Who are we?
Dr. Chris Zimmermann is a FOSS fanatic, communist (sometimes) and expert on esoteric software aspects how to configure Mail Transfer Agents while not carving in to insanity, troubleshoot computer networks without the use of recreational drugs and the advanced enjoyment of craft beverages. He mostly lives in Frankfurt, Germany. In contrast to Mr. Visser the size of his brain has a reverse correlation to the size of his head.
Martin Visser is a slightly less egocentric (actually far from egocentric) computer scientist and engineer, non-communist from Birmingham, UK. In contrast to Dr. Zimmermann, he has human interaction and social protocols down to a fine art.
Why another FOSS podcast?
For those who use any means of transport on a regular basis it is a great way to stimulate the brain.
Others have come before us, tried and failed to achieve this level.
What's in it for me?
Great entertainment
Invaluable tech tips helping with aspects of everday life including the proper recital of Vogon poetry in that worst-case scenario that Brexit finally shadows the Vogons’ landing and how to take care of the proper biological foundation for recreational drugs
A chance to feedback your comments. Glowing ones will be published, others ignored.
The opportunity to request expert knowledge and discussion on a topic of your choice!
What's in it for the Inlaws?
The impending fame and successful broadcasting careers (Martin’s vision) play a small part in this decision.
Which is of course totally overshadowed by the reason of world domination. Donations are encouraged. Ideally in liquid wheat brew format (of course rye, barley, spelt and other assorted grains go as well).
How to get up and running?
(this is how we do it, your mileage may vary)
- Pick an open source operating system of choice that features a decent package management system (unless you’re really technical and know what you’re doing) and is Posix-compliant. In this instance Ubuntu 19.10 was the preferred candidate
- Don't worry about Mumble. Many have tried, most have failed to use this piece of
software for synchronous podcast recording
- Get some really cool music licensed under CC-BY(-SA) from places like Jamendo
- Install a Synapse server on a publicly accessible server and use Riot-Web as a front-end for this instance
- Get Audacity and tty-clock (if you really want to accurate synchronise your system clock with an NTP server)
- Using Audacity and tty-clock, record your friendly podcast locally using Riot-Web's audio call feature to synchronise the hosts and guests
- For the post-production, simply mix the individual streams together and edit to your
heart's content.
- Stick to mono when producing the final ogg or mp3 file, adding music and other content as appropriate
- Upload the audio file to HPR
- Create associated website using some cool HTML/CSS framework
- Watch it go viral (the important bit!)
The kit?
- One home server running Ubuntu 19.10 with mumble-server and Synapse (a reference implementation) of the federated protocol known as Matrix for comms
- One cheap bit of kit running somewhere in Germany at a snails pace (Martin’s opinion before the D-Wave upgrade - little did he know :-)) => much patience is required attempting to use this
- Two laptops for remote access, running a Murmur client (typically Mumble itself), Audacity and various text editors in addition to riot-web or another Matrix / Synapse client
- One MPow USB headset and one interim Logitech 2 Pro (thank you MPow for the countless hours of debugging x-talk issues - we learned a lot! :-)
The Episodes
All episodes are hosted on Hacker Public Radio for now.
-
S01E01: How this shit works A short summary of life, the world and the technical basics of podcasting in general. You have been warned!
-
S01E02: FOSDEM shenanigans
What happened after the episode and @ FOSDEM.
-
S01E03: 32 Bit Time Travel
Martin and Chris discuss a current IT security challenge, shed more light on time travel using 32 bits only and
struggle with Mumble.
Shownotes:
- More info on the Kr00k vulnerability including a list
of affected devices
- The kernel wireless wiki has a list of devices and their
drivers
- Two LWN articles discuss the general problem of 32 bit
time-keeping in Linux and friends and the state of things
- The following C code snippet demonstrates the issue at hand (requires a 32 bit system :-):
#include <time.h>
#include <stdio.h>
int main(int argc, char* argv[]) {
for (unsigned long j = 0x80000000-5; j < 0x80000005; j++) {
struct tm tim;
gmtime_r((time_t *) &j, &im);
printf("%d\t%x\t%s", j, j, asctime(&tim));
}
return 0;
- S01E04: What's in a name
After a short rant about Mozilla's intention to optionally block HTTP-only traffic in an upcoming
release of this browser, the two OAPs explain how the podcast came about, where they got their
inspiration from and what's in stock. The show concludes with Tech Support from the Dark Side,
a new hotline dedicated to helping politicians and other users in need of computer support to cope with reality.
Shownotes:
-
S01E05: Porn and Skynet
A show without Martin :-(. Apologies that it took so long to come up with a new episode but unfortunately
life got in between producing shows. What's been happening? Chris gives a short overview over the last few weeks and
their shenanigans followed by the first part of a two-part series on how to set up your own adult-oriented entertainment
website (or any other content requiring the streaming or playback of multimedia information, namely audio and video.
The first part goes into the theory of audio and video containers and explains compression techniques for audio and video
information. The second part will cover the required tooling using FOSS examples (of course). Linux Inlaws is proud
to have a real terminator sent from Skynet on the show, who explains the past, present and future of human kind in general
and why Skynet isn't so bad after all during an interview in the second part of the show.
Shownotes:
-
S01E06: Porn and Trump A show with Martin (Yay!) now that he's back. The lively chaps conclude the two-part series of
how to set-up your adult-content website (or any other website featuring live or recorded video) by discussing
the relevant tools used for this purpose. The news section contains a description of how to abuse a subdomain
of a major international corporation properly instead of just using it to promote adult websites (kids, do not
try this at home as this is highly illegal!). The sketch has a certain Mr. Trump ringing our beloved tech support
and wondering what to do about a certain virus he came across recently. The show concludes with random
musings on electricity, movies and Pamela Adlon. We would like to thank the Whitehouse for sponsoring
this episode - we feel your pain! :-)
Shownotes:
-
S01E07: The Big Blue Button
In this episode our two chaps welcome Fred Dixon, product manager for BigBlueButton, on the show to talk about the project, its history and if it will finally run on Fedora and CentOS.
Surrounding musings include how to hack the GDM login screen, why Martin is not behind the recent Easyjet hack and poxes as well as anti-poxes.
Shownotes:
-
S01E08: The review of the review
More shenanigans from our two heroes. In this short episode, the our two heroes rant about Linus and other old people, Transmeta and other history, discuss Martin's EdgeOS woes
and discover that MIPS is indeed a CPU architecture supported by standard Debian. The show concludes with a short review of Claudio's review and poxes about the Arch wiki and Californication. You have been warned!
Shownotes:
-
S01E09: Postgres
Listen to our two OAPs interviewing Bruce Momjian, Postgres evangelist and long-time supporter of this popular SQL
database. Expect lots of strong language around SQL and NoSQL topics and some ranting about MINT's attitude towards snaps, a fun breach of a health service provider in the UK
and why broadcasters should stick to monopolies.
Shownnotes:
-
S01E10: The Python Bumper Part 1
Martin, being somwhat new to the field of Hipster programming languages such as Python, has come
up with a comprehensive list of questions to hassle Chris with who carelessly admitted some intermediate Python knowledge. In this first of a two-part
mini-series on this programming language, Chris educates Martin on parallel programming, operating system basics and Alia Shawkat moving in with Brad Pitt. Stay
tuned for the concluding second part soon.
Shownotes:
-
S01E11: The Python Bumper Part 2 The two chaps continue their rant on Python's finer details in this second part of
a mini-series on Python. Somewhat of a treat is the discussion of the upcoming 3.9
release containing an improved parser. Due to the explicit nature of this conversation which borders on so much passion you can almost feel the erotic atmosphere,
listener's disgression is strongly advised. A sketch about PEP 572 rounds off this episode. Plus the chaps reveal a bumper teaser: No other than Lennart Poettering
of Avahi, PulseAudio and systemd fame will appear on a future episode, like to be in the August / September timeframe.
Shownotes:
- S01E12: Reminiscing on FLOSS Weekly In this episode the Inlaws are proud to have Randal Schwartz of FLOSS Weekly fame as a guest.
The discussion - of course - centers around Perl, FLOSS Weekly and carribean cruises as a popular pastime.
Shownotes:
- S01E13: The road to communism and freedom
Our two aged heroes explain how they disovered open source in particular and communism in general. We would like to re-emphasize the fact that this show is marked as explicit on any podcast feed syndicating us as this episode in particular
revolves around operating systems and prostitution.
Shownotes:
- S01E14: The big programming language panel
In this episode the Inlaws host an eclectic panel of aficionados of different programming languages
including Python, C(++) and Rust. The debate ranges from the discussion of the history of each
language and its ecosystem to the ins and outs of the different philosophies and approaches.
To much surprise, no blood is spilled (not even virtually!).
Shownotes:
- S01E15: IT Security and stick insects
In this episode Martin discovers that protecting pictures of stick insects (rated XXX or not)
on USB sticks (pun intended) can be an ardous endeavour indeed. Never mind eventually turning
this into a business including web servers, shared file spaces and password storage. Additional
bonus: the lovely Emma from Rainbow Escorts makes another cameo apperance supported by some Irish, um, students.
Shownotes:
- S01E16: The count and the questions
Watch our two heroes answering all sorts of strange and interesting questions
around open source, Halloween and other scary subjects.
Shownotes:
- S01E17: Nextcloud
In this episode our two elderly heroes have a chat with Frank Karlitschek
who reveals not only the inner workings of a seriously serious open source
groupware software called Nextcould but also spills the beans on how to
fork companies in addition to source code...
Shownotes:
- S01E18: Voice Recognition and Text to Speech
In this episode, Chris is harassed by quite a few artificial nuisance callers, among
drug lords, Irish nurses and some random Linux Inlaws Chief Financial Officer. Based
on these examples, our two heroes discuss the history and current state of text-to-
speech (TTS) and voice recognition. We attempted to use voice recognition software in order
to produce a transcript of the show which can be found here.
We used DeepSpeech with a pre-trained model, hence the quality. An improved version with better quality would require
a serious amount of training including the many hours and CPU core required for this, so we left at this.
Shownotes:
- S01E19: Redis
In this episode our two heroes interview Itamar Haber, community liaison for Redis, a popular open-source
in-memory NoSQL database. Technology prevails in this episode; communism, free love and drugs
take a backseat (but only for the moment! :-). The trio discuss the legacy of redis, bemoan their old age
and reveal why Itamar initially wanted to be a mermaid. Listen to the episode for more shocking epiphanies!
Shownotes:
- S01E20: The Xmas and New Year Special
To celebrate Christmas and the New Year, our two over-aged heroes discuss the past, present and future of not
just open source but computing in general. Never mind the lotto numbers of the country of your choice for 2021 and
the importance of a prenuptial agreement. Ever wanted to get rich quick? In that case don't miss this episode :-).
Shownotes:
All content licensed under 
The DarkSide Tech Support (DSTS)
The DSTS is loosely inspired by the Bastard Operator From Hell,
where a somewhat misguided support specialist tends to break all hell loose on innocent callers who expect help
and guidance on various computer problems. In contrast to this purely fictional prototype, the DSTS deals with
real-world problems such as rewriting history aided by computers, how American presidents tackle virus issues and
how an ancient Egyptian pharaoh tries to remedy the seven plagues inflicted on his empire by talking to God herself.
More episodes in the making - stay tuned!
Similar to other parts of the show, DSTS welcomes listeners' suggestion about topics they would like
to see covered. So if you have a plague you cannot get rid of or need divine intervention otherwise, don't
hesitate to send us a mail.
Contact
Joking aside, we do appreciate feedback. So please email us at feedback@linuxinlaws.eu
Or talk to us at various open source events!
