HPR4604: Quick Tips for January 20 26

This show has been flagged as Clean by the host. In our next look at the game mechanics for Civilization V we three key ideas: Great People, Trade, and Empires/Civilizations. Playing Civilization V, Part 10 - Great People Gaining Great People You earn Great People by accumulating Great Person Points (GPP). Each type of Great Person has its own type of GPP, and they are earned independently, so you can easily accumulate points for several different types of Great People at the same time. You can earn these points through specialists, through Wonders, and through Social Policies. While you can accumulate points towards any and all Great People, you should focus on ones that fit your game strategy. If you are going for a Domination victory, you should focus on Great Generals and Great Admirals in preference to Great Artists and Great Musicians. But if you are going for a Culture victory you might want to reverse that. That is not to say you won’t gain a few random other Great People along the way, just that you should know what you are trying to achieve. And Great Generals and Great Admirals are a little different in that you earn them by winning battles. Types of Great People Great Artist – Can start Golden Age, or create Great works Great Musician – Can do Concert Tour (+Tourism), or create Great Works Great Writer- Can write a Political Treatise (+Culture), or create Great Works Great Engineer – Can hurry production (including Wonders). Can create Manufactory Great General – combat bonus to units within 2 tiles, or steal land when creating a Citadel Khan – Unique to Mongolia, replaces Great General, moves faster and heals adjacent units, and can create Citadel Great Merchant – Trade Mission (+Gold and +Influence with a city state). Create Customs House Merchant of Venice – Unique to Venice, replaces Great Merchant. +100% Gold and +100% Influence from Trade Mission, or can puppet a City-State. Can create Customs House Great Scientist – Can Hurry Research, or create Academy Great Admiral – Combat bonus to naval units within 2 tiles. Can repair adjacent naval and embarked units Great Prophet – Can Found or enhance Religion, can spread Religion, or can create Holy Site Every type except Great Admiral can create something, but that uses up the Great Person. And the main action for each also uses up the Great Person (e.g. do a Concert Tour, Hurry Production, etc.). So you need to consider which one works best for you. As a general rule, compare which option pays off the best. For example, if it is early in the game and you get a Great Scientist, creating an Academy will give you science points per turn that will pay off over the whole game. But once you hit the mid-to-late stages the one time hit of science points from Hurry Research makes more sense because you don’t have the time left for the per-turn bonus from an Academy to add up. And if there is a key Wonder you need to make your strategy works, keeping a Great Engineer on hand to hurry it up can pay off very nicely. This is the only way to Hurry Production on a Wonder. Trade In Civilization V, the amount of Gold you earn from terrain is much lower, so the path to a full treasury requires that you set up Trade Routes. You have limited number of Trade Slots available, but that limit grows over time. You can earn slots two ways. The first is through discovering techs: Ancient Era: Animal Husbandry, Sailing Classical Era: Engineering Medieval Era: Compass Renaissance Era: Banking Industrial Era: Biology Modern Era: Railroad Atomic Era: Penicillin So just from keeping up your research you can get up to 8 Trade Routes. In addition, the Wonders Colossus and Petra each provide an additional Trade Route. You can establish trade route with your own cities, with City-States, and with other Empires. Trade routes are always city-to-city, and are limited by distance, so it can make sense sometimes to move your trade unit to a different city. The city that produced the unit will always be where it shows up first, but you can make a move on its first turn to transfer the unit to another city, though note that Cargo Ships can only be placed in coastal cities. This can bring a desired destination city within range. Note that for land units (Caravans) you can increase the range by building roads. Effects of Trade Trade is generally pursued for the gold, but there can also be Science, Culture, and Religious effects, so it is worth paying attention here. Even if Gold is the main object, you may have several options that provide equivalent amounts of Gold, and a potential gain of Science or Culture might be the tie-breaker, depending on your strategy for victory. If you establish a trade route with a City-State, you can receive Gold, provide religious pressure to convert them to your religion, and gain influence with them, This can be very helpful if you are going for a Diplomatic Victory, But I would not accept a large difference in Gold just for that minor Influence gain. You can gain far more influence with Gold in long run. Setting up trade between your own cities can be helpful in giving a boost to a city because you can send Food and Production. In the earlier phases of the game that might be a good idea to get a city up to full development. The city where the route originates does not lose Food or Production, but some added amount shows up in the destination city. However, for Food trade to happen you need to have a Granary in each city, and for Production you need to have a Workshop in each city. Plundering Trade routes can be plundered by Empires you are at war with, or more often, by Barbarians. When that happens, the route disappears, and you need to build another trade unit and set up another route. Empires/Civs There are 43 possible Civilizations in Civ 5, so I don’t propose to discuss all of them in depth here, but if you want to dive into this more you can go to the Civ Wiki for a chart that shows them all. Instead, I want to discuss why they are different and how you should make choices depending on the Victory type you are choosing. Of course, if you let the game make the choice for you randomly, knowing what each Civ is good for can help you to determine what type of strategy to pursue for your best chance of a victory. The first thing to know about each Civ is that they have a starting bias for where they will spawn at the beginning of the game. This can be either positive or negative, i.e. you are either more likely to spawn in certain terrain, or less likely to spawn in certain terrain. England, which is a naval power, will be biases to spawn on the Coast. Whereas Egypt, a famously desert country, will have a negative bias to avoid Jungle or Forest locations. Second, all Civs have one or more Unique Abilities. For example, the Carthaginians have two abilities that come from history. The first is Phoenician Heritage, which means that all Coastal cities get a free Harbor. And once they have earned a Great General, their military units can cross Mountain tiles, and they are the only ones that can do this. And the French have the City of Light ability, which grants doubled theming bonuses for Museums and wonders that are in the Capital. Third, each Civ has a Unique Unit. These units replace one of the regular units in the game, but are enhanced in some way. Spain has two of these. The first, the Tercio, replaces the Musketman, but it has a +50% bonus against mounted units and an increased Melee strength, making it a combination of Musketman and Pikeman. The other unit, the Conquistador replaces the Knight, but it has some interesting abilities. It can move after attacking if it still has movement points, embarked units have double defense, it can see two tiles further, and has no penalty when attacking cities. Finally, the Conquistador unit can be use to establish a city, though that uses up the unit. Finally, most (but not all) Civs have Unique Building or Improvement. As with units, these tend to replace ordinary buildings/improvements but offer something better. Arabia, for instance, has the Bazaar, which replaces the Marketplace. But it provides an additional 2 Gold per turn more than the Marketplace, it adds one additional copy of each improved luxury resource near the city, and provides +2 Gold for each Oasis and each source of Oil. What you need to consider is how each of these unique attributes of a Civ will fit in to your strategy. And timing matters. The American Unique Unit of the B-17 Bomber is nice, to be sure, but comes very late in the game. It probably won’t help you conquer the world. But the Roman units of the Ballista and the Legion are excellent for an early campaign of conquest. For a Trade-oriented strategy, Portugal is excellent, as all of its Unique attributes help with generating Trade and Gold. And Gold is the key to many possible paths to victory. So keep these points in mind as you plan your strategy. And to illustrate all of the things we have been discussing in the Civilization V series, I will play a game where I aim for a Diplomatic Victory. Links: https://civilization.fandom.com/wiki/Great_People_(Civ5) https://civilization.fandom.com/wiki/International_trade_route_(Civ5) https://civilization.fandom.com/wiki/Civilizations_(Civ5) https://www.palain.com/gaming/civilization-v/playing-civilization-v-part-10/ Provide feedback on this episode.

This show has been flagged as Clean by the host. This is about how dates are formatted, and I demonstrate that the ISO 8601 Format is the only logical one to use, and will make your life easier if you learn to use it. Something you quickly run into if you correspond with people in both the U.S. and Europe, which I have done over my career as well as in my personal life, is that we don’t write dates the same way. If you think March 14th is Pi day because in the U.S. it is written as 3/14, people in most of Europe will wonder why you think there is a 14th month to the year. And if you want to make a joke about May 4th, as in “May the fourth be with you”, it is 5/4 in the U.S., and 4/5 in most of Europe. And it can be even more complicated once you drag in the rest of the world. There is simply no uniformity. You can see this with this page at Wikipedia . And we are not even consistent in how we talk about dates. In the U.S. we might well say “May 4th”, and that does indeed match how we write dates. But then we will insist that our independence day is the “Fourth of July”, almost like we are not a British colony any longer, but let’s use their date format for one of our most important dates. In my experience, each side thinks the other is a bit odd, but regards it as a harmless eccentricity. But which side is correct in this? The answer, of course, is neither. The one absolutely correct date format has been defined, and you can find it in the ISO 8601 standard. The correct date format is YYYY/MM/DD, because that puts the elements of the date in a logical order. Why is this the logical order? Well, suppose you were filing documents by date. Would you start by putting all of the documents from the 4th day (without regard to month or year) into a group? Or would you first collect all documents for a given year? Now, you might argue that filing documents is something people don’t do as much of these days. We have computers and digital documents, we don’t need any filing cabinets. But that only strengthens my argument, as you can easily verify. For example I am writing this on February 13, 2025. If I use a date code for my digital file, and I make it 02132025, what happens if I later on create file on January 6, 2026? That would then be 01062026. Try this, and you will see that in your file manager 01062026 will appear before 02132025, because all computers treat the significance of digits from left to right. But if you follow the ISO 8601 standard, the most significant part of the date is on the left, and all of your files will be in order. And once you get used to it, your life is easier. An example of this is photos. My wife and I like to travel, and we take a lot of photos using our smart phones. And every photo we take uses date/time stamp as part of the file name, and the dates all follow the ISO 8601 standard. So I can easily sort my photos in the order in which they were taken. And since I have over 13,000 photos in my Flickr Pro account, a little help with sorting them is really nice. I now use this format not just for digital file names, but for most of my dating purposes. It just makes sense. Links https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_date_formats_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601 https://www.zwilnik.com/proper-date-formats/ Provide feedback on this episode.

This show has been flagged as Clean by the host. Simple-Podcasting 01 Introduction This is the first episode in a four part series on a simple way to create your own HPR podcast episode. 02 If it sounds contradictory to have four episodes on a simple subject, you only actually need the first episode to see how to create podcasts. The remaining episodes are on steadily more complex subjects, with the later ones being more in the realm of gratuitous hackery for the fun of it. 03 I am fairly new to podcasting. I have done an HPR episode on Oathtool, another on the UCSD P-System, and an 8 part series on nuclear power. Prior to this I have never done a podcast before. Despite that, a number of people wrote into HPR to say that they really liked what I did. This means that you too can make a first podcast and have other people find it very interesting. 04 Since I am fairly new to this, I thought I would document how I went about it for the benefit of anyone who wants to do the same. This describes things from the perspective of someone who is very new to this sort of thing. Later on I will get into some more advanced topics and then finish off with some blatant gratuitous hackery like how to use Libre Office Calc or GNU Octave in place of an audio editor for some things. 05 Initial Hurdles There were several hurdles to get over before I could record an episode though. The most obvious one to me was that I'm not the sort of person who can simply babble into a microphone. That meant that I needed to have a way of recording things that would let me exclude pauses and repeat sentences that I had messed up. 06 However, since I was new to podcasting, I didn't know how to use an audio editor such as Audacity. After a bit of thinking though I came up with a very simple solution to that which I will get into a bit later in this episode. 07 Picking a Topic With the recording process solved, the next thing to do was to find something to talk about. The key to this is to have some place to keep notes. I use a note taking program for this, called Zim. 08 There are other programs which do something similar, but Zim is the one that I use. Whenever I came up with an idea of a topic, I would add a note for it. Whenever I came across any information relevant to one of the topics, I added it to the note. 09 You might think that you don't know of anything interesting, but the fact is that a lot of the rest of us are fairly sad individuals who are just as boring as you are and so find things like verbal tours through obsolete and obscure operating systems to be quite fascinating. 10 I am sure that you too know something obscure but equally interesting. 11 Writing a Script Once you have a topic, the next thing is to write a script. If you are good at talking off the cuff, then all you may need is an outline. If you are like me however, then you will need to write down exactly what you are going to say in a way which you can read back later. 12 In this case, start with an outline and fill in the detail after the outline is written. Again, I use Zim for writing my scripts. It provides a simple way of organizing my scripts as I am putting them together. It also provides character and word counts so I can estimate how many minutes of material that I have. When I started I decided that I should target about 10 to 20 minutes for the length of an episode. That's a personal decision and not something you need to follow for yourself, but it gives me a guideline to work to. 13 As a rule of thumb I find that if I multiply the character count by 0.0011, that gives me the approximate number of minutes of audio when recorded. Your own number may differ from this, but it's a good starting point to work from. If you think the episode is getting too long, don't worry. You can split it up into multiple episodes. 14 Once you have the script written and have, if necessary, split it into separate episodes, start numbering the paragraphs. This is related to the recording method, which I will go into more detail later. 15 Each paragraph or section should be equivalent to 30 seconds to a minute of audio. If you are just starting out in podcasting, this may be roughly how much you are comfortable with recording without pausing to collect your thoughts or stumbling over what you are saying. We will knit these sections together with a very simple bit of software later. 16 Recording Equipment You will need some sort of recording equipment. While some people may talk about using a phone or an MP3 player with record function, or something like that, I'll stick with recording onto a PC. 17 My recording equipment consists of a Maxwell headset with headphones, boom mic, and USB connection. There is no part number on it and can't identify it further than that. The cost was probably around $20. Similar ones sell for $5 to $35, depending on where you buy it. I already had this, so I didn't have to go out and buy it when I decided to make a podcast. 18 A boom mic, that is a microphone that is on an arm attached to the headset, is good because it keeps the microphone at a consistent distance from your mouth without any effort. 19 The disadvantage of the particular model that I have is that there is noise in the signal, which you can hear in my first two podcast episodes. Despite the noise, people still liked the episodes so don't get too hung up on audio quality. I will talk later about how to fix noise issues like this by filtering. However at this point I am just going to stick to the basics. 20 Recording Software For recording software, I used Gnome Record on Ubuntu. This is licensed under GPLv2 or later. 21 Is very basic The only options are to select the file format, and select stereo or mono The sample rate for flac is fixed at 44.10 kHz, which is what HPR wants. 22 If you are using different software, possibly on another operating system, the principles are the same. There are probably equivalents which you can find if you look for them. Perhaps you or other listeners could make an HPR episode recommending one. 23 When using Gnome Record, use the menu located in the upper right of the window bar, which has three small horizontal lines as an icon. Set the preferred format to FLAC. Set the audio channel to mono. 24 Recording Get comfortable at your desk. Get a cup of tea ready as your throat may get dry. Set up the hardware. 25 If using a boom mic on a headset, adjust the mic so that it is roughly at chin level. Avoid putting a boom microphone directly in front of your mouth. You should speak over the top of the boom microphone, not directly at it. This will prevent you from breathing on the microphone, causing noise problems. 26 If you have a different type of microphone, you may have to experiment a bit using short test recordings to find the optimal position. 27 Using your recording software, make a test recording and listen to it. If it is too quiet and the input volume is already up all the way, we can adjust this later with software. 28 If the test recording sounds OK though, then you are ready to start. 29 Recording using Gnome Sound Recorder I will now describe how to use Gnome Sound Recorder. If you are using different software the details may be different, but the basic principles should be similar. Using the mouse, click on the "Record" button. It will start recording, showing the waveform of the recording as it goes. 30 To stop recording, click on the square "stop" icon that appeared at the bottom. Give the recording a name, using a numbering system starting at 01. To accept the recording, click on the check mark button on the right. To save the recording, click on the down pointing arrow on the right. 31 The file name will default to the name of the recording which we just gave it. The numbers should match the paragraph numbers in your script. The recording will be saved as a flac file in your home directory. there is no option to save it anywhere else and you will need to move it to your preferred destination manually. 32 You can now delete the copy of the recording which Sound Recorder keeps by clicking on the garbage can on the left. This does not affect the copy on your disk. You will want to delete these extra copies as you go along, as there's no easy way to do this later and an extra copy of the recordings will accumulate in a dot directory somewhere and take up space. 33 If you make a mistake or are otherwise dissatisfied with that paragraph, just delete the file and record it again. Keep the pauses at the start and end of each audio segment equivalent to normal pauses between words. This is actually fairly easy to do. When you are done you may have anywhere between 2 and 4 dozen separate flac files. 34 Using the keyboard shortcuts with Gnome Sound Recorder Here are the two most useful keyboard shortcuts for Gnome Sound Recorder. Press Ctrl - R to start recording. Press "S" to stop recording. 35 You still need to use the mouse to click on the check mark button to accept the recording. There are supposedly keyboard shortcuts to save the recording to disk and to delete the recording, but these don't seem to work, at least not in version 43.beta on Ubuntu 24.04 Starting and stopping via keyboard shortcuts is still useful however. 36 You can use other software, and I will talk later in another episode about using command line software such as ffmpeg to record. 37 Tips on Recording If you are new to podcasting or just are not good at making long speeches, keep each recording segment short, a minute or less being a good target. If you stumble over what you are trying to say, don't worry, just repeat the recording for that section. 38 Talk clearly in even, measured tones at a reasonably constant volume. Remember who your audience are. They are people who are listening to your podcast while they are doing housework, or gardening, or driving a car, or walking down a street, or taking some exercise. Very few will be sitting at a desk in a quiet room like you are when you are recording. 39 Try to make sure that what you are saying comes across clearly. If the loudness of your voice varies too much, they won't be able to hear you in the quiet parts. The worst thing to do is to trail off into an imperceptible mumble at the end of each sentence. Listeners will not be able to follow you if you do that and may give up trying to listen to your episode. 40 HPR Audio File Requirements HPR episodes are mono, not stereo. If you send in a stereo file, they will convert to mono. However, you may wish to convert to mono yourself for the purposes of better duplicating the final result when you review your own work. 41 The easiest way to create a mono recording is to record it as mono in the first place, if your recording software has this option. If you are using Gnome Sound Recorder, there is a setting for this. I described how to set Gnome Sound Recorder to mono just a few moments ago. 42 If your software doesn't have a mono option, or if you have already recorded it and now wish to convert to mono, you can use ffmpeg to do the conversion. ffmpeg -i stereosample.flac -ac 1 monofile.flac 43 Alternatives to Gnome Sound Recorder An alternative to Gnome Sound Recorder is KDE Recorder. This is also available as a snap on Ubuntu. The license is GPL-2.0-or-later. 44 However, I found it to be a bit more difficult to use than Gnome Sound Recorder. Selecting the microphone source was difficult. It shows several sources rather than just taking what the OS says is standard. 45 This may be because it is a KDE app running on Gnome. Perhaps this is easier if you are using KDE. Every time I unplugged my headset and plugged it back in, it added more audio sources to its list. None of them worked however until I selected the correct one, exited the program, and then started it back up. 46 All files are saved to the Music directory, there is no choice offered. Audio format selection is more difficult, it being a two step process. There was no option for mono recordings, only stereo. Flac recordings were 48 kHz rather than HPR's preferred 44.1 kHz. Converting this would require more post-processing using audio software to change it. 47 It seems to offer no advantages over Gnome Sound Recorder on Ubuntu, while making selecting sound sources more difficult. If you are using a Gnome desktop you are better off with Gnome Sound Recorder. However, it is all a matter of personal preference, and if you find that you like KDE Recorder better, then go ahead and use it. 48 Other Alternatives There are of course still other alternatives. Many people recommend using Audacity to record. However, I don't know how to do that, and the premise of this podcast episode is that you have something you would like to make an HPR episode but are put off by the difficulty of learning how to do so. 49 However, Audacity is a very capable audio program and I have nothing against it. I will describe how to use a feature in Audacity to help overcome an audio problem that I encountered, but I will save that for another episode. 50 As well as GUI programs, there are also programs which allow you to record audio from the command line. I will describe a couple of these in another episode. If you are wondering why you may want to use a command line program for this purpose, one of the advantages of this is that it lets us write scripts which automate the recording process and eliminate some of the manual steps that I outlined above. 51 Combining the Segments into a Single Audio File At this point you will have recorded your podcast episode as a series of several dozen flac files. We will now stitch the separate flac files into a single file. We do this using either ffmpeg or sox. 52 FFMPEG and Sox FFMPEG is a set of command line programs for converting and manipulating audio and video files. Various parts are licensed under the LGPL V 2.1 or later, and GPL v 2 or later. 53 Sox is also a set of command line programs, but for audio only. Sox stands for Sound Exchange. Sox is licensed under similar terms as FFMPEG. In fact Sox actually uses FFMPEG for certain operations. 54 For our purposes here, with one exception you can do everything audio related with either FFMPEG or Sox, except for one thing which I will get to in another episode. That one is related to doing some gratuitous hackery when analyzing audio files, so it may be irrelevant to anything you need to do. Since the two are more or less equivalent for our purposes, I will provide examples using both. 55 Combining Audio Segments The best way to combine multiple audio segments is with a simple shell script. A copy of this will be in the show notes. 56 Using FFMPEG Doing this with FFMPEG requires just two lines. # First create the list file. printf "file '%s'\n" [0-9][0-9].flac > podseglist.txt 57 This first line creates a file called "podseglist.txt" which contains a list of all the two digit numbered flac files in the current directory, together with some other necessary text. I have assumed you wish to give these files two digits. Add more digits out if you feel this is necessary. The file name "podseglist.txt" is purely arbitrary and you can use whatever name you wish. 58 Now we need to concatenate the files. # Now concatenate them ffmpeg -f concat -safe 0 -i podseglist.txt fullpod.flac The second line calls ffmpeg, tells it to perform a concatenation operation, turning the multiple files listed in "podseglist.txt" into one and saving it in a file called "fullpod.flac". 59 Using Sox The Sox version is simpler. sox [0-9][0-9].flac fullpod.flac 60 This will concatenate all the two digit numbered flac files in the current directory into one file called "fullpod.flac". 61 Review the Combined Audio File Next you need to review your combined audio file. Listen to the resulting file. If you are satisfied with it, you are done recording and are ready to upload. If you are unhappy about some part of it, you can re-record just that section and run the combining script again. The numbers in your script will help you find the appropriate file. 62 The people running HPR will worry about adding the introductory and concluding music, converting it to mono if it is currently stereo, and adjusting the output level to make the volume consistent with other HPR episodes. If there are noise problems that you want to try to correct I will cover that in another episode in this series. 63 Prepare the Show Notes You will need to have a few things ready when you go to upload your episode. These are the title, summary, tags, and show notes. The title should be something short but descriptive. If this episode is part of a series, you probably want to use a consistent title and include an episode number. 64 Next, you need a summary. This is a brief description of what the episode is about. Try to be clear about what it is you will be talking about. However, there are limits on the length of the summary. The limit was 100 characters at the time that I was writing this. 65 The title and summary will be automatically added by HPR to the beginning of your episode, so put some thought into what you write here. The title and summary are read out by a text to speech program, so avoid difficult abbreviations or words that the software may not know how to pronounce. 66 Next you will need to pick some tags. These are used for search purposes. I will let someone else recommend how you should pick tags. 67 Next, you need to have show notes. If you have written a script, you can simply copy-paste the whole thing into the show notes. 68 At one time there was a limit on the size of the show notes, but that limit was removed recently. 69 Uploading the Episode I will let someone else describe the process of uploading the audio file and associated title, summary, and show notes. However, you will need to have an email address ready to use as part of that process, so if you have multiple email accounts you need to settle on which one will be used as your HPR contact address. 70 Conclusion The preceding is how I created my first two podcast episodes, which were on Oathtool and the UCSD P-System operating system. Plenty of people wrote in to say that they liked them. Nobody complained about the quality of my narration or the technical quality of the audio. You should be able to do the same. 71 Further Episodes in this Series I have covered the basics, but there is more that we can do to improve the audio quality if you are so inclined or if you encounter an audio problem. In further episodes in this series I will cover the following: 72 Basic filtering with FFMPEG and Sox to cover general cases. It's a good idea to use this sort of basic filtering on your audio whether you notice any problems or not. 73 "De-essing" to improve perceived voice quality slightly in order to overcome sound artifacts inherent to using at least some microphones. 74 Normalizing audio to adjust the sound levels for easier reviewing. 75 Analyzing the audio signal with Audacity to discover the characteristics of any noise problems that you may hear. 76 Advanced filtering with with FFMPEG and Sox so solve specific problems such as I had with my headset or which you may have with environmental noise such as fans. 77 Command line recording and playing of audio using FFMPEG and Sox. This can help automate the process by automatically numbering the small audio files which are part of the recording process which I have described. 78 I promised some gratuitous hackery, and I will provide it in the form of describing how to do audio spectrum analysis using Libre Office Calc spreadsheets and GNU Octave mathematical software in place of Audacity when troubleshooting audio problems. 79 This concludes the first episode in a four part series on simple podcasting. Scripts for this episode. #!/bin/bash # First create the list file. printf "file '%s'\n" [0-9][0-9].flac > podseglist.txt ffmpeg -f concat -safe 0 -i podseglist.txt fullpod.flac #!/bin/bash sox [0-9][0-9].flac fullpod.flac Provide feedback on this episode.

This show has been flagged as Clean by the host. This series is dedicated to exploring little-known—and occasionally useful—trinkets lurking in the dusty corners of UNIX-like operating systems. Hopefully it doesn't seem like I'm picking on Linux Journal , but like UNIX Curio #1 (HPR4587), this column has been inspired by an article of theirs 1 . The author was demonstrating a clever bash script that would take a filename and send the file to standard output or, if the filename ended in .gz, decompress it and send the result to standard output. Slightly rearranged, he had: F=`echo $1 | perl -pe 's/\.gz$//'` if [[ -f $F ]] ; then cat $F elif [[ -f $F.gz ]] ; then gunzip -c $F fi He took some heat on the web site and in letters to the magazine for cranking up a whole Perl interpreter just to chop the .gz off the end of a filename. Our curio for today is a standard UNIX utility made for just this purpose called basename 2 . Along with its brother dirname 3 , it is used to pull apart pathnames to get the part you want. What basename does is remove any leading path on the name given to it, and if a suffix is specified as well, removes that also. If a directory path with a trailing slash is given, it returns the last part with no slashes. Here are some examples: $ basename /bin/gzip gzip $ basename /bin/gzip .so gzip $ basename /usr/lib/libz.so .so libz $ basename /usr/lib/ lib The counterpart, dirname , does essentially the opposite. It removes the last part of the pathname and returns a directory name (with no trailing slash): $ dirname /usr/lib/libz.so /usr/lib $ dirname /usr/lib/ /usr $ dirname file_in_this_dir . So we can replace the first line of the script up top with F=`dirname $1`/`basename $1 .gz` , get the same result, and be sure it will work on any UNIX-like system, no Perl necessary. The more observant among you may be thinking " sed could do that, too!" and you're right; F=`echo $1 | sed 's/\.gz$//'` also would work anywhere. One might suspect that as a general-purpose text processor, sed would be slower than basename and dirname . To see how they compared, we ran each method against a randomly-generated list of 5,000 filenames. Turns out the critics were right, as Perl ran the longest at 59 seconds. Using basename / dirname took 44 seconds—a nice improvement, but sed blew past it at 34 seconds. Probably the fact that only one call to sed was needed versus two for basename and dirname made the difference. Helpful suggestions in response to the article revealed a shell curio. You may have seen the brace syntax for parameters. For example, to show a filename $F with an "X" appended, you can't use echo $FX because that means a parameter named FX . Instead, you'd use echo ${F}X and the shell only interprets what's inside the braces as the parameter name. Modifiers can also go inside the braces 4 and one of these, %, is just what we need to chop off that extension. This works in bash , zsh , and any shell conforming to the current POSIX standard, but not csh and friends or older implementations of the Bourne shell. We can rewrite the first line of the original script as simply F=${1%.gz} and forgo any outside utilities. Performance? Under half a second to process those 5,000 filenames. Not bad at all. References: Treating Compressed and Uncompressed Data Sources the Same https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/treating-compressed-and-uncompressed-data-sources-same Basename specification https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/basename.html Dirname specification https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/dirname.html Shell Command Language: Parameter Expansion https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/xcu_chap02.html#tag_02_06_02 This article was originally written in July 2010. The podcast episode was recorded in March 2026. Provide feedback on this episode.

This show has been flagged as Explicit by the host. It all started at Flanders Technology International in 1987... a tech expo where an eleven-year-old watched a wooden block move across a desk and an arrow follow it on screen. That was it. That was the moment. He had to have a computer with a mouse. What followed was a story of after-school showroom squatting, summer jobs, game piracy, a modem bill that nearly gave his parents a heart attack, and an education in computing that no school could have provided. From the Amstrad PC1512 and the GEM windowing system, to the Schneider Euro PC with its infamous Turbo button that turned Ms. Pac-Man into a half-second blur — this episode is a love letter to the glorious chaos of home computing in the late 1980s. Along the way: the satisfying clatter of a matrix printer , the dark arts of config.sys and autoexec.bat , Digger , the allure of the Commodore 64 , forbidden floppy disks at computer club, a 2400-baud modem, and the very first taste of online community — long before anyone called it the internet. The computers Amstrad PC1512 — the showroom machine that started it all Schneider Euro PC — the computer-in-a-keyboard with the infamous Turbo button Commodore 64 — legendary sounds, legendary forbidden floppy disks Play the games  Digger — play in your browser  Ms. Pac-Man — play in your browser  Samantha Fox Strip Poker (C64)  Leisure Suit Larry — Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places — play in your browser Provide feedback on this episode.

This show has been flagged as Clean by the host. Two geeky people, both HPR hosts, decide to sign on the dotted line and do the darn thing and get married. Provide feedback on this episode.

This show has been flagged as Clean by the host. It's going to be pretty short, I'm going to go through my quick tips. Looks like I've got enough to kind of do a little short episode for you guys. Quick tips are basically just, you know, kind of things that I think about, that add value, kind of like those stupid viral videos on social media where they show, like how to make a pancake with a square, like it, you know. Prevent messiness when making Matcha Baking soda and super glue to get an epoxy type of seal. "Tile batter pad on top of speaker in middle" - even operat0r has no clue ! How to blowing out a candle Request for more shows on rsync inspired by hpr4341 :: Transferring Large Data Sets sent in by hairylarry How to make a foam machine Fixing garden chairs by replacing the Vinyl straps How to use a Fabric belt YTDLnis Full Featured Downloader using yt-dlp, available on F-Droid Use a wet paper towel over Microwave food. Use binder clips instead of chip clips Things To Get Me since Amazon got rid of their add arbitrary item to wish list feature. Provide feedback on this episode.

This show has been flagged as Explicit by the host. DISCLAIMER: "Hill willing to kill on" is an idiom. I do not condone or tolerate open calls for violence and want to make this very clear here. Due to the incredibly unfortunate nature of the topic at hand, I have also taken the liberty to mark this episode as explicit. This episode was recorded while I had some short downtime. There are filler phrases and pauses throughout. I apologize in advance. Provide feedback on this episode.

This show has been flagged as Explicit by the host. 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This show has been flagged as Clean by the host. Some tips on how the text you write can be improved. With the pestilence of AI spreading out over the once-human internet, doing what LLMs don't is a pretty good starting point to improve one's own writing. Make mistakes. Edit yourself. Avoid the tics that are dangerously close to becoming the norm. See this Wikipedia page, aimed at editors of user submissions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing The sections on content, language & grammar, and style are particularly relevant. Provide feedback on this episode.