We started producing shows as Today with a Techie 11 years, 11 months, 21 days ago. Our shows are produced by listeners like you and can be on any topic that "are of interest to hobbyists". If you listen to HPR then please consider contributing one show a year. If you record your show now it could be released in 17 days.
Hosted by Ahuka on 2017-09-22 is flagged as Clean and released under a CC-BY-SA license.
Listen in ogg, spx, or mp3 format.
Comments (0)
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 comes to Scotland and talks to Andrew about Slackware 14.2, a year after release.
Hosted by Andrew Conway on 2017-09-21 is flagged as Clean and released under a CC-BY-SA license.
Listen in ogg, spx, or mp3 format.
Comments (1)
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:
Arch is for fruitflies, Slackware for elephants?
Destroying a hard drive hammer or drill?
Grub vs Lilo?
Changes in Slackware - no changes an end user would notice! Pulseaudio now included as needed for bluetooth support. In Andrew's experience of 14.1 and before, only one package needed Pulseaudio, namely the game VVVVVV and even then it just wanted to see it installed, didn't need it for sound to work!
Beni and Andrew generally build our packages using the slackbuilds.org. There can be dependency issues but it's rare. Worst case is Pandoc with its Haskell deps but sbopkg queue files are a great help there. Beni recommends sbotools as an alternative that deals with this and feels like portsnap on FreeBSD.
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.
Ham Shack Definition
A good definition of exactly what a Ham Shack is can be found on Wikipedia.
I met Mike Lucas at Kansas Linux Fest 2017 and review a couple of his novels
Hosted by FiftyOneFifty on 2017-09-19 is flagged as Clean and released under a CC-BY-SA license.
Listen in ogg, spx, or mp3 format.
Comments (0)
A Non Spoilery Review of "git commit murder" and "Forever Falls" by Michael Warren Lucas
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.
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.
In this show jezra explains how he gets the system to send him an email, and a text message using mailx and his phones providers free SMS to Email gateway.
Hosted by MrX on 2017-09-12 is flagged as Explicit and released under a CC-BY-SA license.
Listen in ogg, spx, or mp3 format.
Comments (2)
Please excuse the audio quality in the episode & feel free to skip if it's too painful on the ears. In the episode, I mainly talk about my two most recent cars as I couldn’t think of anything else to talk about off the cuff.
Released: 2017-09-08. Duration: 00:16:00. Flag: Clean. Tags:Health Insurance, Health Policy, Insurance Marketplace.
We look at the marketplace and see how everyone's interests clash
Released: 2017-09-07. Duration: 00:09:55. Flag: Clean. Series:Cooking. Tags:Cooking, Fermenting, Food preserving .
This is a short show on making Sauerkraut
Released: 2017-09-04. Duration: 01:27:39. Flag: Explicit. Series:HPR Community News. Tags:Community News.
HPR Volunteers talk about shows released and comments posted in August 2017
Released: 2017-08-31. Duration: 00:21:11. Flag: Clean. Tags:Electronics, Multimeter, Review.
NYbill does a quick review of two more inexpensive multimeters
Released: 2017-08-29. Duration: 00:20:09. Flag: Clean. Tags:HPR, recording, audacity.
In this episode I describe the process I use to create and post a show to HPR.
Released: 2017-08-25. Duration: 00:19:36. Flag: Clean. Tags:Internet, ISP, BT, Wireless Networking, Infrastructure, rural.
One person's quest to get a decent internet connection when the big corporations aren't interested.
Released: 2017-08-24. Duration: 00:14:35. Flag: Clean. Tags:Android, phones, file transfer.
Frank discusses AirDroid, an app for managing Your Android via a browser.
Released: 2017-08-23. Duration: 00:10:39. Flag: Explicit. Tags:TV,television,licence.
I don't watch any TV so I don't need a licence, but cancelling it is unexpectedly difficult
Released: 2017-08-18. Duration: 00:12:36. Flag: Clean. Tags:Health Insurance, Health Policy, Insurance Marketplace.
Financing health care means choices to be made
Released: 2017-08-16. Duration: 00:46:09. Flag: Clean. Tags:amateur radio, modulation, AM, FM, SSB, doppler, satellite.
Two of us trying to explain stuff mostly off the cuffs.
Released: 2017-08-09. Duration: 00:12:36. Flag: Clean. Tags:Raspberry Pi,Shell,Zabbix,Monitoring,Temperature,DS18B20,Sensors,Linux.
A surprisingly short geeky episode about connecting a temperature sensor to a Raspberry Pi
Released: 2017-08-08. Duration: 00:03:12. Flag: Clean. Series:Interviews. Tags:Interviews, Making.
A short series of interviews done at the Liverpool Makefest 2017
Released: 2017-08-07. Duration: 00:38:35. Flag: Explicit. Series:HPR Community News. Tags:Community News.
Murphy is strong but Ken struggles on talking about shows released and comments posted in July 2017
Released: 2017-08-04. Duration: 00:10:20. Flag: Clean. Tags:Health Insurance, Health Policy, Insurance Marketplace.
How the Health Insurance Market works in the U.S
Released: 2017-08-03. Duration: 00:24:12. Flag: Explicit. Series:Bash Scripting. Tags:bash,command line,configuration,terminal.
A detailed look into how, and why, to customize a bash prompt.
Released: 2017-08-02. Duration: 00:38:06. Flag: Explicit. Series:Vim Hints. Tags:vim,editor,movement,copy,paste,text object,configuration,.vimrc.
Hints and Tips for Vim users - part 5
Released: 2017-08-01. Duration: 00:37:29. Flag: Explicit. Tags:Hadoop,big data,MapReduce,cluster,HDFS.
Just a pretty boring summary of what Hadoop is and how it works.
Released: 2017-07-31. Duration: 00:05:15. Flag: Clean. Series:Interviews. Tags:Interviews, Making.
A short series of interviews done at the Liverpool Makefest 2017
Released: 2017-07-27. Duration: 00:14:29. Flag: Explicit. Series:Programming 101. Tags:Python, Programming, Hardware.
Improved version of script to capture the number of HPR shows in the queue using python.
Released: 2017-07-24. Duration: 00:06:18. Flag: Clean. Series:Interviews. Tags:Interviews, Making.
A short series of interviews done at the Liverpool Makefest 2017
Released: 2017-07-21. Duration: 00:21:32. Flag: Clean. Tags:Python, Programming, Hardware.
I explain how I capture the number of HPR shows in the queue using python
Released: 2017-07-20. Duration: 00:20:55. Flag: Explicit. Series:Podcast recommendations. Tags:podcast,feed,recommendation.
Updates to my list of podcast feeds
Released: 2017-07-19. Duration: 00:03:08. Flag: Explicit. Tags:binaural,quvmoh,audio.
Binaural 3d audio recording, please listen at normal speed with good head phones.
Released: 2017-07-17. Duration: 00:06:13. Flag: Clean. Series:Interviews. Tags:Interviews, Making.
A short series of interviews done at the Liverpool Makefest 2017
