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Hosted by b-yeezi on 2017-09-28 is flagged as Clean and released under a CC-BY-SA license.
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For some of my other thoughts on this topic, consider reading this blog post.
Hosted by Windigo on 2017-09-27 is flagged as Explicit and released under a CC-BY-SA license.
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Series: Apt Spelunking | Comments (2)
It's another exciting episode of Apt Spelunking! The fourth installation, which covers the following packages:
Dunst is a lightweight, customizeable desktop notification daemon. Similar to Ubuntu's notify-osd, it displays passive notifications with very minimal resources. It has customizeable keystrokes, and its colors can be configured as well.
i3 is my window manager of choice; tiling, extremely customizeable, and absurdly light. With fantastic support for multiple monitors, and vim keybindings, it eventually finds its way onto every machine I use.
Derived from Star Control II, Ur-Quan Masters is a fantastic retro game about spaceships and aliens. Earth has been seized, and is isolated from the rest of the galaxy. Luckily, you happen to have yourself a ship built with ancient mystic technology and whatnot.
Fun, funny, and dangerously addictive; make sure to stay away from this game if you have things to do.
Hosted by Frank Bell on 2017-09-26 is flagged as Clean and released under a CC-BY-SA license.
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Frank discusses his long experience with trying not to get fat by using free weights and a bicycle. Free weights are, without question, the geekiest form of exercise, having a versatility and flexibility unmatched by any alternative.
Here are some sample programs:
Sample Programs:
Procedure: 3 sets × 8 reps, increasing to 10 reps, then add five pounds and start over with 8 reps.
Exercises (* = requires bench, **= bench desirable):
Program One: Leg Raises,* Leg Curls,* Dumbbell Flies,** Barbell Curls, Triceps Pull-Overs, Forward and Reverse Wrist Twists (using pipe with rope to raise and lower weights)
Program Two: Dumbbell Lunge, Bench Press,* Bent-Over Rows, Dumbbell Kickbacks, Zottman Curls, Forward and Reverse Wrist Curls
Program Three: Half Squats, Bench Press, Concentration Curls, Dumbbell Kickbacks, Forward and Reverse Wrist Curls.
As stated in the podcast, Frank has not found many weight-training websites appealing. The websites tend to be for fanatic bodybuilders or for pitching products. This one, though, has a pretty good catalog of exercises: http://www.weight-training-exercises.com/. Note that the same exercise may be known by several names, depending on the speaker.
Hosted by clacke on 2017-09-25 is flagged as Clean and released under a CC-BY-SA license.
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Tcl is an interesting language that does many things "wrong", especially if you're coming from a LISP perspective, and especially-especially if you're coming from a Scheme perspective. Examples are all over the C2 wiki, but probably DynamicStringsVsFunctional is the epicenter.
It also forms an important part of modern Scheme history, as the Tcl War led to the creation of Guile.
What happened after that? Where Tcl and Tk went wrong, by David N Welton
TL;DL: Tcl was successful because it found its niche as a lightweight yet capable language able to both integrate and be integrated with C code, but it fell behind on Tk look-and-feel compared to GNOME and KDE and also on other mainstream development phenomena, it ossified because it was afraid to upset its installed base, it got stuck between not-slim-enough and not-featureful-enough, the syntax is too weird, and it spiraled into losing touch with the rest of the free software world, which ultimately also affected business use.
Hosted by Ahuka on 2017-09-22 is flagged as Clean and released under a CC-BY-SA license.
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The big driver to changing the healthcare system in the U.S. was the inexorable rise in healthcare costs. These costs kept rising for a number of reasons, which we look at at in this episode.
Beni aka @Navigium visited Andrew aka @mcnalu in Scotland as part of a cycling tour and they decided to record a follow up to their previous HPR show on Slackware to mark the release of Slackware 14.2, or rather the first anniversary of its release.
Some points and links mentioned are:
The hosts wish to clarify that no Italian Arch linux users nor fruitflies were harmed during the recording of this show.
Hosted by Steve Saner on 2017-09-20 is flagged as Explicit and released under a CC-BY-SA license.
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Series: HAM radio, QSK | Comments (0)
In this episode I am starting what I hope will become a series where Amateur Radio operators talk about what equipment they have and use in their Ham Shacks.
A good definition of exactly what a Ham Shack is can be found on Wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_shack
I tend to divide gear into the following categories.
You can google any of these model numbers to see what the hardware looks like and learn more about it.
Hosted by FiftyOneFifty on 2017-09-19 is flagged as Clean and released under a CC-BY-SA license.
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I met Michael at Kansas Linux Fest 2017 where he was a speaker. Turns out we've probably been walking past each other in the halls at Penguicon the last three years that I have attended. Michael is a BSD guy and one of us. As well as being an open source advocate, he works professionally as a systems admin and network engineer. I bought his texts "SSH Mastery" (because I've always needed help getting my head around reverse IP tunneling), "Networking for Systems Administrators", and "$ git commit murder", his latest novel. Because I was a good customer, Michael threw in "Forever Falls" for free.
"git commit murder" takes place at a BSD convention. The gathering in the novel is slightly less informal than the Linux conferences I've attended. The conference is targeted at the users, contributors, and managers of the fictional "SkyBSD". Our protagonist, Detroit native Dale Whitehead has come to Canada to deliver a talk on his mesh networking project. The conference is disrupted when attendees start to die in what appear to be unrelated accidents. Dale is unwilling to accept these deaths as accidents, and puts his analytical mind to discovering the killer. He also employees his hacking skills, having already created an admin account on the host university's server within minutes of checking in. This makes him understandably reluctant to discuss his theories with the authorities until he has positively identified a culprit.
The SkyBSD community is not without contention. A significant number of contributors want to move from Subversion to git for version control and just as many are vehemently opposed. Also, the recent release of candid photos meant to embarrass a contributor has many calling for a Code of Conduct and the banning of violators. Others think this is going too far. Dale has to contemplate whether either of these is reason for murder? Perhaps it is a struggle by an old guard who is not ready to surrender leadership to a younger generation?
At first, it was hard to get to like Michael's protagonist, Dale Whitehead. Dale suffers from an extreme form of Attention Deficit Disorder which requires medication and causes him to actively shun the company of other people. The same affliction that allows him to get "in the zone" when programming also makes being in crowds a fresh hell for Dale. He is in constant terror that some aberrant behavior on his part will reveal his condition to his companions and he finds it much easier to deal with other humans via e-mail or IRC. It's clear Michael Lucas has an understanding of the condition, either via research or contact with someone who suffers ADD.
At least one character in the story seemed to me to bear a passing resemblance to a familiar conference fixture in real life. Michael told me the sequel might be set at an open source/Sci Fi convention in a city near the great lakes. Time will tell if the Tuesday Afternoon Solaris Overview or a kilt wearing organizer will make an appearance.
"Forever Falls" is also a mystery, as well a SciFi story. Ella Forecourt is a recruit right out of college for the Montague Corporation. As a corporate security officer, she is assigned to investigate the death of a Montague research scientist at the Freefall installation. In the course of the novel, you learn that Montague has proprietary technology that allows them to "portal" into other universes or dimensions where the laws of physics are different from those of our universe. In Freefall, gravity runs parallel to the surface of the world. In other words, you don't fall down, you fall sideways, and with no ground to stop you, if you fall, you fall forever.
Montague has a research facility built into the "Cliff". With gravity travelling sideways, the surface of the planet appears as an endless cliff. "Above" the facility is a huge metal awning to deflect falling boulders. On top of the awning is where the security team discovers the body of Dr. Devin Grupper. The damage to the body suggests Dr. Grupper impacted with terminal velocity. Even in the lighter gravity of Freefall constant acceleration means terminal velocity is governed by air resistance. Montague does use airships for transport, but there are no records of how Grupper could have secured transportation and a pilot to wind up smashed on the awning without a ship going missing. Thus Security Second Ella Forecourt is assigned to the case. "Forever Falls" is but one in a series of Montague Portal novels by Michael Lucas. I look forward to reading the rest of the series.
Klaatu talks about the benefits of tabletop gaming over computer gaming.
Well I’m back again, as I said in the show I did about Raspbian x86 on the Lenovo x61s, I was interested to see how the OS would perform on what I now class as very old hardware in the form of a Pentium 4 tower.
We have a spare tower at the Makerspace which gets used to test low resource operating systems to see if they live up to their name, so on Saturday (yesterday as I write this, but a few weeks ago by the time this show goes out) I put the x86 Raspbian image on to this tower to see how it would perform.
Tower specifications are: Pentium 4 2.8Gig CPU, 2Gig DDR Ram and a 40Gig HDD, which in its day was a very useful bit of kit, but technology has moved on and most people wouldn’t consider it any use as a working PC today.
First problem I encountered was the DVD drive was duff and I didn’t have the image on a flash drive. Luckily I did have my trusty USB DVD in the bag, so I hooked that up, booted into the boot menu and set the disc off loading the OS. I won't go into this again as I ran through the install process last time, HPR 2362, but the install went well and I was left with a new install of Pixel on the tower.
I went through the new install process and was left with an up to date and password secure PC, I then rebooted to check what the resource use was at first boot, which I was amazed was a consistent 66mb of RAM, and about 1% CPU use.
Using the Chromium web browser pushes up RAM usage over a 100 but it was smooth and easily coped with navigating to resource hungry sites such as YouTube and the BBC. So first test passed.
I next opened a Word document in LibreOffice, this took about 10seconds to load but once open was perfectly usable with no lag, so should provide a good office capable PC.
So you can use the Web, Write documents, it has an email client or you can use web mail. And it’s not painfully slow, this PC would now make a very usable homework/first computer for any child, or a computer for an older member of the family that just needs to keep in touch with family and friends without breaking the bank. In fact you could probably pick up a working tower off the likes of Freecycle/Freegle for £0 and you may even get a small 17”/19” TFT monitor from the same place.
Yes it’s not as energy efficient as the latest kit but as I said last time the cost of a new PC/laptop can buy a lot of additional electricity in the time you may run it before it finally expires.
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