Hacker Public Radio

Introduction

Once again the two HPR hosts based in Edinburgh got together over Mumble to have a chat during the COVID-19 pandemic.

• MrX
• Dave Morriss

We recorded this conversation in the evening of Sunday 23rd August 2020.

The audio was quite long when we’d finished, so we decided to cut it into two similar-length pieces and the remainder is released as a second episode.

Although a explaining a joke can often destroy it, it’s probably worth saying that the title of this show was derived from the name of a variety of potato, Pentland Squire, and the fact that the two participants were separated by the Pentland Hills in Edinburgh! "Where was the joke?" you ask…

Some of the topics we discussed:

• Our positions relative to the Pentland Hills: MrX is to the East and Dave is to the West of the area, which is to the south of Edinburgh, about 6 or 7 miles out.
  • Pentland Hills Regional Park

• The state of COVID-19 and the lockdown in Scotland
  • Scotland Coronavirus Tracker
  • Coronavirus (COVID-19) in the UK - no longer offering a simple CSV download as it originally did, but now has a detailed API.

• Processing HPR shownotes:
  • Experiences:
    • HTML, preferred but needs to be high quality
    • Markdown, if well formatted this is the easiest to deal with
    • Plain text, gets converted to Markdown by volunteers
  • ReText, an editor for Markdown and reStructuredText markup languages

• Glasgow Podcrawl
  • A virtual meeting this year over Jitsi
  • Some people joined from very far away such as Klaatu in New Zealand

• Scripts written in recent times:
  • MrX: finding the duration of a video with ffprobe.
  • Dave: choosing a meal from a list in a database to cook for the family

• Vegetarianism
  • MrX’s experiences
  • Dave often makes a Nut Roast for Christmas dinner