HPR

Posted at 2026-06-02 17:24:01 relating to the show hpr4649 which was released on 2026-05-28 by Lee entitled What did I do at work today? Part 3 Section 2

I think PHP is ok for what it does, but I really don't like the language that much. I've been considering moving my site to Ruby or Go for a while now...

Posted at 2026-06-02 16:44:45 relating to the show hpr4633 which was released on 2026-05-06 by Lee entitled Ham Radio Licence

Thankfully the foundation exam is multiple choice, but it is important to recognise the following terms:-
- Pointy signal-spikey bit
- Long wire dangly-doo
- Metal pokey-poke
- Linear wave catch-a-me-bob
- Bendy frequency rubber-stub
- Wire stretchy-poo
- Scoping prong-a-me-jig

Posted at 2026-06-02 11:22:47 relating to the show hpr4633 which was released on 2026-05-06 by Lee entitled Ham Radio Licence

Very interesting show as always. I love your podcasts (I'm new to HPR (just found it a few weeks ago) and you've been one I know I can always go to for an interesting show).

Is 'uppy downy thing' the technical term in the test for an aerial? ;)

Posted at 2026-06-02 10:52:54 relating to the show hpr4649 which was released on 2026-05-28 by Lee entitled What did I do at work today? Part 3 Section 2

Great episode, and I agree with your views on how nice PHP is

Posted at 2026-06-02 02:38:55 relating to the show hpr4651 which was released on 2026-06-01 by HPR Volunteers entitled HPR Community News for May 2026

hi! sorry i had to go before recording started i was pretty busy over the weekend/friday volunteering at a convention and i had to go do something. hopefully next community news i can pop in ^^

also things are slowly starting to maybe swing back to going good again so i MAY go record a show again soon

Posted at 2026-06-01 21:13:58 relating to the show hpr4650 which was released on 2026-05-29 by Ahuka entitled Playing Civilization V, Part 12

Itihnk the main reason is that the algorithm at the heart of the game reduces Happiness both as your population goes up and as the number of cities goes up. Now I can tell a story about how large, sprawling empires tend to not pay attention to the desires of average citizens, and that might be plausible, but my recollection is that Rome did reasonably well for a few centuries nonetheless.

Posted at 2026-05-29 14:21:14 relating to the show hpr4650 which was released on 2026-05-29 by Ahuka entitled Playing Civilization V, Part 12

If I could ask: why pupeting other States (City-states) reduces internal happiness? Could it be explained by the perception of wasting internal resources for power, without benefits to the population?
If I could note: marvelous exclusive little Building for Austria, the Coffee House!: increases in 25% the generation of Great People! This tells a lot about the reality of coffeee! (or about the perception of the developers.)
Here is a non-player. The size of the episodes, and the cadence, make them a pleasure to learn even without prior knowledge.
It. Thanks, Ahuka!

Posted at 2026-05-27 13:20:13 relating to the show hpr4647 which was released on 2026-05-26 by Vance entitled UNIX Curio #7 - Compression

It's always annoying when a good technology is locked behind a patent, but at least this time it backfired.

I'll miss this series, its one of my favorites

Posted at 2026-05-27 03:33:12 relating to the show hpr4567 which was released on 2026-02-03 by Deltaray entitled Movie Recommendations for Hackers

From this show, and because of this show, I came to watch (1) Gattaca, (2) Surrogates, and (3) Matrix.
The first, oh - wow, what an epic. s2 :)
The 2nd, loved a lot too. A bit "melo" dramatic in the message it aims to inspire, but very well done.
The 3rd, at first I lost interest in the beginning and stopped, seemed that the movie aged bad, but tried again days later and loved to know Matrix. Very worth it, thanks for the recommendation. (The 1st only, the 2nd I didn't like from the beginning so no.)
Ah, also (4) The lives of others. Applauses to it.
In a few weeks, I came to watch more movies than I had for many months, and it was very enjoyable. I may come here futurely, when wanting to see something, to check another recommendation. Thanks!

Posted at 2026-05-27 00:29:32 relating to the show hpr4647 which was released on 2026-05-26 by Vance entitled UNIX Curio #7 - Compression

This has been a great series, and I hope you do find more topics to cover. If I can think of any, I'll add another comment here.

Posted at 2026-05-27 00:24:58 relating to the show hpr4646 which was released on 2026-05-25 by Elsbeth entitled Mobile Gaming

I used to play a lot of mobile games back in the day but nowadays I really can't stand most of them due to the predatory nature of them and every single one using the same freaking artstyle that feels like a 3d version of corporate artstyles

Technically, I do actively play the desktop ports of 2 mobile games being Progressbar95 (a really simple old-computer themed game about filling a progress bar, im going for 100%) and Balatro (because im actively developing a mod), but besides those I haven't played one in years...

As for the ADHD stuff, I usually have my laptop or a mp3 player with me to help with that, but also i sometimes play 2048 or solitare on my laptop as well

Posted at 2026-05-21 05:28:05 relating to the show hpr4627 which was released on 2026-04-28 by Vance entitled UNIX Curio #5 - Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!

It's great not just to learn new commands, but to hear someone explain some of the history and fundamentals behind UNIX.

Posted at 2026-05-19 15:00:39 relating to the show hpr4502 which was released on 2025-11-04 by Trey entitled Cheap Yellow Display Project Part 3: Reverse beacon network

Hi Trey,

I heard this episode on Morse code, and thought this link would be useful.

https://www.whiskeytangohotel.com/2025/09/graphing-average-speed-wpm-of-morse.html

Cheers,
Archer72

Posted at 2026-05-17 19:14:19 relating to the show hpr4640 which was released on 2026-05-15 by Ahuka entitled Robert A. Heinlein

As you can tell I am a big fan so it was pleasure to start writing about him. But I am a fan of many of the older science fiction writers, and I have more to come on Heinlein as well as some other writers.

Posted at 2026-05-17 18:35:11 relating to the show hpr4637 which was released on 2026-05-12 by Vance entitled UNIX Curio #6 - at and batch

I happen to have a number of VMs set up that I use for testing, so I was able to do a quick check to see which distros have "at" and "batch" installed by default.

It turns out that Debian, Ubuntu, Raspberry Pi, Suse, and Alpine do not have it by default. Alma (a Red Hat clone), FreeBSD, and OpenBSD do.

While they can be installed later, it may be that they are not more commonly used now because you cannot rely on them being there as a standard feature.

I was struck by the thought that "batch" may be useful for things like testing software by being able to kick off a long series of tests that are run in the background while you get on with doing other things without these background tests affecting whatever else you are doing too much. Audio and video processing may possibly be the same.

Perhaps some other listeners could think up some creative ways of using "at" and "batch" and tell us about it in an episode in future. This sounds like it could lead to some interesting ideas.

Posted at 2026-05-17 18:08:18 relating to the show hpr4628 which was released on 2026-04-29 by Whiskeyjack entitled Nuclear Power Technology Follow Up

Thank you for your comment. Questions like the one that you asked are very helpful because they cause me to look into and think about things that I might otherwise have overlooked.

When doing the research to answer your question about MAGNOX reactor patents I was struck by some of the parallels between Open Source / Free Software and the early history of nuclear energy.

While this may seem like a stretch, in both fields we see how things like patents are more likely to hold technology back than they are to advance it, and how personal connections between people can matter more than the technology itself.

I have just finished the script for another follow up episode in this series and hope that people find this one interesting as well.

Posted at 2026-05-17 03:03:47 relating to the show hpr4637 which was released on 2026-05-12 by Vance entitled UNIX Curio #6 - at and batch

Nice to hear that others find "at" to be helpful! Perhaps some of these curios are not as obscure as I thought.

To delay running something on a personal system, I would probably be more likely to use "sleep [time] ; [command]" as a quick-and-dirty method. This would also put the output in the same terminal session. But I can see how "at" could be more elegant.

For rebooting, a lot of systems have the "shutdown" command (in looking around, it's far more common than I expected). This takes a time argument for when to execute the shutdown. So you could also use "shutdown -r 00:00" as a way to reboot your system at midnight (some implementations might differ on how the time is expressed). As with Perl, in the UNIX world often there's more than one way to do it!

Posted at 2026-05-17 00:24:23 relating to the show hpr4628 which was released on 2026-04-29 by Whiskeyjack entitled Nuclear Power Technology Follow Up

Liked too much. There are more nuances than I could expect. Thanks for answering my question!

Posted at 2026-05-17 00:22:01 relating to the show hpr4640 which was released on 2026-05-15 by Ahuka entitled Robert A. Heinlein

Great tips for writing. He chose well, ones without subjectivity, no further questions needed to answer with those pah-pum (direct) lines.

Nice to know Heinlein from your show. o/

Posted at 2026-05-16 19:41:04 relating to the show hpr4637 which was released on 2026-05-12 by Vance entitled UNIX Curio #6 - at and batch

I use at to schedule reboots for systems that have kernel updates installed, but I dont want to reboot right now.

Something like:
@midnight ENTER
reboot ENTER
CRTL-d

Posted at 2026-05-15 15:22:16 relating to the show hpr4618 which was released on 2026-04-15 by Whiskeyjack entitled Simple Podcasting - Episode 2 - Basic Filtering

I am glad you found this episode interesting, including the part about generating sine waves using FFMPEG.

I cover this topic again in hpr4658 Audio Revisited, which comes out on Wed 2026-06-10 and in which one of the topics I discuss is characterizing hardware such as speakers and microphones in order to understand their limits. It also helps to understand the limits of your own ears as well.

In that episode I also cover generating a "chirp" signal, which is a tone which sweeps across the audio frequency range from low to high, which is also useful in understanding hardware.

I can recall many years ago salesmen in stereo shops using special CDs which had these signals on them which they would use to demonstrate the capabilities of the high end speakers they were selling. If you have ever wanted to have such a thing for yourself, you can generate it using FFMPEG or Sox.

Posted at 2026-05-14 19:59:46 relating to the show hpr4618 which was released on 2026-04-15 by Whiskeyjack entitled Simple Podcasting - Episode 2 - Basic Filtering

Very interesting show. One thing in particular I find useful for testing speakers is the command to genererate a sine wave at various frequencies. I've tried the ffmpeg command version.

Posted at 2026-05-13 03:43:37 relating to the show hpr4637 which was released on 2026-05-12 by Vance entitled UNIX Curio #6 - at and batch

IMO, at and batch still have plenty of uses in things like scripts. It does provide a POSIX way to schedule a task in the future, which could be useful for scripts that want to offset certain effects without having to run its own daemon. Something like batch could also be used with cron as a sort of "run at some point after this time" trick, so if you happen to be doing something intensive at that time then it can put it off until its more optimal.

Also, at can just be used to plain run some process a few hours from now, its pretty useful for like starting an intensive process overnight without having to remember to start it before going to bed

Posted at 2026-05-12 19:36:04 relating to the show hpr4424 which was released on 2025-07-17 by Archer72 entitled How I use Newsboat for Podcasts and Reddit

I found HPR through this old program called gPodder, its reccomended podcasts list has it in there and it seemed like a cool thing to tune into

Posted at 2026-05-12 17:18:20 relating to the show hpr4631 which was released on 2026-05-04 by HPR Volunteers entitled HPR Community News for April 2026

Thanks Dave for encouraging me to record an episode, I hope to able to do so soon. Currently I have very limited access to electronic devices (30 mins every 3 days), except for an MP3 player

Posted at 2026-05-12 17:16:07 relating to the show hpr4424 which was released on 2025-07-17 by Archer72 entitled How I use Newsboat for Podcasts and Reddit

I found about HPR from another podcast, I think it was called Linux UK LUG cast or something. It ended anyway

Posted at 2026-05-12 01:03:12 relating to the show hpr4607 which was released on 2026-03-31 by Vance entitled UNIX Curio #3 - basename and dirname

In a recent conversation, a friend pointed out that historical BSD versions were not necessarily developed or released in numerical order. Instead, 2.xBSD versions were created to run on the PDP-11 while 3BSD and 4.xBSD ran on the VAX (until support was added to 4.x for other processors); both evolved alongside each other.

In the audio for this episode, I implied that the 'basename' utility first appeared in BSD in version 2.9 (1983), while it actually was in 3BSD from 1979, shortly after Bell Laboratories' Seventh Edition UNIX came out. Similarly, I incorrectly said that the first BSD 'dirname' appeared in was 4.4 (1993), when it was in the Net/2 release from 1991. Sorry about that!

Probably others like me have fallen into the trap of assuming a larger version number always came later, but I should have paid closer attention to dates. (Discussion of the history does not appear in the show notes above, just the audio.)

P.S. Glad you are liking these, xmanmonk! More are on the way.

Posted at 2026-05-08 22:02:23 relating to the show hpr4587 which was released on 2026-03-03 by Vance entitled UNIX Curio #1 - Shell Archives

Glad you enjoyed it, Dave! I did work at one place that had a color thermal transfer printer and got to use it a couple times.

They also had a film recorder, though I never used it myself. This would put a computer-generated color image onto photographic film. After being developed by a photo lab, the resulting film slides could then be shown using an ordinary slide projector. Very fancy stuff, until digital projectors became available.

Posted at 2026-05-07 18:18:05 relating to the show hpr4587 which was released on 2026-03-03 by Vance entitled UNIX Curio #1 - Shell Archives

I'm way behind with listening to HPR episodes, so sorry for the late comment!

In the early 1990s the university I worked for (in Edinburgh) installed DECAthena, a commercial version of the MIT Athena Project. As a consequence I ended up with a DEC MIPS workstation on my desk running Ultrix.

We had a USENET feed by then and we would download stuff like pictures from various newsgroups, using a tool that I assume was shar. Files arrived as a series of posts with encoded contents, which we would reassemble in a newsreader and decode.

I had forgotten about this! Thanks for the reminder :-)

Printing coloured images was challenging in those days (for us anyway), and I recall we had a Thermal Wax printer to do it!

Dave

Posted at 2026-05-06 20:35:49 relating to the show hpr4634 which was released on 2026-05-07 by operat0r entitled Upgrade Failsause

Hi YourName,

We already received a report that there were problems with the audio, and as such we replaced the episode with another from operat0r from the back up queue.

As you are listening to this before it is released I assume it's coming from the Future Feed. You will need to refresh your cache on the podcatcher you are using for to get that episode. Thankfully this is only on the future feed, and the listeners to the main feed will get the updated episode without issue.

Ken