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Hosted by Dave Morriss on 2023-02-08 is flagged as Explicit and released under a CC-BY-SA license.
torch,flashlight,rechargeable,Lithium Ion.
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This torch (aka flashlight) came up during the recording of the Community News for May 2022. I have owned an example of this device since 2016. It’s been extensively reviewed elsewhere but I thought I’d briefly tell you about my experiences.
I bought this from Amazon after seeing a video of it on the Big Clive YouTube channel. It was under £10. This version is no longer available but there is a version 2 for a similar price. I haven’t tried this one.
The Nitecore Tube is a small plastic-bodied torch with fittings for a key ring. I have not been keen to keep it on my keyring for fear of damage from the keys, so I keep it always in my shirt pocket.
The torch is controlled through a rubber-like button on one side, and has a micro USB port on the edge which is covered by a rubber cap.
While charging, a blue LED can be seen inside the body of the torch, which turns off when the charging process is complete.
The torch can operate at a number of brightness levels and has a lock mode:
I don’t use this torch a huge amount. The fact that it’s always in my pocket means I have a source of quite bright light when I need one. The lower level light is useful for moving around in the dark or in a gloomy place. The brighter level I tend to use to read labels on jars, bottles and other containers. For some reason, these labels are often designed with minimal contrast (like a dull orange lettering on a purple background) which my eyes just can’t cope with. The Nitecore is my saviour with this sort of stuff!
I don’t charge it very often, but it is easy to do it with a phone charger - I have several micro USB cables around, so it’s no problem.
This is a great little device. I have other torches for when I need a stronger, more broadly illuminating light source. I wouldn’t be carrying any of these around with me though. The Nitecore is small and compact enough that I can keep it on me all the time.
If I lost this one, or it died, I’m pretty sure I’d get another!
Hosted by Rho`n on 2023-02-07 is flagged as Clean and released under a CC-BY-SA license.
Christmas, electrical, safety.
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The Friday before Christmas, my partner's mother called and asked if I had a short indoor extension cord she could borrow. When I arrived at her house, she showed me her display of ceramic Christmas trees for which she needed the extension cord. These decorations have two pieces. A base which holds a small light bulb, and then the tree which sits over the light and has translucent colored plastic 'Christmas lights' which are illuminated by the light bulb inside the tree. There were four ceramic trees of varying heights—from 14" (~36 cm) to 6" (~15 cm) tall. While helping to arrange each of the trees electrical cords and plugging them into the extension cable, one of the trees wouldn't stay lit. If you turned the base or moved the cord it would light back up, but then go out once you took pressure off the cord. I could also hear crackling at times when moving the cord—not a sound you want to hear in an electric ornament.
After separating the pieces and turning over the base, I could see not only the sparks, but why it was sparking. At some point, one of wires had come lose from the light socket and was taped back in place with what looks like duct tape. The ornament was made in the 1950s. I'm not sure when the repair was made. It is an ornament that has been passed through the family over the years. The plastic which held the wire in place had failed over the years, and the tape was also failing from the electric sparks that would occur when the wire was moved around. You could see burn marks on the tape around the wire.
At first I thought I may be able to fix the side with the bad wiring. Maybe solder the wire onto the socket to give it a good electrical connection, and then use electrical tape to cover the hole where the socket casing had failed, but in the process of taking the wire out and removing all the old duct tape, the socket's electrical contact fell apart. This was for the best, the whole socket needed replacing, but I wasn't sure I could find a replacement socket that would fit through the hole in the ceramic base.
While doing my last minute Christmas shopping on Christmas Eve, I stopped at one of the big box hardware stores to browse the electrical section and see if I could find a replacement socket that might work. Of course I hadn't brought either the old socket or the light bulb, but I found a small rack with replacement sockets that looked like it might work. The candelabra style socket replacement looked like the correct size—for both the light bulb and the hole in the base of the ornament.
Once I was home, I tested the fit of the light bulb, and the socket was the correct size. It was just a little to big for the hole in the base, but I was hoping I could just grind off some of the raised plastic lettering and maybe a little off the sides of the socket here and there to get it to fit in the base. I was leery of using my Dremel tool to make the hole bigger in the ceramic base. I didn't want it to crack or chip the finish. I ended up doing both. Grinding down some of the plastic on the replacement socket and grinding out the hole in the ceramic base.
A bit of electrical tape wrapped around the new socket created a snug fit between the hole in the ornament's base and the socket. I then hot glued the socket to the inside of the base to provide extra stability. Next step was attaching the old cord to the new socket. The cord was in good shape except where it was connected to the old socket. I evened up the end of the cord, then stripped it, and then connected the cord to the new socket with wire nuts.
After flipping over the base and screwing in the light bulb, I tested the repair. Success!
Hosted by HPR Volunteers on 2023-02-06 is flagged as Explicit and released under a CC-BY-SA license.
Community News.
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Welcome to our new host:
enistello.
These are comments which have been made during the past month, either to shows released during the month or to past shows. There are 27 comments in total.
There are 8 comments on 6 previous shows:
There are 19 comments on 11 of this month's shows:
Policy decisions surrounding HPR are taken by the community as a whole. This discussion takes place on the Mail List which is open to all HPR listeners and contributors. The discussions are open and available on the HPR server under Mailman.
The threaded discussions this month can be found here:
https://hackerpublicradio.org/pipermail/hpr_hackerpublicradio.org/2023-January/thread.htmlWith the kind permission of LWN.net we are linking to The LWN.net Community Calendar.
Quoting the site:
This is the LWN.net community event calendar, where we track events of interest to people using and developing Linux and free software. Clicking on individual events will take you to the appropriate web page.
Transcripts of audio have been generated for shows since December
2022, using the Whisper tool.
Ken Fallon has been working on this project, and has also been
transcribing the older shows from hpr0001 to the present
day. This part of the project is complete.
The transcripts have been attached to each show on the HPR website, and are in the process of being added on archive.org.
This "re-upload" project is now ended. All shows from 871 to 2429 have been re-uploaded with all audio files and other assets.
Listen to me cook / fail / hack Boba Green Tea!
Hosted by Celeste on 2023-02-02 is flagged as Clean and released under a CC-BY-NC-SA license.
2FA, OTP, TOTP, HOTP, security.
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Many services implement 2FA (Two factor authentication) by sending you a OTP (One Time Password) using an SMS with a random code, but this forces you to give them your valuable phone number. What alternatives do exist?
Let's dive into the HOTP, used by some banks years ago through a physical token and the recent TOTP, which both let you generate completely offline codes without using any phone number or any other personal detail. They use the HMAC technique usually with a SHA-1 one-way hashing function, but other hashing functions can be used too.
Useful links:
Let's keep Webauthn maybe for a future episode, I'm still exploring it and have to do more research.
Some time in the last year there has been some discussion on the HPR mailing list about some of the problems I was having, particularly with the tags page, on the HPR site.
Here is a show in which you can hear both me and my screen reader, as I navigate the HPR home page, and then the HPR tags page.
Dave Morriss has made a nice job of fixing the issues I had, and made the tags page a lot more friendly for blind and visually impaired users.
It's quite a long podcast, and it took a lot of editing. So most of the polish wore off by the time I 'finished' it and decided enough was enough.
Hosted by Archer72 on 2023-01-31 is flagged as Clean and released under a CC-BY-SA license.
media, formats, encoding.
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Hosted by Andrew Conway on 2023-01-30 is flagged as Clean and released under a CC-BY-SA license.
electronics.
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The Joule Thief is a delightfully simple circuit that can light an LED that requires 2V or more from a battery that is depleted to 1V or less. There are three components in addition to the battery and LED: an NPN transistor, a resistor and a double wound inductor. The key thing about the inductor is that the same core shares two windings but in opposite directions.
The explanation of how it works is simple enough, as long as you already understand how inductors and transistors work. In other words, it isn't simple at all! In short, the double wound inductor and transistor conspire to generate a transient high voltage spike and so turn LED on and off so rapidly that the human eye cannot perceive it.
The idea of such a circuit is approaching its centenary but the name itself is only around 20 years old. I recommend you check out Big Clive's web site as it was he who came up with the name "Joule Thief". I also recommend this video in which he constructs a circuit using some ninja-level soldering skills.
Hosted by Ahuka on 2023-01-27 is flagged as Clean and released under a CC-BY-SA license.
social media, alternative, Fediverse, ActivityPub, Mastodon, Screen readers, WordPress.
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One of the things I love about the Fediverse is that there is constant activity and development. As I mentioned in the previous report on Bookwyrm, it is not unusual to return to an app a few months later and see new features have been added that make it better. In this report I want to highlight three news stories that I think may be of interest.
Hello Hacker Public Radio fans. This is Trey, and I am throwing this recording together for several reasons:
The queue of shows is abysmally sparse. There are far more openings for shows in the next few weeks than there are shows posted.
This show is a pitiful excuse for why I haven't posted any shows recently
If you like what you hear on Hacker Public Radio, please express your gratitude by recording your own show. It doesn't need to be long, or sound professional, or anything. Introduce yourself and share something you find interesting.
If you do not like any or all of what you hear on Hacker Public Radio, then it is the perfect opportunity for you to take a few minutes and record a short (or long) podcast of your own which "fills the gap" of what you might feel is needed on HPR.
Alright. Enough preliminaries.
A long time ago, at an undisclosed university far, far away, I took my first class about Ethics. One of the things I remember most was the question of "Just because you can do a thing, does that mean you should do the thing?"
This was applied to many different scenarios - from nation states building weapons of mass destruction, to authoring computer viruses, and even to saying what you are thinking at any given moment.
It should quickly become obvious that you should not always do a thing simply because you can do it. And today, I would like to relate that to DIY home improvement projects, especially as we work our way up in years.
For regular listeners, you may recall my series "Everything You Always Wanted to Knox about PEX" recorded and shared in May through July of 2022 (hpr3604, hpr3614, hpr3624 & hpr3634). In this series, I recounted the process of replumbing my home using PEX with helpful advice for anyone else who wants to try it. What I did not realize at the time I was doing the project was the toll that doing so much work overhead, by myself, was taking on my old shoulder joints. It was only one straw, but a rather significant one, which eventually broke the camel's back. Or, in my case, resulted in several severe tears in my rotator cuff and bicep tendon.
Therapy was marginally effective, and surgery was eventually required to put things back together the way they belonged. My effort to save money and do the project myself "Because I could" helped lead to significantly more expenses and more than a year of recovery.
I am not sharing this for sympathy, but rather because I learned something important. Now that I am getting older, as I decide which projects I should do myself and which to pay professionals to do, it is important to factor in the potential impact on my body, my mind and those around me, even if all goes well.
Just because you can do a thing does not necessarily mean you should do a thing.
Unless that "Thing" is recording a podcast for HPR. THAT is something you can and should do.
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