OFS, so I guess I lost sight of the example a little in my enthusiasm :-)

I will consider modifying these notes in the light of your suggestion.

Love the episode, and the series.

I think that in your hello world example that demonstrates the FS built-in variable, the character used should not be a comma, but rather something distinct like a pipe (or some other character that does not have a different context in language). I understand that typically FS will be switched to a comma, if anything, but as the print statement uses a comma for a different function, it can be confusing.

$ awk -F "," 'BEGIN{print "FS is",FS}'
FS is ,

$ awk -F "|" 'BEGIN{print "FS is",FS}'
FS is |

Jrullo, I'm not sure which free guide we were talking about, but there are two that come to mind:

1. A voucher for a free copy of Pathfinder rules, which I was offering as a special HPR promotion. As of this writing, I've given them all out, so the giveaway is over! All is not lost, however...

2. Pathfinder is published under the Open Gaming License, so the rules are online for free. The official reference document for Pathfinder is here:

http://paizo.com/pathfinderRPG/prd/

There's another one, which has a different interface and integrates more third party stuff, here:

http://www.d20pfsrd.com/

Note:
If anyone reading this comment is brand new to RPG, though, I do highly recommend a Beginner set for either D&D or Pathfinder, because the beginner sets make character creation really easy, and they use a reduced set of rules, and just generally help you ease in. You should be able to find a beginner box at your local game store or at an online book seller. It's worth it, I promise.

I was listening to the show and you talked about a free guide. I was expecting a link in the notes. Where would I find that, it sounds useful.

Hi Klaatu,

what's more bothersome about `sudo yum whatprovides *bin/semanage` than searching for all the SELinux packages and installing them to maybe get the right tool installed?
That's a feature a _really_ like about yum. And no need to jump through hoops like installing `apt-file` and updating its database necessary.

Keep sending in loads of shows !

What the bananas ???

Not again with the 'let's stop there'

This is hpr "there is no limit on how long a show can be ..."

I found this page which shows how waves propagate.

https://freaklabs.org/wireless-foundations-part-1-what-are-these-wave-thingies-anyhow/

I've got a couple netbooks and have found that the BSDs (particularly OpenBSD, but also FreeBSD & NetBSD) run quite nicely on them. I also run Debian Stable on one and it's a pretty uneventful experience.

I was amused at the Debian comment about not being transparent.
I will accept that. I don't use Debian anymore since Crunch Bang has ended but,,,,
Debian is a community run distro. So is FreeBSD. So is NetBSD.
So is Gentoo. So is Void Linux and Arch Linux.
But of the non-transparent distributions such as OpenBSD which is run by a Benevolent Dictator known as Theo,,, OR Slackware which is run by the Benevolent Dictator known as Patrick,,,,, they too make really solid distro's which a great many people love.
But as an aged old man, it does make me smile at the comments of our FOSS Youth who, complain they simply don't like non-transparent governments yet, they stand by their monarch derived OS's. Not that I'm complaining that your human....

I've been using the phone now for over 2 months and the performance is better than the old Oneplus1 all the apps I use are snappy and responsive with no lag that I can detect. I can't compare to any other phone as I've not used anything else during this time, and I am not a mobile gamer (or any type off, for fact) so can not say what game performance is like on the phone but I think it stands up to most mid range devices well. If it hadn't been for the 4G issue I would probably have stuck with the Oneplus1 and just flashed it and saved myself the £200m but I'm happy and my wife will get an upgrade to her Nexus 4 at some stage.

I was wondering how the Snapdragon 430 processor it is doing with the apps you run. The Nokia 6 interested me when it first appeared but I had concerns about the 430 processor. Everything else was a major plus for me - screen size, fingerprint scanner, NFC & metal build.

Any comments, especially compared to other mid-tier phones like the Moto G5S Plus.

See above

Thanks for the clarification. I'm also on giffgaff but wasn't aware of the 4G issue and the OnePlus 1. I scarcely use my phone and am currently using a fraction of the data I pay for each month, so I don't see this being a problem!

http://cybrosis.podiobooks.libsynpro.com/rss

I'm enjoying the first Chapter.

Nginx is a great alternative to apache web server.

the reference to unixporn[dot]com needs to be updated to unixporn[dot]pro.

We have lost the original domain and it now links to NSFW content.

I've been running servers since before you were born,,, 1975.
And I am enjoying this series. It's good to have a series on these taboo things you know...

Nice start, Klaatu! I'll make sure to point
junior sysadmins to this series!

So was the third option, which isn't really around anymore, Solaris? ^^
Because the OpenSolaris fork illumos is in fact, 6 years after Bryan Cantrill's "Fork Yeah! The Rise and Development of illumos" USENIX talk[0], still around. It's the base for distributions like Joyent's SmartOS and the database appliance Delphix ;)
And upstream for OpenZFS, too!

[0]: https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc

This is so silly, but I had not recently realized the aptness of the terms server and client. You explained so clearly that a server computer serves a _client_ computer. Thank you!

Glad you enjoyed in! I just can't wait for your LaTeX episode!

I must only be running junkers. I've never owned a machine that could play games like this. I'd like to try it someday, when I join the 21st Century gaming world.

I enjoyed this a lot. It was very clearly explained and the example was helpful.

I tried to understand XSL back in 2012 when writing Bash scripts to let me download music from Magnatune. They held their catalogue in XML at that time (now it's in a SQLite database) and I used xsltproc and XSL to extract stuff. I didn't find any very clear explanations of what could be done in XSL at that time, though I winged it by copying examples and using trial and error.

Your links seem to fill in many of the gaps in my understanding, so thanks for them too.

Dave

Loved listening to this episode! My sons and I want to start playing a tabletop RPG like D&D but we weren't sure of how the game play would be like (my eldest and I have our characters created already which was fun to develop so that gives us a head start). Since I've never played anything like this but have always had an interest, I had no idea how it would play on. Even though the type of RPG was different in this episode (yet enjoyable enough for me to want to try Interface Zero as well), it made everything much clearer. This felt almost like playing a text adventure game on the computer (even though it *is* exactly that minus the computer). Lots of fun to listen to as a spectator as well! Thanks for the episode and I look forward to more like this.

Merit will always be secondary to charisma when it comes to the success of projects and individuals. Routinely, people in professional environments that have no business being where they are, and who can't even do their jobs correctly, continue to move upward.

It's the nature of attraction. The cult of personality, when the media is involved -- and media is involved in everyone's lives now, to some extent.

I don't think there's a solution, except to seduce or blackmail the popular kids over to your side.

This is exactly the kind of nuts-and-bolts information I've been looking for in a HAM-related episode. Thanks!

It's episodes like this one that make me want to quit podcasting, because I'll never reach this level of greatness. It's so disjointed and natural that you think it couldn't possibly have been planned, but it's so coherent and persistent that there's no way it couldn't have been scripted.

The characters in it have mysterious backstories ("you saved my life, Casper"), they cut to empty commercial breaks, they come up with the name for the series in the episode itself, they talk about how they'll talk about movies but then barely talk about movies, they talk about video games but can't decide on how to categorize them, the hosts barely even know one another's handles. AND YET THEY PULL THROUGH. It's gripping and triumphant.

This is some amazing avant garde audio. Well done, Alien Brothers. Well done.

There are two types of people in the world: those who are attention-getters, and those who are not.

The right combination of an obnoxious, over-excited, supremely-networked attention-getter plus [any given project] results in *zeitgeist*. Whether that zeitgeist is justified does not enter the equation.

Zeitgeist procreates; the more people stricken with it, the more it builds in volume and size. The more it grows, the more people get stricken by it.

What I'm saying is that you need a Popular Kid to champion your cause.

The problem is, you hate popular kids, and popular kids probably don't know you exist.

(And by "you", I mean "me")

After a while, one begins to think one has heard of all the open source games out there, but obviously that's silly. Still, one runs out of places to look for new games -- until someone like you bring them to light. So thanks!

In the #oggcasplanet IRC channel in freenode, Klaatu mentioned a use for this that more people might have. I had it myself and didn't consider using this.

That use is to distinguish between the left ctrl and fn keys on laptops. For example ctrl is usually in the bottom left most position on HP laptops, whereas those two keys are reversed on Lenovos.

I've used this method to mark the ctrl on both. For what it's worth, I decided to use 3 dots of super glue in a horizontal line on the key because sometimes my finger hits that key in different places.

Chose to mark the ctrl instead of the fn key because the ctrl is the one i need to use most often and the ctrl key is not in the same position relative to the fn key on different keyboards.

hpr2433 :: You were right, I was wrong

Good episode. Like to hear about keeping things alive.

By the way, have you considered reading for librivox?

Thanks for this JWP. Upon further inspection it was surprising to see that the Transmeta Crusoe powered both the OQO Model 01 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OQO#OQO_Model_01), which I distinctly remember salivating over in 2004.

Thanks Windigo!

I did actually know that, but my brain refused to come up with anything useful on the spur of the moment.

I spent time over many years during my mainframe days making serial cables (RS232, RS423) where this was pretty much the same. The varieties of "Null Modem" cables with crossovers *was* something I knew quite well, but have largely forgotten now :-)

I don't think I have ever used a crossover CAT5 or CAT6 cable though, come to think of it.

Maybe we need more shows on the details of connecting devices together?

Just a quick bit of clarification; When Shane said he used a straight through cable, he was referring to the order of the wires inside the connector.

A straight through (also called a patch) cable is used to connect a device to a piece of networking equipment, like a PC to a switch. For connecting two PCs, you can switch the transmit and receive pairs and create a crossover cable.

Thank you for this episode. I thought I was pretty cool for embracing RISC (at least, to the degree that I have; since my iBook G4 finally died, I've been mostly RISC-less lately, ARM notwithstanding) but this Transmeta thing sounds really clever - and very obscure. Thanks for the history lesson!

This is really cool. My girlfriend does some bullet journal stuff, but I never understood what it was all about. Hearing about it in this context is elucidating, though.

Also, I'm really really happy to hear that my Emacs episodes helped you learn to love Emacs!

I am, like croy (previous comment), eager to hear about your Android integration.

+1 for dodddummy's comment above. However:

me@box:~/pods$ wget -c http://hppodcraft.com/podcasts/TheCallofCthulhu-hppodcraft.mp3
--2017-11-08 17:30:14-- http://hppodcraft.com/podcasts/TheCallofCthulhu-hppodcraft.mp3
Resolving hppodcraft.com (hppodcraft.com)... 107.161.176.74
Connecting to hppodcraft.com (hppodcraft.com)|107.161.176.74|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 403 Forbidden
2017-11-08 17:30:14 ERROR 403: Forbidden.

Do a show on how to set it up on something like a raspberry pi and I'm happy to join a pool.

When I was a pre-teen, my Mom bought a 5BX booklet and 3 10BX booklets, one for each member of the family. I was never good at being a regular exerciser, but my Mom has done her 10BX routine her whole life. She eventually lost her book, but she still does her routine three times a week. She is not tapering off though, still stuck at the highest level she got to. She is not growing old willingly : -)

What a memory! thanks for the show.

Thanks for your economic series, I find it very interesting.

Would you be willing to provide dns secondary or backup email services? I run my own dns server and email server, but it is a challenge to find the secondaries to make my services a bit more robust. I don't really want close friends to do this, I'd like it to be cast a little wider. It is even hard to convince the isps to do it, sadly. But it is hard to find like-minded people ... you guys sound about right : -) And if you like, I can secondary for you as well.

Hey blindape.

Seth Frightening having the Flying Nun sound is probably accurate; I found the album in a random Kiwi op shop.

Shortly before moving to NZ, I found a Chris Knox CD on the street (literally, it was lying in a gutter) and absolutely FELL IN LOVE with not only Chris's music but also that general sound and feel. I've been really enjoying discovering Kiwi music and Kiwiana in general.

Is there a link to the audiobook in the show notes for this ep? If so I didn't see it. But I miss a lot. I found it by looking at the last book club episode.

If it's not here, might be worth having it for the next one for ease of use.

I took a look at the page, Bob. Good stuff! One addition - there's a missing entry in your text editors section: GNU Emacs.

Probably just an oversight.

What do you think about Haystack passwords?

https://www.grc.com/haystack.htm

I agree that I might be able to get permission to use work resources on my own time assuming there is information I'm legally bound not to reveal and doesn't contain proprietary information.

But asking for that permission is more effort that I want to make.

I'll see what I can muster without work resources.

The episode was very engaging. Thank you for sharing. Would you let us know in a month or two how it is going?

This was a fun episode because of the enthusiasm of the presenters. Some intriguing ideas.

This is the first time I've ever heard of the concept of a server cooperative. What a superb idea! A very pragmatic compromise between self-hosting and going with a corporate service.

I would listen to an entire week of shows discussing different aspects of this arrangement. Well done!

Mountains of Madness is a great story.

This is hardly the best Lovecraft story. My two personal favorites are At the Mountains of Madness and The Dreamquest of Unknown Katath.

Remember, Lovecraft was a hack writer. He was a brilliant hack, but a hack nonetheless. Many of his works were the same story over and over, but, when he got it right, he was a genius.

If you want more Lovecraft, check out Dagonbytes: http://www.dagonbytes.com/thelibrary/lovecraft/

I'm very curious about your android integration! :)

I've previously published a show about using org mode to create presentation pdfs.

It took me a few tries to quit smoking. I was only able to quit after I convinced myself I would get cancer if I continued smoking. Fear and cold turkey work.
Great episode. Can we here more about life on the road?

@Shane Shennan. I hadn't considered the accessibility use. I'll keep it in mind. For what it's worth, the landmarks I added are still holding up.

Thanks for this idea! I often work with people who are learning to touch type, but who do not have much feeling in their fingertips. I'll be suggesting your hack to them so that they can feel the F and J keys more easily.

I got really behind on my podcast playlist while on vacation this winter (I've just heard this at the end of October) so Kevin bet me to say that I wished I was part of the discussion.

I could not find any evidence to support this, but some of Seth Frightening's songs have a very 'Kiwi' sound to them. This sound/style was common among bands on New Zealand's Flying Nun record label from roughly the mid 80's to mid 90's.

I was going to add more to this comment but there is just so much to say from my own experiences and also from watching how my children consume media that I really need to record a proper response to this.

Going through some of Fran Blanche old videos and she has another type of board also from the apollo missions

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Apollo+Saturn+V+LVDC+Circuit+Board

:P

You ordered one, nice. Its a fun project to solder up. And the best part is when you're done you'll have a useful piece of test equipment.

Yea, I can tell I'm just scratching the surface with this AVR programing stuff. I'm sure I'll be messing with it more in the future. I'm not sure Avrdudess is necessary. It just helped me find out quickly there was a verify option. I'm sure the GUI is just setting some flag for AVRdude I don't know about.

That is a great price for a well powered phone! added to amazon wish list..

I love that their notice is trying to sound sinister and official, and failing at both. After all, any lawyer worth their weight starts their correspondence with "Dear [so and so]".

I really enjoyed your episode! I find automation in games to be a natural reaction to developers introducing more "grind" and busywork into their games, and I think it's fantastic that you're overcoming it with intelligence instead of brute force.

My first real solder project. I hope the thing is programmed.

Cracking episode! Brilliantly timed for me as I am just starting down the path of AVR programming.

I've bought several programmers, usbtiny, libusb, usbavr, avrisp2. A lot of them seem to be less than perfect clones of known designs and they spit out what look like error messages that you can suppress with the -F flag and then carry on working.

Fuses are confusing but there is an online fuse calculator, I'll look it up and post the link if you haven't found it.

I didn't know about avrdudes and I will look at it. But a lot of GUI programs are written with inaccessible toolkits like Qt.

Arduino IDE is itself inaccessible, so I stick to the command-line. Take a look at arduinino.mk, which is a Makefile system you can use with programmers to avoid the Arduino IDE
My first project is an audible logic probe. Had a logic probe with LEDs for years but that's useless to me now of course.

I'm jealous of all the little gizmos now appearing with cheap and colourful displays, like your transistor tester.

Link to Server 105
https://www.meridiannext.com/

Link to German server
http://www.meridian59.de/

As said in the podcast, both have the ogre client.

I listen to Astronomy Cast myself and recommend it too. I actually get the "raw" version before they edit it (http://www.astronomycast.com/feed/fullraw/) since it's amusing to hear what goes on behind the scenes!

I also greatly enjoy The Weekly Space Hangout (http://www.universetoday.com/feed/wshaudio/), and of course, Awesome Astronomy (http://awesomeastronomy.libsyn.com/rss).

I shall check Planetary Radio, which I haven't ever listened to. Thanks for the pointer.

I'm a long time science and space geek, and I quite enjoyed this. If you like this you might to check out The Astronomy Cast (http://www.astronomycast.com/) and Planetary Radio (http://www.planetary.org/multimedia/planetary-radio/). They are both on my podcatcher.

I've really enjoyed your tabletop gaming series and this show fascinated me. I think I'm going to have to listen to it again because I didn't really follow how the gameplay worked. That's not necessarily your fault though as while listening a fair amount of my brain power was taken up with making dinner which got complicated as the recipe required improvisation around ingredients I lacked. Anyway, I digress, I love the idea of the game and will giver serious consideration to the Kickstarter. Any chance of a summary or audio or even video of an actual game?

Hi Dave many thanks for the comment, I think you've hit it on the. The internal Dictaphone microphone is reasonably sensitive but the external clip-on one supplied which I used is even more so. It's clear that the audio was badly clipping when looking at the recording in Audacity. I think I'll be investing one of those excellent microphones recommended by Jon Kulp.

Many thanks for the useful advice and really looking forward to hearing your episode and yes I'll hope to have another go if I get a chance.

Best regards

MrX

Hi dodddummy, many thanks for leaving a comment and sorry for taking so long in replying. Yes that's a good tip in noisy environments which I knew about and I did give it a go but the quality was so poor that I didn't think it really helped. I think it may be Ok up to a point but past that point, it just makes things worse. Thanks for the tip much appreciated :)
Regards MrX

I've considered doing some shows on the mainframe. So far I haven't because I'm leery of using work assets for non work reasons. I would need to do that.

However, I do have a show in the works on my favorite editor, The Hybrid Editor, XE which works like the standard mainframe(ISPF) editor.

Might also do a show on the mainframe emulator, Hercules.

There are related topics I could do without using work resources,
though. Rexx and COBOL come to mind.

But it's not likely I'll do a show on my day to day work on the mainframe.

I should have provided a link to the meeting notes for our KWNPSA meeting on Markup Languages and Note Taking:

https://sobac.com/wiki/Markup_Languages_and_Note_Taking/Meeting_Notes_2017-10-16

Maybe the HPR comment daemons can just append that link to my previous comment...

--Bob.

I conveniently listened to your podcast just before going to the KWNPSA (Kitchener Waterloo NonProfit SysAdmin) meeting on "Markup Languages and Note Taking", where I took notes for the meeting. I added the podcast as one of the resources.

Thanx for telling us about DocBook and some other markup languages!

--Bob.

hi and thanks for your efford.

you have been working on a Mainframe? please consider podcasting on how things are done in the world of mainframes.

thx jan (germay)

Task Master! :P

(I'm on it buddy. I'm waiting for an electronics shipment that should let me program the thing.)

...an episode is inbound in... 3... 2...

*cough* You owe me a show *cough*

Finding your audience is really hard, especially with not only do you have to compete with your contemporaries, corporate or independent, but you also have to deal with everything in the past as well. If not there's a lot more noise, but you do have a lot more control on what to do with your art.

FYI: Seems there is a new version of these kits for 2017. There are multiple options of ordering just the kit, just the parts, or fully assembled boards. I might pick up the $16 kit with the plexiglass case just for fun.

Search:

"2017 English DIY Mega328 Transistor Tester LCR Diode Capacitance ESR meter PWM Square wave Frequency Signal Generator"

On Aliexpress.

I still plan to try and flash this 2016 kit I have. Then I can do a followup to this episode.

I loved this show! I'd also like to take this time to mention sport (I read it as "slack ports") as an alternative tool to sbopkg. It offers no new features, it just doesn't have the ncurses interface and is written in python.

MMMM KDE.


https://gitlab.com/slackport/sport

P.S. klaatu, this is a non-verbal check in of a slackware abuser.

@clacke

Delighted you've found a use for nullglob. I too have been surprised by its side-effects - presumably because stuff like Bash completion makes use of it AND doesn't enable/disable it in the way I waffled about in this episode.

There's always a slight air of "incompleteness" about Bash I feel, though it's a hell of a lot more polished than it was. I was forced to use csh and tcsh at one point in my Unix life, and boy does Bash make those shells look terrible!

Markdown the specification and Markdown the Perl script came out in March 2004 [0] and were last updated in December [1] the same year. I think it's fair to assume that John Gruber considers it perfected for the use case he had in mind.

Any further evolution of the language is now up to anyone who cares to implement a processor. There is nobody maintaining the language itself.

I absolutely agree that it is pretty useless for anything bigger than a small README without resorting to HTML, but I don't think that's a big problem, and I don't think it makes Markdown meaningless. I used to write documentation in HTML, and I think replacing 95% of the HTML with Markdown makes it much nicer to work with.

I wouldn't write a book in HTML, but there are those that have, using CSS3 print styling!

Before hearing your argument, If I were hypothetically to ever write a book, I would likely not even consider anything but LaTeX. But thanks to your episode, and you simply reminding me that DocBook is still out there, I might spare DocBook a look first. It was a good episode and your points are all valid. Thanks!

[0] https://daringfireball.net/2004/03/introducing_markdown

[1] https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/

You seemed unclear on what SGML is, so here's a quick summary:

SGML, to tell a simplifying lie, is the idea of using tag names enclosed in less-than and greater-than characters to mark up text. The original DocBook is one application, HTML is another.

XML is a further evolution of SGML, which both constrains and extends SGML to enable new ways of defining and working with applications of the format.

The counterpart of XML Schema in SGML is the DTD, the Document Type Definition, and the counterpart of XSL is DSSSL, which is a form of Scheme (yay!).

Happy to note that I have now used `shopt -s nullglob` professionally!

Never do it in interactive shell though, and never `set -u` either. I did so by mistake, while trouble-shooting and making a careless copy and paste.

All kinds of prompt-rendering and tab-completion will fail loudly and hilariously.

Adam Ruins Everything is very entertaining, but not exactly complete in its analysis. So this comes across to me like cherry-picking the data. hospitals do indeed have chargemasters, and the prices therein are largely made up. But it is also true that margins at most hospitals are rather thin, so I think it is not accurate to imply that hospitals are simply being greedy and waving around large bags of money. So I think Adam is essentially confusing cause and effect here.

Thank you for the kind comment. I happen to have very strong opinions on what should be done, but in this series my primary goal was to be objective, and you are relieving me that I may have succeeded.

Could we start a series in which a Slackware user from each named nationstate (doesn't have to be acknowledged by the UN or any agency) checks in? Let's hear about Slack where ever it may occur!

Thanks gurdonark and Shane, glad you enjoyed the episode! The comparison between books and movies is such a great, meaty topic. Somebody ought to do a series on the subject.

I am hope you can address some of the points brought up in "Adam Ruins Everything - The Real Reason Hospitals Are So Expensive" in a future episode. The video seems to challenge your arguments related to why health care is so expensive in the US. Their video and sources are here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CeDOQpfaUc8
http://www.trutv.com/shows/adam-ruins-everything/blog/adams-sources/adam-ruins-the-hospital.html

I would also argue that it is possible to decrease the individual cost of equipment by increasing it's utilization. For example it common practice in European hospitals to run expensive equipment like MRI machines 24/7 to reduce the overall cost.

It is also possible to increase human utilization by concentrating skills in facilities dedicated to a given specialism. This is been done to great efficiency in India and there are facilities dedicated to, for example eye surgery, or heart treatments. This has proven to be extremely useful in attracting the best specialists from all over the world, because they are guaranteed to have a high throughput of patients in their dedicated field. This allows the facilities to train up many more specialists as there is a constant utilization of their skills.

Thank you for this episode. Once again, I am impressed by your knowledge of the healthcare system in the US, and love to hear your apolitical description.

Hi clacke,
Ah, I missed that. That'll teach me to listen at 4x speed.

The flamefest you are referring to is the Tcl War linked in the show notes.

Thanks for the comment on the accessibility. That's good to know if you're building a serious UI. I guess it's another example of how Tcl/Tk hasn't quite left the 80s.

rms started a flamefest when he posted to comp.lang.tcl in 1994;
Why you should not use Tcl:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.lang.tcl/7JXGt-Uxqag/3JBTj5I43yAJ

I don't like Tcl for its stringly typed nature but Tk seems like a nice light-weight GUI toolkit; but, unfortunately, it doesn't work with screen readers on any platform so you should avoid using it unless you're just developing something for your own use.

You said "Unicorn" :)

I loved this show. The only problem I had is that I wanted to be a part of the discussion! Well done!

I liked the explanation of the Doppler effect's effect on radio freqeuencies. At 33:30, it was mentioned that at the speeds that satellites travel, the Doppler effect is noticeable, so much that you may have to adjust your RX frequency. And at the speed of car travel, which is very slow compared to RF propagation that the Doppler shift wouldn't play a role.

I just have one nitpick, which that at car speeds, a measurable Doppler shift of RF signals indeed happens, even at GHz frequencies, and this is exactly how police radar works (commonly using RADAR way up in the 10 GHz or 24 GHz bands). This is totally a nitpick, since we're probably not talking about a shift of more than a few kHz, and very few if any radios can tune in less than 10 kHz increments in UHF anyway.

Enjoyed the show. Cheers.

There's also a Ruby/Tk, and there used to be a Guile Tk (best frenemies!), but Guile Tk was deprecated and replaced with Guile GTK, which was then replaced with Guile Gnome.

It's pretty funny that although Python has to a large degree replaced Tcl out there, any system that includes a full Python also includes Tcl/Tk, because tkinter depends on Tcl/Tk and is part of Python stdlib.

Even funnier, the proudest project of the Guile world, Guix, depends on Python (via graphviz via glib) and therefore Tcl.

I enjoyed your comment about a GM being a person that has too much imagination for one person. Well put!

Good to see HPR showing Slackware love ;-)

Loved that comment at 15 mins 7 secs, both because it is funny and because it is brings the point home.

It was probably 'force of habit' that caused me to mark the show as 'explicit' :)

Brilliant cleanup job !.

The closest I come to gaming on the table-top is chess, and my on-line gaming life is more about casual FOSS games than PC gaming. But even as a non-gamer, I really enjoyed this episode.

It spoke to me because it reminded me how much I like science fiction novels better than science fiction on film. Like the tabletop games in your story, the power of imagination in a sci-fi story trumps, for me, even the most well-done special effects in a science fiction movie.

You make at least 7 good points here, in a show I found a good listen.

Hi jezra

We process the shows as per the instructions given to us by the hosts. In this case you marked your show as explicit on upload.
http://hackerpublicradio.org/request_a_slot.php#Explicit

We never contact people who have marked their shows as Explicit as there is a large body of hosts that deliberately mark all shows as Explicit as a precaution or protest. http://hackerpublicradio.org/stuff_you_need_to_know.php#explicit

We have on occasion contacted hosts who have marked their shows as 'clean' where we feel the show may not "be considered inoffensive in every region of the world". If it ever occurs and the host disagrees, we will put the case to the HPR Community Mailing List. hpr2210 :: On Freedom of Speech and Censorship describes the agreed approach to this topic.

Ken

I did the same thing with a very similar P4 computer. It does eat some electricity, but it is substantially faster and has more inputs and outputs than an original Model B Raspberry Pi. This could make for a more enjoyable experience learning to use a Pi since it can use USB persistence and be utilized on nearly any PC.

Since most of the software is the same it could be a great way to make up for a a lack of funds to fill a classroom with Raspberry Pi machines. Nearly any donated PC that still runs could be made to work even cheaper than buying any of the Pi computers. People could rotate so if they want to experiment with the GPIO pins or other Pi specific components they can have a chance, while other won't have to sit around and wait for a Pi to become available.

The new version of Raspbian x86 Stretch should be coming out very soon.

I'm not sure this episode is "explicit". Sometimes I forget if I swear or not.

Anyway, the coop isn't always opening and closing properly, so today I am in the process of updating the code that controls the coop door. Testing has resulted in a massive amount of texts and emails.

Oh yea, and thank you Ken for the show notes. :)

I managed to get the gist of what you were trying to say... although I don't believe that any level of processing would have been able to tidy up what was ultimately recorded. I find that in noisy environments, a low gain recorder with the microphone nice and close to your mouth tends to make you heard much better.

I've just uploaded (what will be) episode 2400, where I basically pinch your idea, and drive the 28 miles into my work, and spend most of the time talking about the 14 cars I've had! :-)

When I recorded this show, the only thing I did was push the file through Auphonic to level it out, there was no noise reduction applied... and I do have a fairly noisy car.

http://hackerpublicradio.org/eps.php?id=2400

I would definitely like to hear another attempt from you at this! :-)

I have found that Guthub markdown is a heck of a lot better than markdown. In fact, it's so significantly better that I don't see why it's not merged into markdown yet, except that as far as I can tell markdown proper is unmaintained.

The existance of Github-markdown reinforces my point: markdown needed fixing.

But I agree; sometimes docbook is overkill and [github] markdown is a better choice. If I didn't say that in this or my previous episode, I did mean to, but maybe I was blinded by docbook passion.

Had not heard of kramdown. I'll take a look at it, for kicks, because it sounds pretty good.

I was going to comment on your last show where you said you didn't think any processing was necessary.

While I agree content is king, you might find this tip handy. When I record in noisy environments, I record a few seconds without speaking to pick up the background noise.

The reason for this is so that you can use those seconds as a model for noise reduction in audacity. Only takes a few seconds to process in audacity so it's not much more work.

Since this is a common practice, did you try this?

For some reason I hadn't considered this for older hardware. Thanks for the post and idea.

7 spaces makes sense, it's 3 for everything belonging to the same point on you list plus 4 for the code, see experiments on
https://gist.github.com/0xf10e/91f021b82a2bc4586b235e8f56c31f92
(Yeah, "github-flavored" markdown, but it's a common dialect these days)

I still prefer three backticks, but I come from trac-wiki syntax via ReStructuredText to markdown and using single backticks for inline monospace but
{{{
Code here
}}}
in track still annoys me.

I understand the additional value semantic markup has but in many cases it's nice but not necessary.

-- sysadmin who never broke out into HTML in rst or markdown …

I completely agree that it is impossible to write anything complex in markdown without resorting to HTML tags.

For me it's putting anchor tags around headings to provide in-page links.

But you should take a look at kramdown. Debian install:

apt-get install ruby-kramdown

Has stuff that markdown doesn't, like tables, stuff like id and class attribs for css etc.

And auto-generation of tables-of-contents

While all the specialized media makes it more difficult to find commonalities, the internet and forums like Reddit also make it easier to find other people that share interests.

Hi dodddummy,

I had never heard the term 'Jam' used in US English, though my experience is not broad.

Researching, I found this:

" I bought a jar of raspberry jam. She made us jelly sandwiches."

Which implies the words jam and jelly are a little interchangeable!

I have also believed that where UK English uses 'jelly' which can refer to a jam with all the bits taken out (based on pectin) and a dessert made with flavoured gelatin, whereas US English uses 'jello' for the latter.

I may be wrong! Language is a moving target anyway!

Thanks for clarifying things.

Jelly is the clear/shaky stuff. Jam is not clear and less shaky. Jam and preserves are a bit harder to differentiate. I've lived all over the US and this difference between jam and jelly seems pervasive.

This is just what I needed! I made some changes (raspberrypi.org is now using SHA-256 checksums, and I use losetup to avoid all that calculation). This script is on GitHub at: https://github.com/sesamemucho/pi-sdcard-setup

Thanks again.

Hi All,

We have gone live with the new comment system.

Keep us posted if you notice anything weird on the site.

Ken.

Jezra, your welcome, it was other people freely sharing via You Tube and blogs that got me started so I thought I would share with the HPR community. As well as it tasting really good, it has health benefits as well. Win, Win in my book.

By the way after making your first batch, try adding a couple or 10 ;-) cloves of garlic in a future batch, the flavor is fantastic and you can eat the fermented garlic or use in other recipes.

Thank you for the inspiration. Cabbage is now on my shopping list, and I will be making a batch this weekend.

Yes I have. I've built two of them. The first I sold to a friend at our LUG for the cost of the kit. (They are worth the money and I was happy to solder up another.)

http://media.gunmonkeynet.net/u/nybill/m/esr-tester/

I even started recording an HPR on the unit. But, life got in the way. So yep, get one, build it up, and give us a review! ;)

I had to laugh out loud when you went remote raiding for batteries. I'm sure weve all done that more than once.

Have you checked out any of the ATMega328 based ESR component testers?
I gave this one a try
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00OOQC2E8/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o02_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
based on the price and reviews. I got the one with th IC in socket cause I tend to trash things.
Nifty unit.
I know,,,,,do a show.?

I have a very selfish idea for a show--a tutorial based on moving HPR from http to https.

Selfish because I need to do the same thing to stop Firefox's incessant and--given the nature of my site, quite silly-nagging (it's not like I manage any personal information, after all, other than my own logon I mean really).

I have nothing but praise for my hosting provider's tech support--they have proven themselves to be real troopers--and generally find their help files actually helpful, but I must admit that, since I now have a VPS and I'm all on my ownsome for managing something like implementing SSL, I am quite confused and unsure to what I must do.

While that would be an improvement, there would still be other tradeoffs to deal with.

Well if you must insist on wasting shows, then you get a series !
http://hackerpublicradio.org/series.php?id=98

Also are you going to go back and rename the other shows ?

hpr2115 :: Apt Spelunking 3: nodm, cmus, and parecord
hpr1906 :: Apt Spelunking 2: tvtime, phatch, and xstarfish
hpr1813 :: Apt Spelunking: surf, lightyears, and fbterm

I meant to reply to the scope comment, Dave. But, I was typing the above replies first thing in the morning, when I should have been driving to work. ;)

Yea, I don't think I've mentioned that scope in past episodes. I've had it for a couple of years now. It could warrant a little review. (You've a bit of Ken in you trying to pull another show out of people!) he he...

Mike, the sounds you heard outside my window (Which I hear as I type) are Upstate New York. I'm not in NYC. but, I am in the suburbs of a city a little more north. ;)

Don't worry about the ambient noise, it was not intrusive. I think near the end there is the usual burst of a distant police/ambulance siren, which any city dweller can tune out. But that was not loud.

The day after this podcast and drooling over the sounds of beeps, clicks, tools, battery manipulations etc. which let me visualise the workbench so vividly, I heard mention of something called ASMR (automatic sensory meridian response), for which a lot of stuff is appearing on Youtube nowadays. It's sounds that generate a response that feels like a pleasurable tingling of the scalp, down the spine etc. The stuff on Youtube is all typified by women whispering, turning the pages of a book, drumming fingernails and stuff like that. But the workshop sounds and tthe infectious enthusiasm in your podcasts qualifies.

Maybe I'm more subject to this kind of stuff because I'm blind, no idea, but the sound effects were great

Thanks Dave,

Yea, it seems like a capable little meter for the price. Its been with my regular (small set) of tools in the laptop bag since the show.

Thanks Mike,

You know, I didn't notice any of the outside noises while I was recording. Only after did I notice them in Audacity.

I just wish I remembered to plug in the mic with the wind screen. I don't like hearing the mic clip in the wind.