Episodios

  • HPR4610: Playing Civilization V, Part 10

    HPR4610: Playing Civilization V, Part 10
    Apr 3 2026
    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 worksGreat Musician – Can do Concert Tour (+Tourism), or create Great WorksGreat Writer- Can write a Political Treatise (+Culture), or create Great WorksGreat Engineer – Can hurry production (including Wonders). Can create ManufactoryGreat General – combat bonus to units within 2 tiles, or steal land when creating a CitadelKhan – Unique to Mongolia, replaces Great General, moves faster and heals adjacent units, and can create CitadelGreat Merchant – Trade Mission (+Gold and +Influence with a city state). Create Customs HouseMerchant 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 HouseGreat Scientist – Can Hurry Research, or create AcademyGreat Admiral – Combat bonus to naval units within 2 tiles. Can repair adjacent naval and embarked unitsGreat 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, SailingClassical Era: EngineeringMedieval Era: CompassRenaissance Era: BankingIndustrial Era: BiologyModern Era: RailroadAtomic 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 ...
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  • HPR4609: Proper Date Format

    HPR4609: Proper Date Format
    Apr 2 2026

    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/

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  • HPR4608: Simple Podcasting - Episode 1 - Preparation and Recording

    HPR4608: Simple Podcasting - Episode 1 - Preparation and Recording
    Apr 1 2026
    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 ...
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  • HPR4606: My Nerdy Childhood: From Floppy Disks to Dial-Up Dreams

    HPR4606: My Nerdy Childhood: From Floppy Disks to Dial-Up Dreams
    Mar 30 2026

    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

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  • HPR4605: Lee locks down his wifey poo

    HPR4605: Lee locks down his wifey poo
    Mar 27 2026

    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.

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  • HPR4604: Quick Tips for January 20 26

    HPR4604: Quick Tips for January 20 26
    Mar 26 2026

    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.

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  • HPR4603: On the Erosion of Freedom in Open Source Software

    HPR4603: On the Erosion of Freedom in Open Source Software
    Mar 25 2026

    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.

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