Hacker Public Radio

This show has been flagged as Clean by the host. Dave and Kevie bring the HPR listeners another festive edition of the Beer Garden, with the focus turning to Belgian Christmas ales. Kevie discovered a scan of the original advert in the Journal De Charleroi from 1896 Translation: Christmas beer has arrived at the Arabian horse and the globe, these two establishments so famous for Anglaise beers. Go and taste it, because Christmas is only sold for a short time. In this episode Dave samples Baby Jesus by Brouwerij 't Verzet and Kevie tries out La Binchoise Speciale Noel . Connect with the guys on Untappd: Dave Kevie The intro sounds for the show are used from: https://freesound.org/people/mixtus/sounds/329806/ https://freesound.org/people/j1987/sounds/123003/ https://freesound.org/people/greatsoundstube/sounds/628437/ Provide feedback on this episode.

This show has been flagged as Clean by the host. References in order of first mention Daytimer - https://www.daytimer.com/ PalmPilot - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PalmPilot Gina Trapani - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gina_Trapani Todo landing page - http://todotxt.org/ Todo file format - https://github.com/todotxt/todo.txt Dropbox - https://www.dropbox.com/ Simpletask - https://github.com/mpcjanssen/simpletask-android/ QTodoTxt - https://github.com/QTodoTxt/QTodoTxt Synology DS220J NAS - https://global.download.synology.com/download/Document/Hardware/DataSheet/DiskStation/20-year/DS220j/enu/Synology_DS220j_Data_Sheet_enu.pdf Ice_recur - https://github.com/rlpowell/todo-text-stuff Py_recur - https://github.com/TASpinner/py_recur Microsoft todo - https://to-do.office.com/tasks/ Provide feedback on this episode.

This show has been flagged as Clean by the host. 02 Less Common Reactor Types In this episode we discuss some of the less common historical reactor types. These are a mixture of less common commercial types and some experimental or research reactors. I will cover advanced or future designs in another episode. 03 Minor Successes 04 Magnox 07 AGR - Advanced Gas Cooled Reactor 10 LWGR - Light Water Graphite Moderated Reactor (RBMK) 14 Historical Oddities or Dead Ends 15 Organically Cooled Reactors 16 Organically Cooled and Moderated 18 Organically Cooled and Heavy Water Moderated 24 HTGCR High Temperature Gas Cooled Reactor 28 HWLWR - Heavy Water Light Water Reactor or SGHWR - Steam Generating Heavy Water Reactor 31 Reactors Making a Comeback 32 Pebble Bed Reactors 33 AVR 35 THTR-300 36 South Africa, China, and the US 39 Making a Come Back? 40 MSR - Molten Salt Reactors 41 Slow or Fast Neutron Reactors 42 Fuel 43 Salts 44 Why Some Variants Use Dissolved Fuel 46 History 47 Types of Molten Salt Reactor 48 Pros and Cons 52 Overall 53 Conclusion In this episode we discussed some of the less common historical reactor types. As we have seen, there have been a number of different reactor designs which were less commercially successful for one reason or another. Some of them may make a come back however, particularly as the basis for a small reactor. In the next episode we will describe fast neutron reactors. Provide feedback on this episode.

This show has been flagged as Explicit by the host. Background I have a very old EPSON R300 inkjet printer It has served me well for many years. I thought it was at least 10 if not 15 years old. I got it before I even became interested in Linux. For many of those years now I have been using this printer extensively on Linux. It has been a really good printer and has been incredibly cheap to run. Many years ago I got a number of sets of ink for it. I think they only cost me £15! A colleague at work later on gave me more sets of ink. I ended up with a large bag full of ink cartridges which I have been working my way through ever since. I used the printer infrequently for many years. This is far from ideal for an ink jet printer as doing so tends to cause the ink jet nozzles to clog up. Unsurprisingly in later years it has become somewhat temperamental. The problems consisted of paper mis-feeds (Probably down to the rubber take up rollers going hard over time) and missing bits of print (This I assume due to infrequent use of the printer and age of ink jet cartridges all of which were well out of their expiration date). The mis-fed paper could be solved by individual feeding each sheet through the printer. The poor / missing print could be solved by a combination of running the print head clean routine or by replacing the offending cartridge. Latterly I had print problems again and as per usual after cleaning the heads and then finally changing the cartridge the printer resumed printing normally. Shortly after this I bought myself an Apple iMac mini and thought it could be useful to be able to print from it. I visited the EPSON website downloaded and installed the EPSON print driver for my trusty R300 printer. I tried printing from my iMac and received a warning stating something like some of the components within your printer are worn and may need servicing. I’d never seen a message like this before as I normally print using open source print drivers on Linux which never report such things. When I tried printing on my Apple Mac no black text was visible on the page. I tried running the head cleaning routine and this made no difference. I eventually had to resort to changing the colour of the text within the LibreOffice document. This allowed me to print text that was at least legible. At the time I was a little suspicious of all this as the printer had been working so well just a few days previous. I plugged my trusty printer back into my trusty PC running an old version of Ubuntu using the open source printer drivers. Fired up LibreOffice and tried to print a document. To my surprise the printout was very good. While it was not as good as when the printer was new the quality of the black and coloured text was actually very good. My suspicion though I can’t prove it is that the EPSON print driver has worked out that the printer is 10 plus years old and needs to be returned to EPSON for servicing (or to purchase a new printer). To ensure this the driver is crippling the output from the printer. The Open Source print drivers have none of the nefarious nonsense and allows the printer to operate. As I said I cannot prove any of this however I’ll leave this up to you decide what you think is going on here. At this point I was going to end the podcast however the story didn’t end there. The story continues My mother wanted me to print out some holiday insurance documents for her. She sent me a copy of her documents as I told her my printer was working again. The first page printed out slightly faintly but was readable the other pages seemed to print using invisible ink. I tried cleaning the heads but it made no difference. It’s looking a bit like my printer or at least the cartridge is past its expiry date. Clearing out our loft I found the original box for my EPSON R300 printer and discovered that it was purchased in May 2005. This means the printer is now over 20 years old! At this point I decided that it was maybe about time that I replaced our ageing printer. We use the printer very infrequently and rarely need colour. For this reason I decided this time to buy a laser printer since I believe these don’t tend to dry out like ink jet printers and are less likely to suffer with infrequent use. Only time will tell though I don’t expect this one to last 20 years! Finally after all this I am not sure if using the EPSON driver had anything to do with the final demise of my printer though who knows. As Klaatu would say I leave that up to you dear listener to decide. Provide feedback on this episode.

This show has been flagged as Explicit by the host. A two-part conversation about what it’s really like being a woman in tech for almost three decades. Content Warning: The F word probably makes an appearance multiple times. In this episode, Lee sits down with Elsbeth to talk about her long, winding, sometimes ridiculous, often inspiring journey through the IT industry — starting all the way back in 1997. If you’ve ever worked helpdesk, ever had a customer say “my cup holder broke” (yes, the CD tray)… or ever felt underestimated in a room full of engineers, this one’s for you. Because we throw around some tech terms in the conversation, here are a few friendly definitions so everyone can follow along. Terms We Mentioned (in plain English) QA (Quality Assurance) Think of QA as the people who try to break things on purpose so regular users don’t break them accidentally . They test software, hardware, websites — you name it — to catch bugs before they cause chaos. If it’s glitch-free, a QA person probably saved the day behind the scenes. Content Moderation This is the work of keeping the internet from turning into the Wild West. Moderators review posts, comments, images, and videos to make sure they follow community rules and don’t harm users. It’s a mix of tech tools and human judgment — and yes, it can get intense. Building PCs Where many IT careers start! Building PCs is basically grown-up Lego: picking parts assembling them hoping you don’t zap anything with static electricity praying the cable management gods smile upon you It’s one of the most empowering skills in tech and often the first time someone realizes, “Oh hey… I can actually do this.” Gender Equality & Inequality Gender equality means giving everyone the same chance to succeed — no matter who they are. Gender inequality is what happens when that doesn’t happen. In tech, inequality often looks like: being talked over being paid less being assumed “non-technical” having to prove yourself twice as hard being the only woman in a room… again Elsbeth has seen all of this firsthand since 1997 — and she’s got stories. End-User The end-user is simply the person who actually uses the product. Not the engineer who built it. Not the manager who approved it. Not the QA who tested it. The end-user is the human at the end of the chain who clicks the button, pushes the key, taps the app… and finds entirely new ways to break things no one expected. Understanding them is the secret superpower of tech. Neurodivergence Neurodivergence means brains come in many beautiful varieties — like ADHD, autism, dyslexia, and more. Neurodivergent people often bring incredible strengths to IT, including creativity, pattern spotting, hyperfocus, and out-of-the-box problem solving. They can also face misunderstandings in workplaces that weren’t designed with different brains in mind — something Elsbeth talks about openly and honestly in this episode. Provide feedback on this episode.