This in HPR episode £1,871 entitled HPR Community News for September 2015, and in part of the series HPR Community News.
It is posted by HPR volunteers and in about 92 minutes long.
The summary is HPR Community News for September 2015.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by an honest host.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HPR-15, that's HPR-15.
Bit your web hosting that's honest and fair at an honest host.com.
Okay, bladder is off and it will free up some, I don't know, how much resources bladder
uses in terms of the things like pulse, pulse audio.
I know it's constantly listening so it must do something, anyway, I don't know why my computer
doing wacky things could, what happens is I've always got bladder going, and as long
as I'm by myself everything is good, but if somebody walks into my office and starts
talking to me, my computer sometimes will just start doing crazy things.
Yeah, yeah, that sounds great, I like that.
The first thing I have to do when somebody comes in to see me is hold up my index finger
saying, hang on one sec, so I stop bladder from going, and then we can have our conversation
without any important files being deleted or messed up or whatever who knows what bladder
is going to do, because it thinks you're talking to it all the time, it doesn't know
there's somebody else in the room.
No, no, it makes perfect sense, that's great, right, okay, so we show ahead of them.
One thing just to point out, we normally go through the shows, you know, you know how
this is done, but the bit where we come to the mail, we're doing the mail messages,
what we normally do is I've got lots of links into g-main, where we have copies of our
messages, but the thing seems to be broken today, I don't think it's up, I'm having
difficult to get into it, so what I might do is, I found that we have a full record of
everything on the mailman list, the archive system used not to work but now it is working,
so I'm going to point to that, I don't know if you, you're bothered particularly with
you going to track that yourself, but just to warn you, yeah, that's fine, I mean, I did
see, at the show notes here, a list of the mailing list topics. Yeah, I can click through to
that, if it seems like we're going to be discussing something for a little while, I'll go
ahead and click through. You might find that they don't get you anyway, that's a problem.
Those links seem to be, the thing the other end seems to be a bit flaky today. Well, it opened
up a new tab and I don't, looks like it's taking a moment here, yeah, maybe you're right,
maybe it's not going to do anything. Well, we'll see how we go anyway. No worries. Yep, no worries.
Okay, right, here we go then. Hello everybody, this is the HPR community new show for
September 2015. My name is Dave Morris and I have with me tonight, John Colp, hi, John.
Hey everybody. So, Ken's not available tonight, so I think I'm in the in the hot seat.
Um, hope I can remember how to do this and we're going to start off with, um,
I'll leave me messing up my screen because I've got the wrong push to talk button.
I made control my push to talk and then I try and scroll and of course the screen
strings and I can do in this. I really got to learn anyway. New hosts. We have one new host
this, this past month and that is, get this, get this, I think it's, it's name is. I'm not sure
how that would be pronounced. I, yeah, I think it might be a Welsh name, but I, um, hope he doesn't
come back and tell me how to say that. But it's, uh, it's a name you do, do come across occasionally
in an English context, but it, it may be a hamble, I don't know. I don't know either. I think I
remember him saying it in his episode, but I forgot now how it was pronounced. Anyway, let's
launch straight into the, um, the last month's shows and, uh, the first one, that was, that was
me just clicking. Okay, I'll be able to, I'll be able to take all the delays at, now I'm talking
about because we can't take the delays at, but, uh, the first one was SIGFLOCK, welcome return of
SIGFLOCK who did a show entitled Client Side C, W2F, TF is wrong with you.
That was a talk about using, um, using a rather wonderful bit of software called M scripting,
which is capable of converting C and C++ into JavaScript, which is something I've never
considered ever ever wanting to do. What do you think of that job? Well, I don't know. I, I got to
confess most of her episodes leave me a little bit confused, but I think what this was all about
was some kind of, um, some kind of thing that allows you to run C code, like, on the fly in a browser,
is that, what, and like getting that right? That was my understanding. Yeah, yeah, it, uh, it's
pretty astonishing when you consider that you can, first of all, that JavaScript can actually do that,
can, can emulate a piece of C and quite fast from what she said. Um, and, you know, there's,
there's a thing that's actually, uh, turning this stuff in, it's turning C or C++ into this. That's,
that's pretty astonishing. That is pretty cool. Um, I, I don't really know what, uh, application
I personally would have for, but I, I think it's a pretty cool sounding thing. I wonder if there
any security risks to doing something like that? Yeah, I have no idea. You think, you could just
and pretty evil things in, in C, uh, and presumably C++, so quite quite what how that would operate
in JavaScript, I have no idea, but it's pretty cool. Um, what we'll do as we go through the shows,
we'll just, if there's comments, we'll just deal with them as we, as we pass through, yeah,
so there was a comment on this show from Gabriel Evenfire, who says, I always look forward to
your shows, um, because I know they'll be something really unusual, so there's some really unusual
technical material in them. This one's no exception. I've never heard of inscription before, but I'm
going to have a look at the into this. It reminds me of a project a while back to Compile C code
using GCC to MIPS assembly that would run on a MIPS interpreter in Java. Oh, it careful. Wow,
someone built it as a way to compile Cpering amps that would never buffer overflow. Not exactly
accurate, but the buffer overflow's would never corrupt the interpreter's stack. So yeah,
people have been writing some pretty bizarre things since over the years. Yeah, and these are
things that a real programmer understands better than I do. I understand a little bit about
bash and Python, and that's about the extent of it, but um, yeah, I've not really had, I've been
sort of, um, what do you call it, my sister's manager? My sister's admin? My job title was
sister's manager, and that's why I can never remember it. Um, but that was all about, you know,
this thing stopped working, going run about, and trying to make it work. It wasn't really doing
anything as clever as this. Right. It's a machine jockey sort of thing, you know? About, uh, up time.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Right. So let's move on to the next one. Should we take turns doing these things?
If you want to, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. So the next one, episode 1848,
1,848. This was introduction to W3M, a command line web browser by Frank Bell, who has done
a number of interesting episodes. Yeah, this, this sounded pretty good, actually. I, I didn't
think I had an application for a thing like this, but having heard what he was talking about,
I sort of started to change my mind. What did you think? I've used it a little bit before, and
it's, um, what, what I've used W3M for in the past is, um, like, um, testing for my HTML code,
like, uh, sites that I'm building. If I want to test their accessibility in terms of making sure
that all the images have alternate text and that, uh, you can navigate easily around using things
like skip to main and, you know, stuff like that. Uh, but it really is a very good, uh, text browser.
I, I got admit, I normally use e-links instead of, uh, W3M, but I, I have used W3M in the past.
It's handy. Yeah, it's good to know that these things exist. I, um, it's listening to,
it's a little bit of a touch jam. I think it was when they were talking about a very lightweight,
uh, gooey browser called Surf. When I'm using that, where I need to, to do really lightweight
stuff at the moment. But, uh, but I can see W3M and things of that sort could come in similar,
similar place. If I've never heard of that, or that you said it's surf? Surf. Yes. Yeah. Okay. I
made try there. You should check that out. It's, it's part of the, what's it called,
subclass project? Um, yeah. I think so. There was, um, if you listen to,
last week, the on the, uh, Twitter network, they just interviewed the, the subclass guys,
you know, which is funny. That's a great thing. That's fantastic. I like it.
It really is wonderful. Yeah. I, I might actually check out that, uh, the surf browser. I'm
looking for a browser to use with Zimbra, which is our mail and, um, uh, a mail and calendar application
at the university. It's a, a collaboration suite. I guess they call it. Yeah. And, um, right now,
it works best on Firefox. I, I've been using Firefox almost exclusively for a long time, just because
of a certain accessibility feature, the quick search feature where you can start typing with either a
forward slash or a single quote, and it will start searching the text on the page and allow you
to, uh, put focus on it quickly. I, I, I use this all the time with blather. But, um, I discovered
a plugin for Chromium that, uh, implements the same functionality. And so I've switched over to Chromium
because it's so much faster. However, Zimbra doesn't work right. I'm currently, uh, there's something
about it. And so I'm keeping Firefox open just for that one, uh, web application. And if I could make,
if surf were to work with Zimbra correctly, I would probably rather do that because it would
use less system resources. You should check it out. It's, it's a strange beastly. It doesn't,
it's just a simple window that, uh, doesn't have any buttons or anything. It's just like keyboards,
the keyboard input. I haven't really got to grips with it totally yet, but, uh, it seems to have
some potential. That would, that would be perfect for the Zimbra web app because, uh, the
the Zimbra web client has all its own buttons inside the window there. And it's got a very robust
set of keystrokes to navigate around to the calendar and to create new appointments and new emails
and all that. So I don't need it to be very robust. I just need it to display correctly.
Yeah. Well, I, um, what I've tended to do is I've got, I've got two monitors now. I, uh,
acquired another one recently. And I, and I have one with them in it. And the other one,
I fire up surf into it. So if I'm editing, um, marked down, then I can generate my HTML
and view it in the other window through surf and fire it up out of them. That's the, uh,
so, you know, anyway, we're getting off the point here a bit, but, uh,
because I don't see time to talk about Markdown later. I'm sure the wheel, yes. Okay. There was
one comment to this one from Tom Land. You want to do that one, John? Oops. Have I been talking
all this time without, uh, my button pressed here? I think you've been, you've been in mute.
I mean, that is funny. I read that whole comment without my, look, button for it. Oh,
I forgot that it's pushed to talk. I don't know. I've to, uh, so easily done. Let me start over again.
Okay. Okay. The title of the comment is automatized log in from command line. I don't know if
that automatized is really a word or not, but I'm kind of like it. Or to, I could say, or to
make, but then I'm, I'm British. So there you go. Yeah, I don't know. Anyway, he says, I just discovered this
tool W3M and I was wondering if it could be possible to access a page that requires a log in
and password. I need it to be done automatically from the command line. I wouldn't be pressing
any keys. It's a headless server. Do you know if that's possible? I would need to grab some text,
but once log in, the URL remains the same thanks in advance. And there is no response to this.
I don't really know the answer to this question using W3M, but can't you use something like
curl to enter a password and username? Yeah, I think I would, I would be doing something like that.
I wasn't quite clear. What do you need to do? Log into web browser automatically. Why would you
do that? I don't really know. I would need some kind of demonstration or more detailed description
of exactly what he's trying to accomplish here. There's probably a way, but as you say,
something like curl might be the answer. Yeah, you can do all kinds of stuff with curl.
And so it seems like that would be the tool I would use. I wouldn't, if it's a headless,
and you're not going to be actually reading it with your own eyeballs, I don't think you would want
to use W3M necessarily. Unless it's got some kind of, I don't know if that's the right word,
but where you can just send a command and it'll grab some tag like e-links. For example,
I use the e-links dump option quite often to grab the contents of a web page and then scrape
it for just the part I want. And that will use the e-links program, but without ever actually
opening up the web page in a way where you can look at it. Yeah, I'm sure there's also
some ways that you can do that. As you say, we need to know a bit more about what it
will be trying to do as a spade. Right. That's that's move on. 1849 was Lynna Luzcast. Sorry,
did you step on my toes there? Is it my turn? No, you did the last one. No, you did. You read the last
Oh, man. Show. I think it's a measure of how slowly we're going that I forgot.
Okay, I'll do this one. Lynna Luzcast episode four outtakes. So this is where Kevin Wyship posts
some of the stuff that they don't publish on the logcast feed. So yeah, it's good. Only nine minutes
this time. We've had that more significant chunks in the past. So come on, Kevin, we need more.
We need more. I can't really remember whether I listen to this one or not. I normally listen
every day, but I don't remember if I heard this one or not. I did, because I usually make notes on
these things in a, so I keep a wiki to keep that sort of stuff. And I just said to myself,
very nice, but could have done with a bit more. All right, so then episode 1850 is a hookah
doing SSH introduction. I'm not sure what the 18 is that a series number. I think it is. I think it's,
this is part of privacy and security. I think that's the 18th of that of that series. It's
the way I read it anyway. That probably is correct. So the series privacy and security episode 18,
this is SSH introduction. And I love the, I mean, I've used SSH quite a lot, but it's just like
with any show a hookah does, he always points out something that I haven't heard of before.
Yeah, I thought it was a great introduction to the subject and a bit of history and everything was
it. I've forgotten quite how SSH would come to be. It was quite nice to have the reference back
and go and check that out, actually. Just a moment or so. Yeah, I read a book. I wonder what,
it seems like I might have sent that book to NYU bill. For a while there, we were reading books
and then sending them along to other people in our little community. And then whoever read it next
would send it to the next person and so forth. And I think one of the books I sent along was
one about the history of public key encryption. And I don't remember the title of it. Now,
but it talked about a lot of these kinds of things. Yeah, yeah, it's an interesting subject.
I had not quite remembered that it started up as a sort of fairly open product that tattooed
loan and I assume you pronounce this name. I don't know. In Helsinki, then it sort of got to
turn into a commercial thing. Become proprietary. And then in the OpenBSD guys that are taking
away and open SSH based on it, I've booked it effectively. I think I have forgotten that. It's
good to be reminded of that because it's good to know that history of these things is a say.
Yeah, and I think there's going to be one more in this SSH series that we'll get to today.
Over there are some comments here. And comment number one from OXF10E. Oxfuri.
Yeah, I was so terrible with that one. He says the title of the comment is portable version
of OpenSSH. Actually, the portable version of OpenSSH is needed on every platform other than
OpenBSD, not just Unixoid ones. Winky face. Right, right. Okay, thank you. And Gabriel
even if I had said this could be a very fruitful series. SSH is one of those Swiss Army knives that
most people just use the blade. I'm looking forward to seeing where this is going. There's a lot of
potential uses to cover. Plant two already added an episode talking about SSH config, which we're
going to get too soon. And there are lots of useful shortcuts one can include from that alone.
So I hope the more people including you are who can keep this going. Yeah, I agree with that.
You know, what also might be interesting is for those of us who are not going to talk so much about
how OpenSSH works necessarily is just to run down the ways we use it. Yeah, I mean, I could
I have a number of ways that I use it that are not necessarily the same as other people.
Yeah, I know there's a lot to it. There's a lot to it. I used to but work use it quite a lot.
And there's a minus capital X option, which lets you reflect back accessions through it to
your local workstation. So it's very useful to be able to go to a sort of headless service or
remote service and get accessions back. It's slow, but you know, that's it. There's this
times like that loads and loads. There's one more comment and that's from the host, Kevin O'Brien. He says,
thank you. I'm glad you enjoyed this introductory episode. I recorded and uploaded several more
and I'm not done that a warning and Clato has also sent in an SSH show. So there is plenty to go around.
Very good. Okay, so the next one was the community news. So I don't think we want to reflect
on that one other way. So we go into one of those internet circles. So yeah. So I forget that I
do the last one or did you pay? Yes, sorry, sorry, yeah. I'm biting my control. Take my finger off the
control key when I want to do something on the screen and then forget to put it back on when I want
to speak. I'm going to say that. I got you. But I can't remember whose turn it is here.
No, I can't remember either. How about I go on the next one? Do you want to go on the next one?
Because it's my show in that place. Yeah, yeah. So episode 1852, day Morris,
Operation Walacia. I'm Walacia. I don't know. I had difficulty knowing how to pronounce this.
And I'm told that the organization and themselves pronounce it Walacia. That sounds
fine. That's good enough for me. This was a terrific episode. I really like hearing about
what your daughter was doing over there. And I went to their website and looked and saw that
they've got projects going all around the world. Yeah, that's amazing stuff. It's a great
great thing to do as a youngster to get involved in something like this. And it's great on
you CV too, which is what a lot of people are doing it for the experience and for being able to say
look, I want to do biology. And here's how much I want to do. I've actually done this during
my vacation. Yes, really, really terrific. So is she back in school this semester now? Yes,
yes, she's getting heavily into her biology degree right now. She's doing it in
the animal behavioral behavioral studies or something about nature. I can't remember the type of
thought. Sounds like something I would not understand. Wow, she's leaving me standing, I'm
done. She, my son is only 14 and he's already talking about scientific things that I don't
remember ever learning in my life. No, it's scary when they start to run fast you in a way. It's a
frightening thing. It's good though. So it should be? So with her comments on this one? Nothing,
nothing on this one though. How could that be? We're commenting on it now, I guess. Yeah, that's
what this shows all about. Okay, absolutely, 1853 then. Yeah, shall I, I'll just read this one. And this is
this is Alpha 32 and his shows in title, I heart this story so you may pronounce it that way.
So what's this? Somebody's commenting on Vista on this channel? How I got into Linux it is really
so. I believe what he's saying is he loves Vista because it helped him get into Linux because
it was so bad. Is that what I, that's exactly what I'm just doing. Yes, yes, yes. Yeah, I thought it was back
in the comments. That was a really, it's a good hook that was everybody, what? What? All right. Okay,
it was good. It's for you. So yeah, there was a comment which made that point as well. The
Aaron B483 says a great name for a podcast. I'm sure because of the name your podcast,
you've probably got a lot of interest. Yeah, it's an interesting, interesting show too. Some
certain, you know, some personal anecdotes about learning the way around. When those things
and finding that Linux is better, just so it's good to hear. Yeah, speaking of moving from Windows to Linux,
the next episode 1854 is me talking about how we finally got Linux installed on my son's Asus T.P.
500 L, which came with Windows 8 installed. And here I talk about how I finally decided to try to get
into the secure boot protected bios and disable that and allow installation of Ubuntu on there.
Yeah, it was a good story. It's this UEFI business is a worrying thing because you never know
when it's going to lock you out totally from doing what you want to do. So good to hear that you
managed to crack that one. Yeah, it actually wasn't as hard as I feared it was going to be.
I mean, like I said in the podcast, I knew when I bought this laptop forum that it had this
feature, I guess, this negative feature of secure boot, but he just needed a new laptop. And
he actually didn't mind Windows 8 that much once he got used to it. And then he installed Windows 10,
which people kept saying have all his security and privacy issues. And so we thought, well, maybe it's
time. And I'll say this, we did this maybe a month or six weeks ago. And he has not a single time
booted back into Windows since then. It says a lot, that does. Yeah, that's fascinating.
My, my daughter's also got Windows 8 machine. And she is pretty much content with it because
same reason that, you know, needs it for things related to study. She hasn't yet reached the
point where she's gone to Windows 10 and has hated it. So she's moderately contented the moment.
So yeah, continues, you know. Well, here my son was, I mean, there are certain things he likes
about Windows 8, just because like, there's so many things that will run on it that won't run on
when it gaming kinds of things. And sure. But the kinds of compatibility issues that I was talking
about where he was worried about not being able to work with his classmates at school on projects.
That, that issue is going away a little bit because it seems like more and more they are all using
Google Drive and those online free services, you know, free isn't beer anyway, services. And so
he doesn't even necessarily need to use this office product. Yeah, that's good. That's good.
So he'll probably just stick with the, the one thing that's come up repeatedly since installing
a boot to him on there is that every time he gets a curdle update, we have to recompile the driver
for his Wi-Fi. And that's always kind of a startling at first because he'll run the updates and
then he'll say, Dad, my Wi-Fi is not working. Remember, oh yeah, we've got to do so. So I finally
wrote a script that he can run that will recompile the Wi-Fi driver and then install it in the
right place. And that's all good after that. Yeah, well, that's good. That's good. But it's a
kind that it has to be that way. But there you go. Yeah, yeah, at least he's got something that's a
very good. That's a little bit there, Dave. Oh, right. At least he's got something that works well.
That's the main thing. You're there, John. Your audio is breaking up a little bit.
Yours is breaking up for me, actually. I'm not sure. I wonder if it's because my kids are watching
videos or something. Can you hear me? I can hear you, John. Yep. Okay. Okay. We good. Well, I guess
that's the year next. 1855 is a hookah's number 61 in the series on
Libre Office. Libre Office impressed slide layouts and auto layout text boxes. So this is more
on the ins and outs of Impress and generating slides and so forth. I always go off and look at
a hookah's his own website for the details of business. Always really, really good and very easy
to follow and stuff. I've had this one. Very useful. I don't actually need it anymore, but I have
used this in the past and you know, it's good to have this sort of overview. I'm sure anybody
who needs to generate slides will enjoy it a lot. Okay. So you had just finished
introducing the episode 1855 on Libre Office and Impress and I missed nearly your whole thing.
So and I don't see any comments on it. Yeah. So I guess we could just go on was I'm hoping that
if we if we work with the recordings at this end then we're good. We should we should be good.
Last year wanted to discuss it in any any degree. I mean, only to say what I always I should have
this little disclaimer or canned response to all of his episodes about Libre Office, which is
they're awesome. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. I have no immediate need for for them at the moment, but
it's really good to to be able to look on to the hood a bit and see how it all works just in case,
you know. Yeah. I mean, I usually burp as Impress doing school semesters. I use it almost every day.
That's what I use to just slides in my classes and stuff like that. But a lot of the stuff he's
talking about here, I have not really explored before. No, some useful stuff. We want to generate
different slide layouts and formats and stuff. That's it's good to know. I don't create all that
many new slides anymore. What I'm trying to do now is essentially reduce the amount of text on all
of my old slides. I have this ideal one day. I want to get down to where each slide just has a
single icon and each one will prompt me to speak for five or ten minutes about whatever the icon
represents. And what I'm curious to see is whether my students will actually take any notes at that
point. I think they're kind of conditioned only to write down what is on a slide.
Yes, I know. I know the way that works. My daughter says that if the lecturer doesn't
give a handout at a class, you know, usually there's slides and usually you get a copy of the slides
and sometimes some notes, then people don't write anything. They just expect this stuff to be fed
to them and then they sit over the miles open as it will hurt. Yeah, I find that I don't just post
the slides anymore for students do that or else they just don't do anything in class. You know,
I have certain students who for like the office of disability has tested them and they say these
people need a note-taker for class. And so for those students I will offer them outline versions
of my slides but I don't just hand out the slides anymore because I want people to take notes.
Well, yeah, the way my daughter works is she takes an iPad and then she's got a note-taking
thing on that that she uses it with a stylus. And then she, if there slides to take away,
she then goes and annotates them and makes copies notes on top of the slides or random slides
and that sort of, so for her it's actually quite good but a load of people don't do that,
you know, they just say, I don't need to do any work, I can just go on carry on.
She sounds like an ideal student. She's keen, she's keen. Very good. Okay, let's get on to
866. Yeah, I guess that's mine. Now, SSH config by Clotu and that is the entire title.
And then he gives an example and oh yeah, he's talking about the config file. This is something
I learned about maybe a couple of years ago and man, what what a difference that file made once I
learned about it. So you can set up all these like aliases for all your hosts and store the
login credentials, the port numbers and all of that kind of stuff so that you don't have to type
these very long complicated commands. And so now I will do something like SSH Pi 2 and that will
go into my second Raspberry Pi using the recordentials and all that and I love it. Yeah, yeah,
that's good. I knew this existed but I'd never actually bothered to delve into what it did.
And I actually, in many cases, had aliases command aliases to do it. So that's how I used to do it too.
Yeah, yeah, so having heard this, I thought oh I'm just looking to this and oh yeah, it's much better
and so glad that Clotu did this. And I've done the config a lot of mine that way now, so it's very,
very convenient. Yeah, it's wonderful, not just for SSHing into things but for secure copying,
I mean, you can copy files over to your servers using these aliases and man, it makes everything easier.
Yes, I know, I do that. I use SAP and stuff quite a lot, so yeah, it makes life considerably easier.
Very good. There is a comment by Ox410i, he says nice intro to homeslash.sshslashconfig,
comma Clotu. He says the protocol to option is the default for quite some time, as in more than 10 years.
I think the latest version of OpenSSH doesn't even compile with support for version one by default,
at least the SSH Damon or they have a server. Shortening host names comes really handy in cases like
webfrontn.fancy, hyphen example hyphen corp.co.uk or you're not kidding there. And there's also patterns
matching like, oh yeah, he talks about pattern matching for host names, so asterisk.fancy,
hyphen example hyphen corp.co and so forth. And then he shows how to use a username and identity
file and very, so I do it. You should go read this comment if it's answered all interesting.
It is too difficult to read at all. What have you? Okay, the next one was next comment was from
BeEasy, who says thanks for the show. I immediately added a complete file for the couple of
accounts that I commonly use. The only thing I added perhaps you meant, the security is to charge,
is to change the permissions on the file to 600 or 644. So, yeah, you only change that I added.
Yeah, I think that's must be what we're working with. Keep up the great shows.
Now, I was thrown by the fact he missed a word out there. I was trying to fill it in for him and
failing miserably. So, just shut up and get on with it. Yeah, I think you are forced to change the
file, the file permissions to 600, if you're trying to do SSH logins, I mean, because I've had
situations where I had forgotten to do that before. Yeah, maybe it's a key file. It might be the
key file that you have to do that, but because they won't let you log in unless your permissions
are set to 600. I thought you had to be careful about the config file because that's potentially
dangerous. I thought you probably. I can't, I've seen this somewhere, but I might be
conflating it with the thing you said, I'm not sure. I'm having trouble remembering right now,
too. It might have been one time where I, for the first time tried to log in using a new key pair
and I had forgotten to change the key files to 600 or something and it, it aborted and said,
you've got your permissions are not secure enough. Okay, that's good. So, do you want to do that last
comment there, Joe? Sure, a Gabriel even fire comments. Identity file. I'm curious if, from your
example, you are creating separate identity files for each host. I imagine not, but it's a possibility
I'd never considered before. I suppose it doesn't provide that much more security insofar as if
someone can read one of your private keys from dot SSH slash. They can read all of them, but it does
make me think. From my part, I have this ruby script to run SSH with short hands to the different
identities and accounts in our internal machines. This show is prompting me to do it the right way,
especially insofar as it will work with secure copy, secure FTP and scripts that use them.
Thanks for the show. I'm enjoying the people are starting to break open the tools other than the
blade in this SSH Swiss Army knife. And that's uh, I never really thought about creating a separate
key pair for each server that I use either. Is this something you do? No, I've never, never done that.
Never occurred to me why I would need to do it to be honest. There's no need there, but
something to think about, I suppose, but I don't really know. So, okay, next show then, 1857
adventures in coffee by C. Prompt Curtis Atkins. And yeah, another one in the series,
that great series on coffee, I'm not sure we've had enough to make a series yet, but maybe we should.
C. Prompt is talking about his French press, which is very interesting. And the way he gets his
coffee from, I think the uses are creamer too, which I was impressed by the links and the
various resources he uses. They look really good. We have a French press, but I haven't used it
quite a while. And in fact, I think my wife took it to her office so that she could make
French press coffee there. We have probably six or seven different ways to make coffee in the house
here. And uh, yeah, I like French press, you know, as long as you grind it course enough, so it
doesn't get too gritty. And I like the fact that he talked about the temperature of the water and
and how that affected the taste of the coffee into. I used to have a travel French press mug
where you just drink right out of the thing itself. I think it was actually boredom that made that
as well, but it was a little travel mug that was a French press. It sounds very good. I like the
sound of that. Yeah, yeah, there's this quite a variety of different devices like that. I'm sure
it's been in some restaurant where they maybe gave everybody an individual French press or something
and a cup or something. I can't remember that. Probably so. Quite cooler. So a Gabriel even
via comments, uh, nice episode even for non coffee people. I'm not a coffee person. I've tried
a constant to acquire the taste. Definitely prefer teas. But it was nevertheless entertaining
here the process you go through. I heard people talk rave actually about French presses before,
but never had a clue as to why they were useful. During the process, I can start to imagine why.
Thanks for the show. Very nice. Come at number two, post a by Dave Morris. He says,
I enjoy this a lot. I like the relaxed style and the detailed content. Not use my French
presses or cafeteria as we prefer to call them for a while. I prefer to use my mocha pot and
brew a large strong coffee every morning. After listening to this, I had a craving for coffee
so made some with some Kenya medium ground. I had all but abandoned in the freezer. It's great,
but that's double my normally daily intake. Got to watch it there, Dave. I know. I know.
I should be shaken if I don't know what's happened. There's true though. It's something
about listening to people talking about coffee the making of. Oh yeah, I could just drink coffee
now. I don't give that very thing. I don't use a French press very often. I've got a
metal-intulated one, which is really good. Keep the coffee warm after you've made it. So
that's what I thought. Oh yeah. We used one of those. When we were traveling last summer,
we stayed at a bed and breakfast place that had one of those metal French presses that was
insulated. That made really nice coffee. Yeah, it was good. It's good. A Michael made a comment saying,
you've got my European mind. Congrats. You've got me for a long moment. And this is an interesting
thing. It was a deeply puzzled water at 200 degrees. After finally dawned of May, I can
start with an online converter to then that 200 degrees Fahrenheit means 93.3 centigrade,
which made a lot more sense to me. I guess it would. Fahrenheit centigrade into problems always
all the time. Otherwise, I second-gay will have a thanks for the show. That's it. I like that.
You know what the problem for me with the the water temperature is that it's it's too difficult
to get it just right. I would like to have a water heater upper that just goes to the right
coffee temperature. Because we have the electric tea kettle that will it boils it and I suppose you
could turn it off before it gets to the boiling point, but which is the right point and we've got
a thermometer. Man, I just can't be bothered to be doing all that to make sure the water is at the
right temperature. No, it's it's a tremendously complicated process, isn't it? I just happened
yesterday when I was just wanting to relax for a bit. I got to the the Wikipedia page on coffee
up on my tablet. I was sitting reading this. The detail that they go into there about, you know,
coffee, where coffee comes from and how you make it and all of the the complexities of what
what comes out when and what different roasts and stuff is. It's amazing. You could you could write
PhDs galore on that, I'm sure. Oh, you surely could and somebody probably has everything. It's
probably happened, yeah, true. Right, so episode 1858, another one of my favorite ones here,
multimeter mods part two by In White Bill. And in this one he talks about more
modification finishes the mods that he started in an earlier episode to his knockoff multiver. Well,
I think that's putting it in negatively to say it's a knockoff multimeter. He just says that it's a
very high quality multimeter. It's not quite commercial grade, like the one he uses for work.
Yeah, it it I was impressed with it. It's a description of it because he's also done a review
of it. Hasn't he? Is that in the past one? Yeah, sure. I'm not sure. I think it's coming up.
It's coming up. Yeah, yeah, but yeah, it's impressed with it. In fact, I quite tempted,
you can buy them here as well. I'm quite tempted to get one. I just have a cheap multimeter
low in which is quite like something of the bit more quality to it, even though that is not
professional quality. Certainly high enough quality for my needs. Yeah, I've got one. I don't even
know how much mine costs because my dad bought it for me as a birthday present or something. And
I mean, it seems fine for me, but I don't think it has all the features that the bill's
talking about this one having. Yeah, yeah, it's tempting, but I was very impressed with what he was
doing with it. It's quite a quite a tail he was telling here. Oh, well, a bit of a bit of a
a faux par if you like going on, they're cutting the hole in the wrong side, which sort of thing
you had just got, oh no, and you just sort of throw it out the window, perhaps. He managed not to do that
and carried on and 3D printed a thing to fill the hole in, which I thought was just amazing. That's
a brilliant piece of work. I love that. It's one of those examples of messing something up and then
instead of being angry, thinking, what an opportunity. I can learn some 3D printing and some
CAD and stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, somebody made the comment that we could do with the show on
the 3D. I don't know if that's following on later on, but it's yeah, the fact that we taught
himself how to do this in blender and then got his friend to print these things out. So it's just
fantastic. I like this very much. Me too. So my comment was the first one. I say another amazing
tail of ingenuity, well done Bill. I loved this episode, especially enjoyed the inadvertent
detour into CAD and 3D printing. Of course, the process of designing and printing 3D model is good
for another episode, dot, dot, dot, dot. Very good. Yes, yes. And Mike Ray followed with the comment,
hacking it is best. Great stuff. Hacking it is best. Heard the names of some old friends, too.
2n, 3n, 0, 4, 2n, double 2, double 2, etc. These are not old friends to me, but I know he's saying.
Yeah, I don't know those guys either. In White Bill response, thanks John. Yeah, that detour into 3D
design and printing was interesting. A friend from our love, Jason bought a 3D printer about 8
months ago. A sphere was interested in it and asked lots of questions. He then designed a part
for one of his model rockets and asked if Jason could print it. Before I knew it, A sphere bought
his own 3D printer kit. And while designing my parts, I asked A sphere is this how it all starts.
I want my own 3D printer soon. Of course, that's how it starts, Bill. Why would you know?
Oh, yeah. Yes. And Enribe will also come in back to Mike saying, yep, those old 2n's,
one of those, if one of those if it ain't broke, don't fix it parts. Yes, they still do the same job.
They've always done and do it perfectly fine. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. I like at these
guys that they're starting to talk code to one another here and like transistor nerds or something.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there are a couple more comments here. Mary, we titles his comments
splitting here. I agree on old friends for the 2n3904 and 2n222. However, I can't resist to add that
these are unlike the 2n7000, not MOSFETs, but MPMBJTs, bipolar junction transistors.
The point being that BJTs need some amount of control current at the base in contrast to the
virtually zero current at the gate of a MOSFET, judging from the link to pictures you have
compensated for that by using a bigger capacity to get the desired turn on time. In any case,
thanks a lot for sharing this journey. Okay, I didn't understand very much of that there,
but no, no. Well, like it is, you know, the conuessantia or discussing these things that
us mere models have to just sort of stand in the sidelines and listen to, I guess.
Yeah. And I build, uh, replied to Mirri saying, uh, transistors. I started with a MOSFET,
but what it wasn't doing what I wanted. I experimented with the transistors I had on hand
and chose the one that worked best for me. However, I can't remember if I went into detail about
the part change between episode one and two. Thanks for the clarification. You know, I never
sold on the finer points of transistors. Make a fine HPR. Thanks. And my bill adds a good one.
It's we need more of those comments. Yeah. And finally, Mike Ray makes another comment.
Sadly, some of the old friend through whole mounting transistors are beginning to disappear,
or at least be very hard to find. And those that are still there are rising in price, I guess,
to reflect the smaller numbers in which they're made. It's getting almost impossible to find the
good old 2 in 38 19 MOSFET. I used to use to make oscillators and even work courses like the
BC107 Slash 8 Slash 9 transistors are getting ridiculously expensive over here in the UK.
Anybody remembers creeping the paint off the body of an OCR45 to make photo transistor?
Uh, sorry. No, but not this. I dare say some people do. Very nice.
Right. So I guess you're up? Yep. Yep. So I am just juggling between pressing the button and
clicking the clicking to the next page too much behind the scenes there. So this is 1859.
And most in a maze on the Raspberry Pi by a Gabriel even fire. And this is him talking about
more about bare metal programming on the Raspberry Pi and continuing on from some of these
earlier earlier stuff. Very detailed stuff. Yeah. I'm interested, but I don't really understand
very much of it. I'm sad to say, but I always like hearing what people are doing with their
Raspberry Pi. I mean, that itself could be a series I would think. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's interesting
stuff. It's hard to get into unless you have that sort of background. I mean, if you've done
into green computer science, you might well have covered some of these sorts of things, but I haven't
and so my knowledge in this area is more sort of peripheral in any ways. So yeah. I did. When I
worked at my previous job, it was in the era when micro processors as they were then called
were appearing. And there was a team in our department who was building a mic. There was a competition
and I think it was just in the UK called a micro mouse competition. We had to produce a mouse
shape robot that physically went through a physical maze to find a piece of cheese. They were
doing this on using processors like 6502 and that type of stuff. I wasn't sufficiently
knowledgeable about how to do that in those days, but with very deeply interested in what they were
doing. So this reminds me of that. Yeah. It sounds pretty cool, but I can't really follow a lot of
what he's talking about there. There was one comment by Mike Ray entitled Welcome Return
Great Episode Gabriel and great to see you back with more bare metal programming.
Looking forward to episodes about sound rendering on the GPU. Wow. Yes. Yeah. Quite
interesting to hear that. All right. So the next episode, 1860, said it. Yeah. 5150 interviews
Chris Wade of Save Wi-Fi. And this is the one where they're talking about new FCC regulations
and the potential consequences for open source operating systems and for the firmware that many
of us like to load on to our routers. Yeah. This is a pretty scary prospect I think.
Isn't it the fact that, yeah, there's a potential issue with software defined radio
is being used to do things that more fixed hardware was being used for in the past.
It's opening doors that weren't open before. And I understand it. This is sort of a bureaucratic
response to that, which is to say, you know, ban it. Control. It's stopping. You know, rather than
more controlled response. And it's, I think Chris Wade made some very excellent points about
the stupidity of this response by the FCC. But it's going to have worldwide ramifications as
well, which is very, very worrying. Yeah. Well, for my own part, I don't not planning on changing
the firmware on any of my routers, all of which run DDWRT on them until I hear otherwise. I'm
just going to keep running them. Sure. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. I'm sure that's the case. But it's more
that new stuff will be restricted in this way. And eventually, if it happens, if it actually happens,
it will spread to all sorts of places. Because, you know, there's so much stuff that could
potentially have this sort of software to find radio equipment in it, including laptops and
anything with Wi-Fi on it, I guess. Yeah. Well, there are no comments for that episode. Okay.
So moving on to 1861, this was Curtis Atkins, Adkins. Sorry, Curtis. See prompt,
who was doing another in his series of cool stuff. This is part four. And he was talking about
three main topics, C-muse, C-muse. He's not what it's called, C-M-U-S. Come on. I've never used it,
but yeah. And I've not used, I've used M-P-C and M-P-D and some of the things that work around that,
but not that particular one. And recommending a podcast song exploded and musicians take
apart their songs. That sounds pretty cool, actually. And I've not explored that podcast,
but I remember thinking while he was talking about it, that's a genius idea for a podcast.
Yeah, yeah. I'm sure it's interesting. I've not followed it up. And the third one was Mr. Robot,
which is a TV show, I believe, sent me heard of it, not seen it though. I haven't either. Maybe I should
try it out though, because my wife and I are having a real problem finding any TV series to watch.
I mean, we'll watch one episode and then just can't be bothered anymore and we just read our books.
Well, yeah, it's a funny thing, actually, without addressing too far.
Well, my kids were here before they went off to university and one stuff. We reached the point
between us that we just got so bored with TV. And that was 2013. The TV is not being switched on
since. Nobody wanted to watch it. There's plenty of other places you can read. You can go on
the internet. There's so much other stuff. We have not watched the television in that time,
because the amount of stuff that we actually enjoyed amongst the what was available was tiny.
Why bother? We really would see it. We found a few series that we like, but then there
are the sorts of series that are over after say six or eight episodes. And then there's no
follow-up. And so then we are left looking around for more. And I've always got a book going.
And I like reading just as much. The only thing I always watch on TV is whatever
American football games are on. And I won't watch those, but otherwise I'd rather just read my book.
I think it's a common response these days. I know loads of people who see the world in that sort of
way. It's a good year for us now.
Another one of the cool stuff episodes where Ken might say that you could make three episodes out
of that stuff. So that's always true. Yeah. All right. So are you up next? I forgot already.
No, I did last one. I think tonight. Okay. So 1862, the awesomely epic guy to Katie E. Part one.
And then the next day is part two. And in this one, the new host gets, get us. Get it. So I think it's
get us. It contributes his very first show. And he talks about the KDE desktop. And I found it
very, very interesting. I've tried KDE two or three times in the years that I've been running Linux.
And it has never stuck. There are certain things I really like about it. Like the Kate
Text Editor. I think it's excellent. But overall, I just have never found it all that interesting.
But I liked hearing him talk about all the various ways to tweak it, to make it better.
Yeah. I know it. It's a great idea to do a show on this to be going through an article like this.
The article was brilliant, of course. But it's a great idea to do this because it's a good way to
consume that sort of thing. I think. That's right. I forgot. And so he did not write this article.
But he had made the audio recording for Linux voices. That's right. That's right. Yes.
Okay. Yes. And he got their permission to put it up on HPR as well.
Yeah. I enjoyed that. Yeah. I thought it was a brilliant idea. I really enjoyed listening to this.
I have been a KDE user actually for a long time. Yeah. I thought so.
I started on Red Hat Linux back in the 90s. And then it turned into Fedora. And KDE must have
appeared in that sort of era. And I just moved that rather than the Gnome because Gnome seemed very
primitive. So I just stuck with it ever since. Until now, I'm not on it anymore. But because
Debbie and testing breaks it all the damn time. Oh, no. So I'm currently here in XFCE, which
which is more basic. But it's more stable. Well, I'm on openbox with 10 to and
you know, it's much more basic even the next XFCE. But I like it very much. Yeah. I used to use
crunch bang on one of my machines and had openbox on that. Yeah. It's good. It does, does jump.
Yep. So there's one comment by Ken Fallon. He says, I just enabled a load of these. Hi,
get us. I just re-enabled a load of these. I didn't bother before. As I mostly did reinstalls.
But then I realized that I could keep my config in my home door. So it would move with me. Excellent
reading and a great idea. I guess he's referring there to the idea of taking this audio from something
else and then presenting it as an HPR episode. Yeah. I think it is a good idea. It's a, yeah.
And then it's voice product always worth hearing again. I think. Sure, especially for those of
us who found Linux voice too expensive to subscribe to. That's a shame. Yeah. I'm a pity.
So if we hop across to the next episode, there's not much more to say about the content.
Well, there's a, there's a comment from John Calp. He says,
probably still will not switch to KDE. But I really enjoyed both of these episodes about
tweaking KDE, although I probably still not adopt the desktop myself. This also is a pretty good
idea to read old magazine articles of this still of current interest as HPR episodes with some
intro upfront. As long as it doesn't run a file of any licensing, which, which we know it doesn't.
So yeah. Good deal. Great idea. Good, good way to, to join HPR too. Yep. Okay. So who's on
it's me next? Is it should I do this one? Yeah. You can do your own episode there. Some of these
are called Dave Morris did a thing. Turning an old printer into a network printer. This was me trying
to make my old printer work. I think somebody commented on old cast planet. I just saw the
comment and I looked in the other day. But old is 10 years? Well, yeah. It's a way of describing
I do actually have an even older printer, which is from the 1980s, but it's a serial laser printer.
So I want to get that one in some stage. But to, wow, I think I might be in for a struggle there.
That's funny. I remember when my dad got his first laser printer, I think it was an HP LaserJet
4. And I want to say he paid nearly $3,000 for that thing. Yeah, I can believe that.
Well, they were very expensive. Yeah. That's about 1990. Well, we bought laser printers for
our Vax cluster, which we bought in 1987. At the university I was working at. And when it was
jumped, then the laser printers were still working. So, and then we're going to get thrown out and
I said, well, I'll have one. But you try lifting it. Wow. It weighs a ton and it's only a sort of
desktop thing. That's funny. It's amazingly heavier. It's made of ladle or something. I'm not sure what
it is, but it's concrete. I have no idea. I believe that's a security feature. Somebody runs off with it.
Yeah. Anyway, the point of this show was I was doing this and getting it to work. And I'm
in a terrible note take. I have to write things down, otherwise I forget them. So, I wrote lots
and lots of notes in my wiki and I suddenly thought, oh wow, I could make this a show. So, I did.
Sure. So, you got my notes effectively. So, I like that episode. And I commented as much saying,
wow, remote scanning. Very cool Dave. I've got an old printer on the network too, but hooked
up to my goodwill router via USB. The advantage of using a Raspberry Pi is the remote scanning.
I never even knew that was possible at all. Thought you always had to hook up with the USB
to scan stuff. Again, then again, I never really thought about it that much. Usually, I walk over
to the university library to do my scanning because they have awesome scanners for public use.
Thanks for another great episode. Thanks, John. And that's what I said in response.
Thanks, John. I like that. I like that. But, routers can run printers like me. So, it's a great idea.
But, I suspect the features are limited. I might do have a router that can do it when I haven't tried it.
I have plans to experiment with cups, perhaps configuring other cues for different size
stationary. For example, just as an aside we used to run cups at work, back in the day, so I have
a little bit of experience playing around here. Oh, I commented here about my deck. I don't know
three monochrome lays the printer. So, can I have four? I don't know how to make a Raspberry Pi
talk serial RS232 to a printer. But, there would be quite an interesting thing to do. Sure,
it must be possible. So, the scanning capabilities good to have and it's been used more than I
would have expected. Quality is not particularly high, but it's good enough for most purposes.
Sounds fine. So, man, look at me yawning here at 2 o'clock in the afternoon.
Well, we're getting close to the end, I think. Yeah, next episode. We got four more episodes here.
Yeah. Next one is number 62 in the Libre Office Impress or the Libre Office series. This is
Impress working with text boxes by O'Hooka. Yeah. So, this is another, this is a follow-on from the
the previous one, actually, making your slides with your own text boxes to put them where you
want and have as many as you want and so forth. I'd never actually done this. Didn't even know
it was possible. But, as usual, I hope it does, it does the great thing of giving us lots of
information, especially on his own site there and leading us along the way to the answers to this.
Very good. Thank you. Well, this is, I mean, the episode really helps to explain some confusing
things about the way Impress behaves. When you think you ought to be applying a text style,
you really ought to be applying a drawing object style. I mean, it really is counter-intuitive
when you're using the program and here he kind of breaks it down and tells you which styles you
really need to be using if you wanted to work right. So, that's, it's very helpful.
Absolutely. Absolutely. Yes. Yeah. It's a, it's a, it's a strain. It is a rather strange beasty.
This, this, this thing. It's a, to, to make it do what you want to do. It's not entirely obvious.
I've certainly seen people try and use slide presentation systems as if they are typing a document
and only to, oh, it's awful. Yeah. And then it flows from one slide to another and makes a
hero, hell of a mess and so on and so forth. So, it's good to, to understand it better in this way,
I think. Yep. There were no comments. So, on to 1866. So, this was Kufmo. Kufmo. So, how you say? Kufmo.
Who was talking an awkward talk with two young computer users as his title and he talks to his
his children, Eric and Emily talking about operating systems school and fun uses of computers. So,
I don't know, it's nice. I didn't think it was that awkward. No, no, no, no. So, it's a, it's a way,
you know, it's a way these things go. I think it's just seen very natural and relaxed. It was, it was good.
And they, they were certainly, the, the, the two kids were very, very full coming with the,
they're full with some opinions. Yeah. I've enjoyed that because my kids are one year off of
their ages. My kids are 14 and 11 and they would have had somewhat similar responses. Although,
I think it sounded like my son has a bit more experience in the programming part of it.
It sounded like he was trying to, to get his son to show a little bit more interest in programming.
And I'm not sure he really wanted it. Yes. Yes. I think he hadn't quite dealt far enough
into it yet to understand what it was entitled. But, uh, there you go. This is his wife. There and
up. And, uh, Frank, I don't know which Frank this was commented on the show. Was it Frank Bell?
That's probably Frank Bell. I don't know many Franks that listen to us and who comment.
And he said absolutely delightful, which I can't but agree with. Yeah, that was great.
So, the next day was my episode called the Lafayette Public Library Maker Space. And, uh,
this was one that was made over a series of days. I think there are three separate segments here.
One ending in bidder disappointment. And another longer segment where I got just
awesome help from the librarian on duty in the makerspace. And then I finally come back and
give a little round up and talk about the results of the printing. Basically, what I was doing was
trying to get in there and make use of the 3D printers and other things that they have
in the newly renovated downtown public library in Lafayette Louisiana. Yeah, what a place.
It sounds really, really good. I was so so glad you told us about it. You're very lucky. I don't
know that there's places quite that of that caliber in the UK. I don't really know either.
This is the only one of the public library branches that's got a maker space. And we do have a
new branch of the library. Well, I say new, but it was probably built seven or eight years ago.
And it has lots of excellent things in it. But I just like how they, when they were renovating
this downtown library, they thought of so many things. They thought of the makerspace. And
also liked the fact that it's not just for technology, but also for more traditional making
parts like knitting and sewing and things like that where you can go in there and use these
sewing machines or sit around with other people and knit a scarf or something. It's really
very cool. Yeah, somebody with quite a lot of the four-site must have thought this through. How
would that have been done? You know, there's some sort of a community group that comes up with these
ideas. Well, I know that there is a, I don't know if it's a board of directors or something like that,
but I'm actually friends with one of the people who's a sort of official in the Lafayette
Public Library. And she may have had something to do with it. They also hired a very good architecture
firm to handle the design of the interior renovation and everything. The exterior of the building
didn't change a lot, but it has some additions. The interior is almost completely different.
And it's really, really well done. It took him four or five years to get it done, but man,
it's awesome now. Yeah, it sounds well. Well, worth the weight of what you describe. It's really good.
The only thing I wondered about was the, maybe they didn't quite get the opening times
sorted before the game available. That was the only sort of down, slight downside. I'm sure
there will soon get organized, but it seemed a little bit lacking there. Well, yeah, I mean, I talked
to the, I cut out the part of the podcast where the librarian explained to me why they weren't there
on that day when I first went. And it was, it had to do with personal reasons for her. And so I,
I decided to cut that out. It was very valid excuse, but I think they've got it stabilized now.
And she told me that there's starting to have lots of groups going in scheduling classes and stuff
like that. So I think it's going to be very well used. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah,
yeah, I heard the bit where she said there were classes coming in and stuff which will be
fantastic. Well, what a resource. That's that's really good. Yeah. It's like I said a great
public quality of life enhancement for the city. Yeah. Absolutely. Right. So next was, was me again.
All it wasn't really me. I just posted the show for the, for the group. And this was the
1868 Glasgow pod crawl or pod crawl Glasgow, maybe, should have been whatever. Kevin,
think puts it the other way around for the first time. Okay. So Kevin was the organiser of the
up at the pod crawl really. He and Macnalo Andrew Andrew Conway. But it was a, it was a fun time.
I thought there might be a few more people, but the fact we had Andrew Gregory from
then it's voice going along to join us as well. It was very good indeed. So that was good.
Then it was, it's a good idea to come back and chat about it. I thought it was fun to get together
and chat. Yeah. It was really nice hearing Andrew Gregory's voice. Again, I, I've not listened to
any of his podcasts since what, what was it? Was it the Ubuntu UK podcast that he do before
Linux voice? He did, you know, it's on Linux format and they're, they're podcast is called
TuxTux Raider. I think we're going to touch it. Tux Raider, yeah, listen to both of those.
Yeah. Yeah. So yeah. They, they have a, they have a really nice relaxed way of doing their podcast.
Yeah. It's, it's just always quite amusing. And so yeah, he's a, I think,
partly down to Andrew. I'm sure the others contribute a lot as well.
Yeah. So it was fun. Fun hearing guys sit around talking at, remind me a little bit of the
Duffer cast. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That was, there was some commonality there. I just liked it.
I'm getting a little bit distracted right now. My daughter is outside singing,
love, be all those in a very loud voice. She and her friend are rehearsing because they're supposed
to sing this at an upcoming event at her school. I think the French immersion program is doing
some kind of thing. And so I like I'm hearing you, but I'm also hearing her singing outside my window.
It's very distracted. Yeah. That's relevant. It's, it's not coming through. Well, I just
call it just the edge of it that you know, your mic must be quite directional or something.
Well, it's a condenser mic, but it is outside. So I'm, I'm in, I'm in the detached office,
which is not connected to the house, but she was out on the back patio there singing.
And it's really funny. Very good. Very good. Yeah. I sometimes when I do these, my daughter's here,
if she's, if she's, if she's, if she's a vacation and stuff, and she's she occasionally
forgets and makes noise. No, it's isn't the background, but to not, not seeing it. That hasn't
happened yet. It's good to get a little atmosphere there. Yeah, absolutely. All right. So mailing list
discussions. Yep. I'm just changing gear quickly. So yeah, what we normally do is to talk about
what's been happening on the mailing list. And the, the notes are set up. But what happens if you're
not the where that is that when stuff gets posted to the edge of the mailing list, it also gets
copied to the G-M-A-N-E service and is available there as well. So what I do is I scan that
and link to the various things for the notes. But I have a suspicion that G-M-N is having a problem
today. When I tried it earlier on, I wasn't actually able to get through to it. So just hold,
hold on a second while I check again. I'm actually trying to grab one right now and it's just
spending. It's not loading up. Yeah, I'm seeing the same here. It's a great service. It's a free service.
But I don't know whether he gets attacked. The guy who runs this or he gets attacked or whether he's
maybe just gets overloaded or what exactly happens to it. But maybe let's view this as an opportunity
to have a shorter community news. Yeah, I think that the going into my new detail with the
email might be excessive. I don't know. We can probably scan them through it fairly, fairly quickly.
The time I did this on my own, this show a while back, what I did was I summarized the mail
to for myself and just quickly scan through it and said he's near with the main topics without
drilling down. Because you can always drill down yourself to see the details. And if you're a
native VR subscriber, then you probably are on the mailing list anyway. And if not, you may be
ought to be. The other thing I should say is that we are mailing this as run with the mailman
list software. And mailman can keep its own archives or messages, which it threads and various
be keeps in order. We used to have a problem with this. And I think that's why can move
over to Gmail. But since we've moved across to an honest host, the new mailman installation
has fixed all of the problems that we had with the archive. So the archive is completely intact.
Now, as far as I can see, so if you can't get through to Gmail, you can just click on the link to
the mailman mailing this site and click on the link to archive. And you'll see all of the messages
there. So that's multiple strings to the bow there. So it's good. I used to do administer a mailman
system for the University of Oict案, so it feels like home from home in many respects. Anyway, the main
topics on the mailing list then briefly are there was some discussion about using Markdown for
show notes. That was one of the earliest subjects that came up with some chat about the different
versions of Markdown that might be available. And possibly some other Markup languages being
used. I don't think we've reached too much of a conclusion. I think the view that Ken and I hold
is that we will take whatever you send us. We really, really like it if you could send us something
which was a no Markup format. And if you tell us what it is, that would be great. We don't have
a mechanism for doing that yet. You can just put it in the top of the show notes as a few people
have done. You're so concluded, John. And then I'm writing some stuff to help with the
processing of this into HTML. If you feel that you're able to generate good quality HTML5,
then go for it. That's the best option. But we'd prefer not have to debug it, so we'd like it to
be good quality, please. Yeah. I tried Markdown for the first time on this latest episode that I uploaded.
And it seemed like everything worked fine except for the image links were messed up by whatever
version of Markdown either. Are you the one that handled that? I actually processed someone Ken
does most of the processing on the back end. Though we're trying to work it out that we can
divide up the load, but we haven't got there yet. But in this particular case, I ran my tests
script against your notes and it said, this is Markdown. So it went and ran Pandok on it. But what I
hadn't realised was that it was running Pandok in its Pandok mode, which does slightly different
things to standard Markdown. So it messed it up, which you pointed out has then fixed it.
But it's a learning process. It's still discovering things about this. But you said that there was
a flag that you could use on the command line that would tell it to run in some kind of a different mode.
Yeah. When you run Pandok, there's a team. Well, you mean it in the notes themselves? No,
in the command line. On Pandok. Yeah. There are a team options to Pandok. So you can say, I think this is
playing Markdown or it's Pandok in the handsmarkdown or it's GitHub style Markdown and many others.
Urban helpers. Yeah. It's a brilliant bit of software. It seems to have written very,
very well. As far as I can see, I haven't had too many problems with it. But the one that worked
for mine was something like strict mode or something. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Just switch off
the Pandok extensions. Yeah. I mean, I was just going by the documentation over it, daring fireball
as far as how to insert images. Yeah. Yeah. Now that's fine. That's fine. It's like I say,
we're still we're still learning where it was my fault. I didn't quite appreciate that it was
going to do that. Yeah. Well, you fixed it. So another comment, another thread that we had was
concerning the menus on the website. Mike Ray had pointed out that the menus that we have
are not accessible to him because he can't hover over them and get the sort of spoken feedback
that he needs. And the reason to that is because we're using the hover facility, hover capability
to drop down stuff to make it look like a like a menu. And so I think Ken commented back on
this that he was off to to look to see what could be done to improve it. And he came back saying
that it was going to be really, really difficult and could do with some help on that. So yeah.
So it's that balance between HTML and CSS and how those two things hook into
screen readers and all of those types of things. What if Mike could depending on what browser
he's using like if he's using Firefox, it's extremely easy to just disable all styling.
And that would open up the menus to his screen reader it seemed to me. Yeah, I'm not sure
of the details of this. I think the way that the HTML underneath has been put together means that
it it relies on the fact that there are going to be there's going to be a CSS that responds
in particular ways to to drop down lists and open up lists and stuff. So I'm not clear whether
that would do the job, whether it be better just have a different version of the main page.
I don't know. I don't know. No expert on this tool. So I can't really comment.
It sounds like a good reason to try the page in W3M. That's true. That's true. Yeah. Yeah.
So it's an ongoing thing. I think and this help is requested from people who might know how
to better ways of solving this. So another thing we had on the list was we seem to have an issue
with the main list itself. This is this is a bit sort of behind the scenes. But what seemed to be
happening was that when Ken was trying to send a message out about, which I'll come on to in a
minute about, more contributions needed please, he was sending some attachments. The attachments,
the message went to mailman. Mailman apparently did the right thing and sent it out to everybody.
But it looks as if the anti-spam stuff on the server then killed it because the reason I said
is because the message in its intact form was in the archive and in a reduced form was in the
digest because I subscribed the digest just to make sure that it works. The digest form of the list
digest always strips out the attachments and points to them on the website and that work.
So it was just the one with the actual attachments that was being stopped. So I think that's been
solved but we were trying to test it so that was what all that was about. I'll be honest I kind of
ignored that whole thread. Probably I should have ignored it too really shouldn't I so yeah.
And then the issue of getting contributions was had a lot of discussion
that threading in these notes hasn't worked very well because a lot of people did
digest replies and stuff and broke through it. I see a number of digest things here.
I still try not to nag even though I did do the show and I'm not to do that but anyway,
hold me back, hold me back. But the point of it was that Ken was I think Ken's view was that
you always a show. He said you always a show if you've ever been a contributor or if you're a
listener even you always a show. But it was pointed out by lost in Bronx in a response that
I didn't completely absorb when he wrote it that maybe that wasn't quite the approach that we
should be taken and thinking about it. I think he was right. It was more that it's a community.
In order for the show that the whole community structure of VHBR to continue we need contributions.
But you don't always a show. It's just that we desperately need your help.
So the difference in sort of trying to, I don't think anybody was ever trying to make anybody
feel guilty about not contributing but it might have come. Somebody might have been.
Yeah, well it might have come across that way. So I think the point is and Ken responded to this
saying that's not quite the way that we want to. We still need them. We still need the
shows please but it's more that if you want the project to continue then we need your
contribution please. Yeah, well we did get a new host this month and we could use a few more.
I'm going to say my episode contributions are probably going to go down this fall. I've got
a number of things going on and so it'd be great if some other people could step in there and
upload some more shows. Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, so there was, there were one or two comments
about you don't need to worry about the quality and don't think you sound stupid because
it's just you who thinks that I'm not the rest of the world and so on and so forth.
I would say I think people should worry at least a little bit about the sound quality.
I want to be able to listen without hearing distortion. That's my main thing.
Yes, yes, do you do your best, do your best but don't be, don't be frightened that it's
that it's terrible. Unless it really is terrible. Well, actually it's not, that was,
most of you have been there. There've been a couple of episodes where I had to turn it off
because there was so much distortion but as far as worrying about the way your own voice sounds don't
worry about that at all. I would say I don't, but I just want to hear people talk.
I know, but there is a terrible embarrassment that first time you ever record your voice.
The voice you've heard all your life coming through your head to your ears and all of a sudden
you hear it coming from the outside world to your ears and it's totally different and it sounds awful
and you never know. But everybody else heard it that way all the time. So you weren't about it.
I sympathise with that viewpoint. Yeah. Get over it. It's not such a big deal. What we want to
know is the interesting stuff that you have to tell us and if you listen to any of
HBR you'll get some idea of the sort of things that we get to listen to and it's all fantastic.
So just add your bit to that. Please. Yeah. Okay, let's call the whole to the
the bail business and I think we've pretty much covered the comments. What we change the way
that we do the comments are we bit because we used to wait till the end of everything at this
point and then go through all the comments. In some cases it was going back to shows we'd already
looked at and doing the comments. What we're doing now is we're just going through all the comments
as we go along. The only bit that we don't cover by that means is where somebody in the month
of September has made a comment to an older show and so we need to maybe just check if there
any of those before we call or we get the end of that particular. And there was one, there was
one, 5150 made a comment to Lost and Bronx for his yet from the imagination part seven show
where he was talking about the zoom H1 I think it was and a task camp and I think 5150 was
happy that like a person been done because he went out and bought himself a zoom.
Yep and then a guy named Rob Blaine made a comment on my HPR1750 which was where I talked about
XClip XDO tool and XVKBD and how I used them in conjunction with Bladder and I was really glad to
hear that he is using Bladder although I'm sad to hear that it's because he also has
a medical issue so he's got a dystonia or something and so it's I hate hearing about anybody
suffering from those things but I'm really glad that Bladder is helping him out. Indeed, indeed.
We had these are not easy to follow it, it just me. We had a comment on 1831 back in August which
was a shadowy figure show. We covered these last last time that didn't we? I think we did
see a little confusing because what we did was we reviewed that particular show
1831 last month and the comment had already kind of already been made because it was made in
the following month. It says it's September 7th. Yeah yeah so it was a further comment.
It was comment number 5 to 1831 which is shadowy figures show on speed listening and
this was okay who came back and was commenting on the speeds of German speaking podcasts and
Swedish speaking postcards and English and the different speeds. I like that. It hadn't really
occurred to me that you would have different speeds for different languages but it totally makes sense.
I suppose depending on your fluency in the different languages. Yeah yeah yeah yeah I find I can't
speed English up very much these days because my brain's slowing down or something like that.
It's an interesting thing. It's an interesting subject but good for people who can do it.
I certainly can't but it might be about some things on NY Bill's HP 1846. That was in August
that was the review. Remember we had wondered about the review of that multimeter? That was his review show.
That was last. That was August. Yeah yeah because the last community news was actually in
September wasn't because just the way these things paned out. So we were some of the
some of these comments had already come in. I think the David Whitman's comment hadn't
made it that particular time. David Whitman says it takes me a minute to open these things up.
What I'm saying. Damn you he says these good buys the NY Bill keeps bringing up because of me
to spend dollars for two of the X61's. I'm gonna love them. Now this actually needed the
ability to test capacity. This can save a bundle. Just asking. Just ask flying Ritchu last
a bundle. Okay. That's a yes. I'm not sure everybody will get that comment. I'm not sure I do
it. Well I guess what he's saying is all these bargains get pretty expensive. Yes yes.
Well the flying Ritch reference was I think that the Bitcoin probably. I don't know anything
about flying Ritchu. I don't know who that is. It's one of the TLLTS presenters who is into
Bitcoin one time. So I think that's it because now we 80-407 we've already covered. So that's it.
We need to actually make it easier to keep a record of what we have covered in the
way of comments and what not. I need to do a better job of this. I thought I'd got this one down
but obviously not. I think it worked okay. Yeah we could this it's better than it was.
Right. I think we've nearly finished. I've just got one maybe two more things to say.
One is that we put out a request for help with the tags, the missing tags and some
reason older shows and over the past month we had one helper to who came along and helped out
with the with these. This is by whose hand is Colin 6128. I don't think he's a host yet.
Hope maybe he will think of doing a show for us but he certainly was extremely helpful in doing
for the or more tag and summary additions to the various shows in that in the database.
So just want to make it plain that make a public vote of thanks for the Colin 6128
and his help in this regard. So yeah super super very pleased that we got that. The only other thing
was that we can and I've been we've been putting HPR shows up on archive.org for a while now.
So from episode 1300 forward we most of them have gone up and then before that we had problems
because we didn't it wasn't easy to get hold of the high quality versions of the shows.
Well we discovered that we're probably never going to get the high quality so we're just going
to go with what quality we have. So we're just starting the process of loading a numbers back
with from 1300. So the range 1200 to 1299 I'm working on it. So if just just in case you've got
shows in those ranges and you're interested in them being on archive.org we're actually in the
process of doing that for posterity. So like I should have for my own shows anyway I think I've
still got the high quality for all of them. So for mine I'd be happy to supply that and by the
I want to thank you publicly also for working on that and also for handling the pictures on my
episodes that have gone missing since one of my servers crashed. So thanks for taking care of that.
You're very welcome. We need to get a better method of ensuring that we don't lose
links and pictures and that's that type of thing. Sometimes links have just not going to ever be there
again. We're all the shows but we very least need to be looking to see if there are copies on the
way back machine, various things and linking them and bringing them on to the HBO site and
those sort of things we're putting a disclaimer in saying sorry this links are dead so
yeah yeah that's life but yeah I could I could be busy for you know I lived about 90 then I've
probably got a job for that for that time. Anyway how are you?
Great thanks John have super I've never gone too long you haven't we haven't overdone this for
you pushing pushing two hours here so yeah if anybody's still listening thank you
okay thanks very much for your help John. Yep you bet talk your way. See you later bye.
You've been listening to Hecker Public Radio at Hecker Public Radio.org
We are a community podcast network that release the shows every weekday Monday through Friday.
Today's show like all our shows was contributed by a HBR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording a podcast and click on our country building to find out how easy
it really is. Hecker Public Radio was found by the digital.com and the informomicon computer club
and it's part of the binary revolution at binref.com. If you have comments on today's show
please email the host directly leave a comment on the website or record a follow up episode yourself
on their otherwise status. Today's show is released on the creative comments. Appribution,
share a like, see you to our live streams.