<h2 id="another-in-the-chat-series-from-edinburgh">Another in the chat series from Edinburgh</h2>
<h3 id="hosted-by-mrx1-and-dave-morriss2">Hosted by <a href="https://hackerpublicradio.org/correspondents/0201.html" title="MrX">MrX</a> and <a href="https://hackerpublicradio.org/correspondents/0225.html" title="Dave Morriss">Dave Morriss</a></h3>
<p>This time we met up for breakfast on Sunday 24<sup>th</sup> November in a pub/restaurant in an area called <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillend,_Edinburgh" title="Hillend, Midlothian">Hillend</a>, just outside Edinburgh in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midlothian" title="Midlothian municipal district">Midlothian</a>. The hill close by is the location of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midlothian_Snowsports_Centre" title="Midlothian Snowsports Centre">Midlothian Snowsports Centre</a>, an artificial Ski Slope which is very popular in the region for recreation and training.</p>
<p>We chatted for a while inside then moved to <em>Studio C</em> in the car park and recorded this episode.</p>
<h3 id="pdas-and-the-like">PDAs and the like</h3>
<p>We were talking about PDAs (Personal Data Assistants) from the 1980’s.</p>
<ul>
<li>MrX had recently been offered a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(PDA)" title="Gemini PDA">Gemini</a> device and had at one time owned a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psion_Series_3" title="Psion Series 3">Psion Series 3c</a>.</li>
<li>Dave owns a broken <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psion_Series_5" title="Psion Series 5">Psion Series 5</a> (and recently parted with a working one after much bargaining).</li>
<li>Dave struggled to remember devices like the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PalmPilot" title="Palm Pilot">Palm Pilot</a> which were quite popular in the 80’s and 90’s. These had no keyboard, but offered a touch-sensitive screen, used with a stylus, and had handwriting recognition<a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1"><sup>1</sup></a>.</li>
<li>MrX mentioned the Compaq <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPAQ" title="Compaq/HP iPAQ PDA">iPAQ PDA</a> (Compaq was later acquired by Hewlett Packard) from the 2000’s, which was a much advanced PDA with similar features.</li>
</ul>
<h3 id="software-annoyances">Software annoyances</h3>
<ul>
<li>Mr X has had some problems with the latest Audacity on Ubuntu. It sometimes does not launch from the menu link after an upgrade.</li>
<li>Calibre on Dave’s <em>Debian Testing</em> system has stopped working recently, due to a Python error.<a href="#fn2" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref2"><sup>2</sup></a></li>
<li>Dave uses Clementine, the music player, which turns off the UI when you close it down the wrong way and apparently doesn’t provide a way to enable it again without hacking the configuration file<a href="#fn3" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref3"><sup>3</sup></a>.</li>
<li>MrX had problems with audio device recognition and uses <code>hdajackretask</code> to correct this. This is part of the <code>alsa-tools-gui</code> package on Debian (and related)<a href="#fn4" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref4"><sup>4</sup></a>, but has a non-intuitive UI.</li>
</ul>
<h3 id="os-choices">OS choices</h3>
<ul>
<li>Dave uses Raspbian Lite on his headless Raspberry Pis (which he secures using advice from Ken Fallon’s HPR show on preparing the <a href="https://hackerpublicradio.org/eps.php?id=2356" title="hpr2356 :: Safely enabling ssh in the default Raspbian Image">Raspbian image</a>).</li>
<li>MrX uses standard Raspian on RPis, Ubuntu as his main Linux version, as well as OSMC (Open Source Media Center) on a Raspberry Pi, for watching media.</li>
<li>Dave originally started with Fedora (actually Red Hat version 4 for a brief time) then moved to Ubuntu (Kubuntu) before moving to Debian Testing on his desktop, and KDE Neon on his laptop.</li>
<li>Both had used Crunchbang at one point, another Debian-based distribution.</li>
</ul>
<h3 id="a-few-other-topics">A few other topics</h3>
<ul>
<li>MrX uses a Wiki service (<a href="https://www.wikidot.com/" class="uri">https://www.wikidot.com/</a>). Dave uses MediaWiki on a Raspberry Pi and has scripts that update some of the contents (mainly tables). There was discussion about using Pandoc (<a href="https://pandoc.org/" class="uri">https://pandoc.org/</a>) to generate MediaWiki markup from something like Markdown.</li>
<li>Emulating a Bash session in a web browser. One example is: <a href="https://bellard.org/jslinux/" class="uri">https://bellard.org/jslinux/</a></li>
<li>Online Python tools. For example: <a href="https://repl.it/languages/python3" class="uri">https://repl.it/languages/python3</a></li>
<li>Midnight Commander (<a href="https://midnight-commander.org/" class="uri">https://midnight-commander.org/</a>) contains its own editor.</li>
<li>Notepadqq (<a href="https://notepadqq.com/" class="uri">https://notepadqq.com/</a>) is a Notepad++-like editor for the Linux desktop.</li>
<li>File managers:
<ul>
<li>MrX has problems with the Ubuntu file manager; he uses Nemo (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemo_(file_manager)" class="uri">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemo_(file_manager)</a>) for its more advanced features</li>
<li>Dave uses KDE’s Dolphin (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolphin_(file_manager)" class="uri">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolphin_(file_manager)</a>)</li>
</ul></li>
</ul>
<h2 id="links">Links</h2>
<ul>
<li>Location:
<ul>
<li><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillend,_Edinburgh">Hillend</a> (Wikipedia)</li>
<li><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midlothian">Midlothian</a> (Wikipedia)</li>
<li><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midlothian_Snowsports_Centre">Midlothian Snowsports Centre</a> (Wikipedia)</li>
</ul></li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>PDAs (Personal Data Assistants - <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_digital_assistant">Wikipedia page</a>)
<ul>
<li><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psion_Organiser">Psion Organiser II</a> (Wikipedia)</li>
<li><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psion_Series_3">Psion Series 3</a> (Wikipedia)</li>
<li><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psion_Series_5">Psion Series 5</a> (Wikipedia)</li>
<li><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PalmPilot">Palm Pilot</a> (Wikipedia)</li>
<li><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(PDA)">Gemini PDA</a> (Wikipedia)</li>
<li><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPAQ">Compaq/HP iPAQ PDA</a> (Wikipedia)</li>
</ul></li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Compaq computers
<ul>
<li><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPAQ_(desktop_computer)">iPAQ</a></li>
</ul></li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Software niggles:
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.audacityteam.org/">Audacity software</a></li>
<li><a href="https://calibre-ebook.com/">Calibre e-book Manager</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.clementine-player.org/">Clementine music player</a></li>
<li><code>hdajackretask</code> from the <a href="https://alsa-project.org/wiki/Main_Page">ALSA Project</a></li>
</ul></li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Operating system choices:
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/raspbian/">Raspbian Lite</a>
<ul>
<li>Dave’s HPR show about his <a href="https://hackerpublicradio.org/eps.php?id=2496"><code>what_pi</code></a> script</li>
</ul></li>
<li><a href="https://osmc.tv/">Open Source Media Center (OSMC)</a></li>
<li><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CrunchBang_Linux">Crunchbang Linux</a> (Wikipedia)</li>
</ul></li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>MrX’s shows that we were talking about:
<ul>
<li><a href="https://hackerpublicradio.org/eps.php?id=2879">Describing how I listen to podcasts PART 1</a></li>
<li><a href="https://hackerpublicradio.org/eps.php?id=2889">Describing how I listen to podcasts PART 2</a></li>
<li><a href="https://hackerpublicradio.org/eps.php?id=2901">Describing how I listen to podcasts PART 3</a></li>
<li><a href="https://hackerpublicradio.org/eps.php?id=2914">Describing how I listen to podcasts PART 4</a></li>
<li><a href="https://hackerpublicradio.org/eps.php?id=2923">Describing how I listen to podcasts PART 5</a></li>
<li><a href="https://hackerpublicradio.org/eps.php?id=2933">A walk through my PifaceCAD Python code – Part 1</a></li>
<li><a href="https://hackerpublicradio.org/eps.php?id=2951">A walk through my PifaceCAD Python code – Part 2</a></li>
</ul></li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>The previous episode:
<ul>
<li><a href="https://hackerpublicradio.org/eps.php?id=2905">Two HPR hosts living in the same region finally meet up!</a></li>
</ul></li>
</ul>
<section class="footnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1"><p><small>The person using a Palm Pilot to take meeting notes had an external keyboard, and wasn’t using handwriting recognition!</small><a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn2"><p><small><code>calibre</code> was failing with the error: <code>ImportError: No module named functools_lru_cache</code>. It later proved possible to fix this by reinstalling a Python module: <code>pip2 install --force backports.functools_lru_cache</code></small><a href="#fnref2" class="footnote-back">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn3"><p><small>There have been no releases of Clementine since 2016 sadly, though there are more recent changes on the GitHub page.</small><a href="#fnref3" class="footnote-back">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn4"><p><small>Information on the web about <em>alsa-tools-gui</em> seems a little sparse. The <em>hdajackretask</em> application has a README file in the distribution that gives some information.</small><a href="#fnref4" class="footnote-back">↩</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>