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Welcome to HPR, the Community Podcast
We started producing shows as Today with a Techie on 2005-09-19, 18 years, 8 months, 11 days ago. Our shows are produced by listeners like you and can be on any topics that "are of interest to hackers". If you listen to HPR then please consider contributing one show a year. If you record your show now it could be released in 6 days.
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The reason I found HPR can be traced back to the 1990's when I first
heard about Linux and I got interested in Linux. But it was not until
ten years ago that I actually started to try Linux for real. A friend
was enthusiastic about Linux. Although he did not have a computer
himself, he made CD copies of multiple Linux distributions and gave to
me. And it happened more than once.
At this time I was on macOS on a macMini. But I also had a cheap
laptop with Windows 10 for a few programs. That laptop was too cheap
with too little memory and soon, despite it was not old, it could not
manage to keep Windows updated, it had too little memory even without
additional software: 32 GB hard drive and 2 GB RAM. So, this was the
driver to install Linux for real. I installed Linux Mint. And the laptop
was now usable again, with an updated operating system.
My interest in Linux Mint led me to start listen to the pod Mintcast
some years ago.
One of the hosts of Mintcast was also an HPR correspondent, and in
his presentation of himself at every pod episode he told he gave shows
at HPR and shared his ID number.
Every Mintcast pod episode also had acknowledgements where Mintcast
thanked HPR for letting them use the HPR Mumble server.
At the end of each year, Mintcast also sends the jingle for the HPR
New year show where everyone is welcome to live chat or just listen.
I know I have tuned in and listened to the New year show. Eventually
I also listened to one or another show in earlier years.
When Mintcast this year, 2024, has talked about Hacker Public Radio
they have mentioned it was low on episodes and encouraged Mintcast
listeners to contribute.
It was after this I finally started to become a regular listener to
Hacker Public Radio and at the same time recorded my first show.
I like HPR for its community based host approach.
I like that shows mostly have the Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
I like the concept of knowledge and experience sharing.
I like that the content is what matters most, the equipment and
presentation skills are of less importance.
I like the monthly community shows with feedback and review of shows and
comments.
I like the occasional comments to my shows and my possibility to comment
other shows on the website.
That is how my journey with Hacker Public Radio started.
My name is Moss Bliss. I'm a podcaster. This is technically my 2nd
HPR podcast, but as the first one was unintentional AND back in 2019, I
can start fresh.
I don't know much of anything. I'm a Linux user, about the same way
most people are Windows users. I have gotten more technical over the
past few years largely due to being a regular on various Linux podcasts.
I don't have sufficient education to be hired in computers (although
I've tried several times), and I did spend a few years in radio back in
my youth.
So what do you have to know to become a podcaster? Almost nothing.
Just so long as you have a computer, an Internet connection, and a
microphone. (For some shows, you may need a webcam.)
I got into podcasting by asking questions. I tried for almost 2 years
to get Chris Fisher at Jupiter Broadcasting to co-feature me, with zero
experience, on a podcast about using Linux desktops. It never happened.
So when in 2018 Rob Hawkins asked for new hosts to take over mintCast, I
was one of the first 10 or so people to apply, and one of 6 who
eventually stuck with it. All I had was a computer, an Internet
connection, and a Blue Yeti microphone my little sister gave me. Within
a few months, I started another podcast, Distrohoppers' Digest with Tony
Hughes. And a couple years later, I was asked to take over Full Circle
Weekly News. Apparently some people like my voice. Since starting my
little mini-career in podcasting, I have probably more than doubled what
I know about Linux. I'm not all that scared of the Terminal
anymore...
Some microphones are pretty bad, and my Blue Yeti was the worst one
on the show when I joined mintCast. In about a year, I found a very
inexpensive CAD Audio U29 USB mic, currently $20 at Amazon, and that
worked pretty well. Some time after taking on Full Circle Weekly News,
the magazine bought me a Samson Q2U ($60), which I'm still using. I love
this mic, as it can be used either as a USB mic or plugged into a sound
box for even better audio.
When I started, I had a T430 laptop and the Blue Yeti microphone. My
listeners and co-hosts have made my life better with new and used
equipment I could never have afforded on my own, including laptops,
Raspberry Pis, modems, routers, headphones, and even a sound box. My
current setup includes a 2016 Lenovo ThinkCentre M600 Tiny, which cost
me under $200 on eBay, a Focusrite Solo sound box (a gift from a
friend), a WavLink ST336A external goodies box (also a gift), and an old
Dynex 26" TV I use as a monitor I paid $15 for locally. I have a boom
arm for my microphone, which is made by Neewer and costs $15 on Amazon.
My keyboard is a Fellowes Microban Natural, which I need as a trained
touch typist. And I put all this stuff on a little rolling computer
desk, which I bought used locally for $25.
The only software I use is Audacity, and I didn't need to know any
more than the basics. If you're part of a team, such as mintCast, you
aren't even required to do any audio editing, although if you know your
way around Audacity you will find your skills very welcome.
If you want to start podcasting, have the equipment, contact Ken
(Note: I misspoke in the audio and said Ronnie where I
meant Ken) and do something here at HPR, which is a fairly low
entry bar, or you might contact long-running shows such as mintCast.
Participation and commitment are usually all that is required.
OK, so maybe you want to do more than produce an HPR show or join
mintCast. You have your own idea and you want to get it out there, your
own personal podcast. This is where it gets a little more detailed. If
you already have the information you need, you can stop the podcast
here, but...
First, you'll need a website or blog (if you're really broke, there
are free WordPress sites available at wordpress.com, or you could use
the dreaded Google blogs (blogger and blogspot). Other than that, you'd
have to register a domain name, find a webhost, and write a website,
some of which can be cheap (or not!). Then you have to find a way to
stream your podcast. Google has closed Feedburner, but there are some
paid places like Red Circle you can get for not much bread. Those will
probably help you stream your podcast to places like Apple Music,
Archive.org, Spotify, etc. But if you want help from me, I'm already
lost. mintCast is handled by Bill H., Distrohoppers' Digest is handled
by Dale M., and my Full Circle Weekly News is uploaded to Ronnie for
publication.
Or maybe you want to do it with a few friends, and they can't cram
themselves into your bedroom to do that. In that case, you should
explore using Discord, Jitsi, VDO.ninja, or (sizzle preserve us!) Zoom.
Everyone will need to record their own part of the stream, and you'll
need someone who knows Audacity well enough to edit a few (or several)
streams together. Maybe you want to post it on YouTube. If you want both
a video and audio podcast, someone will have to learn OBS and
Audacity, and if you want the video podcast to be edited, have fun
learning one of the many video editors out there (you might start with
KDEnlive).
For more information on streaming, you'll need to get someone else to
make an HPR podcast on the subject. Way over my head.
I hope this little show has pushed a few of you into wanting to try
your hand. It doesn't take much, or it takes a whole lot, depending on
what you want to do, and your future listeners will thank you. My
listeners have certainly shown me lots of thanks.
Today we will be installing Home Assistant Operating System (HAOS),
on a x86-64 machine.
Home Assistant can be repurposed and installed on various hardware,
such as an Odroid or a generic x86-64 machine. The Home Assistant
Operating System allows you to install Home Assistant on these devices
even if you have little to no Linux experience.
We are going to my HP t610 Flexible Thin Client, which has a 16GB
SATA Flash Drive, and I upgraded it to 16G of Ram.
Note that this will install Home Assistant Operating
System (HAOS) as a computer appliance. That means that it will run a
bare OS with the various components in a customised docker setup. It
will take over the entire computer, and requires secure boot to be
disabled.
On the HP t610 Flexible Thin Client, that involves pressing "Esc" at
boot to get to the bootup menu. If that doesn't work try pressing "F10"
just after turning on the power.
Two methods to install
HAOS has no integrated installer like you would expect with
distro
hopping, but it requires that the image be burned directly onto the
disk of the computer itself.
It has two methods to do this and "Method 2: Installing HAOS directly
from a boot medium", is basically take the disk out of the target system
and attach it to your own computer. The use a burning tool like Balena
Etcher, or dd to write the image to disk. Much as you would
burn a sdcard for a raspberry pi. I don't have a way to do this so let's
go with method 1.
Method
1: Installing HAOS via Ubuntu booting from a USB flash drive
Here you download and burn live operating system as you would if you
were
distro
hopping, the document suggests to use Ubuntu. I tried it but my HP
t610 Flexible Thin Client didn't like it. It also didn't like Fedora
despite having worked earlier, so I just used
Debian
LXQT.
Now you have Debian running off a usb stick on your target
machine.
Steps
to burn Home Assistant Operating System (HAOS) to disk on target
Anything after the '#' character is a comment and doesn't need to be
typed.
Note The following steps are optional, and you
should only do them if you wish to ssh to the target machine from your
pc.
# Anything after the '#' charachter is a comment and doesn't need to be typed.
apt install openssh-server # Install the ssh server on the target
systemctl start ssh # Start it once installed
passwd user # Change the password or you can just use the default which is `live`
ip add # Get the IP address of the target
ssh user@ip.of.the.computer # Replace ip.of.the.computer with the actual ip address in the step above
Open a terminal on the machine, and type the su -
commands to get root access on the Debian OS running from the usb drive
on the target machine.
user@debian:~$ su -
Password:
root@debian:~#
Now you are root, the super user admin, you can install the
wget command using the Debian apt package
manager.
root@debian:~# apt install wget
Once wget is installed, we can use it to download the latest image
from the
HAOS
Download Page, which is haos_generic-x86-64-12.1.img.xz
at time of writing.
Now we have the image we are going to write to the disk, but the
question is which disk to write it to.
Your target PC will be different to mine but the tool
lsblk is good for showing what is installed and
mounted.
root@debian:~# lsblk
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
loop0 7:0 0 2.5G 1 loop /usr/lib/live/mount/rootfs/filesystem.squashfs
/run/live/rootfs/filesystem.squashfs
sda 8:0 0 14.9G 0 disk
├─sda1 8:1 0 1M 0 part
├─sda2 8:2 0 1G 0 part
└─sda3 8:3 0 13.9G 0 part
sdb 8:16 1 58.6G 0 disk
├─sdb1 8:17 1 3G 0 part /usr/lib/live/mount/medium
│ /run/live/medium
└─sdb2 8:18 1 5M 0 part
The loop0 is the mount where Debian is running from,
while the mounted sdb1 and sdb2 have the word
live telling us that's the actual USB drive we installed Debian
on to.
While your disk will be different, for me the disk to install it on
is sda. The partitions sda1,
sda2, and sda3 are left overs from a previous
install. They will be overwritten anyway.
The drive I will be targeting is therefore known to the system as
/dev/sda
The dd command will do a disk duplication and writes the
ones and zeros from the if input file, to the
of output file.
The command below will take a while and not display anything
root@debian:~# dd if=haos_generic-x86-64-12.1.img.xz of=/dev/sda
761949+1 records in
761949+1 records out
390118272 bytes (390 MB, 372 MiB) copied, 66.3225 s, 5.9 MB/s
Plug in an Ethernet cable that is connected to the network. Power the
system on. If you have a screen connected to the Generic x86-64 system,
after a minute or so the Home Assistant welcome banner will appear in
the console. In the browser of your desktop system, within a few minutes
you will be able to reach your new Home Assistant at
homeassistant.local:8123.
Passkeys are still a fledgling technology, as of this writing, and we
are trying to keep pace with the rapid adoption across various websites,
in addition to specification refinements. The following is a short list
of critical improvements to our passkeys support:
Update an existing passkey or add one to an existing entry
Support more specification standards
Various UI improvements to dialogs and context menus
**Show a warning prior to exporting a passkey**
In addition to bug fixes, we always strive to deliver something
useful in each of our updates. For 2.7.8, we have brought forward
several awesome features including:
A database setting to allow a delay prior to auto-save
Improvements to Bitwarden and 1Password importers
Improvements to monospace font display
Improve display of dialog buttons on Linux
**SSH Agent: don’t auto-load keys that are in the recycle bin**
Add hotkey for showing search help.
Add hotkey for group switching (Ctrl+Shift+PgUp/PgDown).
Add per-database auto-save delay setting.
Add configurable password strength check on database password.
Add setting to hide menubar.
Improve Bitwarden 1PUX import and support organization collections.
Show advanced settings checkbox only for settings that have them.
Remove obsolete setting for requiring repeated password entry.
Passkeys: Allow registering Passkeys to existing entries.
Passkeys: Show warning about data being unencrypted before Passkey export.
Passkeys: Support NFC and USB transports.
Passkeys: Pass extension JSON data to browser.
SSH Agent: Do not use entries from recycle bin.
Linux: Change hotkey sequence used for {CLEARFIELD} Auto-Type.
Windows: Improve DACL memory access protection.
Fixes.
Fix crash when deleting history items.
Fix crash on screen lock or computer sleep.
Fix search field not being focused after unlock.
Fix loss of window focus when Auto-Type needs to unlock a database.
Fix inconsistent TOTP visibility on unlock.
Fix CSV import skipping over single-name groups.
Fix key file folder being remembered even if disabled in settings.
Fix issues with entry editing and database locking.
Fix key file text when provided on command line.
Fix issues with hardware key auto detection.
Do not override monospace font size.
Perform group sort only when group view is in focus.
Do not show decimals for attachment sizes in Bytes.
Prevent merging of global custom data when merging databases.
Fix minor translation issues.
Passkeys: Fix StrongBox incompatibility.
Passkeys: Set RP ID to effective domain if unset instead of returning an error.
Passkeys: Various UI fixes and improvements.
AppImage: Fix URL opening.
Flatpak: Fix application autostart.
Linux/macOS: Fix button sizes on modal alert popups.
Linux: Fix clipboard clear on Wayland.
Windows: Preserve file-hidden attribute.
The Apple menu, which is always the first item on the leading side of
the menu bar, includes system-defined menu items that are always
available. You can’t modify or remove the Apple menu. When present in
the menu bar, the following menus appear after the Apple menu in the
order listed below.
AppName (you supply a short version of your app’s name for this menu’s title)
File
Edit
Format
View
App-specific menus, if any
Window
Help
Ken Talks to Marc Balmer and Kristoff Bonne about spectrum24, The
Conference for Creative Use of the Radio Spectrum in Open Systems.
Following the success of the Software-Defined Radio and Amateur Radio
devroom at FOSDEM, spectrum24 plans to bring users of the radio spectrum
together.
For over a century, technology has made it possible to transfer more
data, faster, further. Today, wireless technology is everywhere and
commonplace. However, it remains a playground and a ground for
innovation for many communities.
This conference is an opportunity to publicize your projects and
allow the different communities that use the spectrum to meet over a
weekend.
spectrum24 will take place September 14./15. at SmartCity Campus (1
rue de Clairefontaine, 78120 Rambouillet.) at an old radio factory in
Rambouillet near Paris, a short 15 minute walk from the train
station.
All right. Well, good evening, hackers. My name is Clinton. And this
is a very off the cuff episode for me just to announce that I've got a
new microphone. So I just wanted to run through a couple of details of
that. Make a show, say a little about the microphone while I got it.
What I hope to do with it. So this is a roadie wireless go to setup. It
comes with three little boxes. Roughly, roughly, you can fit each one of
the little boxes inside a matchbox. So there are three of these that
come with the set that I bought. Two of them are microphones that you
clip onto your lapel. The third is a transceiver. So at the moment, I've
got the transceiver on and I've got one of the microphones on. I bought
this because I'm going to be going to a conference soon. And one of the
things that I do try to do at conferences is to interviews with people.
And this is kind of nice in that I can switch these two microphones on.
Give one to myself. Give one to the person I'm interviewing. And I don't
have to use a single microphone and shove it underneath their faces. And
I don't have to swap the microphone between the two of us. The other
feature, like the particular reason I've got this model is that each of
the two microphone units actually has built in RAM. So it will actually
record, like if you've got it set up in the mode, which I do, you can
get each microphone to do a backup recording of your presentation. The
regular mode for this set of microphones is to actually treat the
transceiver as a source and plug it into computer or plug it into your
camera as a external microphone. But it has this lovely mode, which I'm
recording this particular episode to. We can just turn it on. It's not
the transceiver is not plugged into a computer. It's not plugged into
anything. And it'll record something like 40 hours of voice. And later
on, I can hook it up to my computer as a standard mass storage device
and just download the waveform I believe. So it does have some Windows
firmware or Mac firmware. I didn't have too much fun getting that to
work under Linux. I tried under a couple of different VM products and
wasn't having any luck. So try it under wine. I tried under open box.
Eventually I did end up installing like a full Windows 10 install onto a
qemu image. And that had enough stuff working such that I could install
the Rode firmware on it. That let me do an upgrade of the firmware on
the two microphones and the transceiver because the first thing you do
when you buy something these days is out of the box you have to upgrade
the firmware because why would they do that at the factory before they
send it out when they can just make the users do that. And there is a
phone app but it does not let you update the firmware on these
particular hardware models. If I remember the error message correctly it
does look like the Android app lets you update the firmware on other
Rode microphone devices but not this particular model. So I had to go
down the track of setting up a qemu. I did find a good blog post on how
to set up a Windows box on qemu. It had a few things that seem outdated
so maybe it's a job for future me to write an updated blog post on how
to do this. If for nothing else instructions on how to do this in future
when I need to rerun the firmware update. The other thing that I really
needed to use the software for though is to switch on the recording
option. So out of the box these things do not record to the memory
that's built into the microphones. So I had to get, I had to update the
firmware and then I had to run the software on both of the microphones
to switch on the recording option. But now that that switched on I can
just hook it up as a USB master device as I've mentioned before and
presumably I can just copy the files and delete the files and I won't
actually have to run that software. So yeah there's a number of options
going forward so I can write that blog post with the updated details.
There were a number of hoops that I found that I did not have to go
through of the blog post I found so things are getting easier over time.
Depending on how in depth I want to go I could potentially one day sit
down and install like a USB listening device and see if I can work out
how to work out if there are any magic packets getting sent to do the
configuration on the device. Do I need to break any crypto stuff or is
it just a straight command like plug in the device and send a command
with a few funky options. So maybe in the very distant future when I've
got no other things on I could try and work out a pure USB non windows
solution for setting some of these configuration options. I'm not sure
I'd go down the track of updating the family I think that's probably a
little bit too risky but you know maybe one day in the future. But yeah
basically this set of microphones assuming that it works out okay
assuming that it sounds good. I'll hopefully be using these for
conferences coming up. Hopefully as well I'll be able to use it for
camping and stuff like that so if I'm out and about I'll just be able to
pull out these two things transceiver, microphone, a couple of clicks
turn them on they talk to each other wirelessly and then start recording
something. So it's much smaller than the current microphone that I'm
using so it's much easier to travel with. There are two of them so that
when I'm interviewing someone it's much easier and it's got recording
memory so I don't actually have to plug them into a computer so all up
it should be much easier to use. I think it might even give better
recording outputs and hopefully like increase the number of talks and
presentations that I give on HBO. So that's been Clinton this has been a
very off the cuff recording I very much am used to sitting down and
writing out a full script for these things so I'm doing this because
it's cool new hardware but also because HPR needs more episodes. So yeah
maybe other people can do an episode on what particular funky wireless
or what particular microphones that they've got that they enjoy using
and what the advantages are and disadvantages are. That's it for now.
Ciao.
We finish our South Carolina visit touring a plantation, and then go
to see a magnificent live oak tree. After that, it is time for us to
head back home.