So what's the little turny knob thing all about?
Excuse me.
Ask the host episode one.
I'm Joe.
I'm Gary.
And I'm Alan.
Hello, Chaps.
It's a brand new show for the late night Linux family.
And we're going to have various hosts
from the late night Linux family shows on each episode.
But for this first one, it's just you two.
As the name suggests, we're going to be answering
your questions, dear listener.
You can send them into us via email.
Show us the host.com.
And you can ask us anything you want with one carryout.
We can't talk about Linux or free night
per source software, but anything else is fair game.
And if you're listening on Patreon,
then you're getting this early.
And if you're not on Patreon, then you could have been
listened to this two weeks ago.
So go to askthethost.com slash report.
And you'll find the Patreon link.
We'll probably do this about once a month, but we'll see.
So the first question.
Sire asks, what's the most beautiful place
you've ever visited?
For me, probably Montenegray.
My wife booked a holiday to Montenegray
for a belated honeybee.
And neither of us really had any idea what to expect.
We just sort of booked somewhere that was cheap.
And when the plane was landing,
we just both looked at the wind day
and going through this really mountainous terrain
that was just nothing for miles and miles.
And we spent the week there, and I've got to say,
it's just picturesque.
We spent the entire time kind of by the beach
kind of going up and down mountains,
ended up in this really amazing restaurant
that was sort of nestled in the mountains
and the restaurant owner caught the fish for you to eat.
And yeah, it was just really, really lovely week away.
And there wasn't a single thing I looked at and thought,
that's not particularly great.
I feel terrible that I couldn't point to Montenegray
on a map.
Well, I know that it's near Serbia.
Yeah, so think of Italy on the map
and then go east across the sea.
So it's sort of in the Balkans, slightly below Croatia.
I think the most beautiful place I've ever been
is either Sicily just because of the mountains
and the just the arid nature of it.
And this was in January when no one was around.
There was no tourists there.
And it was just really weird.
I went up on this mountain where if you look on street view,
there's a massive car park and it's just ramped
because it must be in summer.
And there's an ice cream van and everything.
And then I've got a photo of just my little higher car there,
no one else.
And so there was a real stark beauty of Sicily in January.
And it wasn't too cold either.
It was sort of, it was like London in sort of late March,
early April.
So not exactly warm, but not horribly freezing.
But either that or the Pacific Northwest
around kind of Seattle and stuff,
all of the woods around there,
not really the cities, but just, you know,
you just go a tiny bit outside and you've just got so many,
I'd never seen so many trees in all my life when I went there.
Yeah, I've got to say I've got memories of hiring a car
when I went out to Linux Fest Northwest.
And someone in there, BNB, I was saying in suggested,
I drove out to Leavenworth,
which is tiny town that's modeled after a historic German village,
about 100 miles away from Seattle.
And just driving up through the mountains and forests
to get there was, yeah, like you say,
just really, really beautiful.
Yeah, I was overwhelmed by the size and quantity of trees
up in that part of the world.
I think I was there the same time as you, Joe.
And yeah, it was quite good fun driving long journeys
through trees, trying to keep up with other Linux nerds
in their higher cars.
I also like London.
I know people don't think it's very beautiful,
and it's a bit sort of grim and grimy and dirty,
but I don't know if there's something beautiful about
the really old buildings mixed with the new ones.
I suppose you get that in a lot of cities really,
but like you go to the city of London,
and you've got pubs that are like a thousand years old,
nearly next to these giant skyscrapers,
and I just love that truck's to position somehow.
Yeah, for me, there's nothing nicer
than on like a warm summers morning,
having a walk along the South Bank.
I usually deliberately stay quite away
from our office when I'm working in London.
And just nice stroll along the South Bank in the morning,
just taking the sun, walking along with a coffee is,
yeah, let me say, it's something nice about it.
Yeah, really nice three days a year when it's sunny.
Yeah, indeed.
Keeping the honeymoon theme, my most beautiful place,
I think would be the Maldives,
where Claire and I went on our honeymoon,
and we stayed on this little island that took,
I don't know, about 10 minutes to walk from one end to the other,
and 30 seconds to walk from one side to the other,
it was really small.
Mostly beach with a few buildings,
but it was really quiet other than, you know,
all the other honeymoon is there.
And I had an opportunity to do scuba diving,
and scuba diving in the coral in the Maldives is just amazing,
because as you get to the edge of the atoll,
the surface of the ground under the water,
the bed of the sea, whatever the world that is,
just drops off in front of you,
and it's quite scary and quite awe-inspiring,
and makes you realise just how tiny you are,
but on the land, it's just like a desert island
with a few buildings plopped on it,
and some really nice chefs who cook up your food and the bar,
and, you know, a pool and all that kind of stuff,
it's like a well-appointed desert island,
it's absolutely lovely, and completely disconnected.
When we were there 20 years ago,
you could barely make a phone call,
and there was no cell reception,
it was really nice, it was lovely.
All right, Simon asks,
what's the weirdest coincidence that's ever happened to you?
So I think for me, it was the aforementioned trip
to the X-Fest Northwest,
where just sort of quietly booked it, turned up,
and suddenly there's tons of people
you recognise in the car park,
and I think I remember turning up,
and bumping into you and with PPP,
and it was just this like,
seeing you somewhere before, what the hell are you doing here?
Obviously, I should have probably put two and two together
and realised that actually,
we all have a very common interest,
we're all part of the same community
and should be in the same place,
but I just didn't think of it,
and it was just this weird coincidence
of standing in a car park outside Seattle,
eating barbecue with a load of people
that historically I'd been drinking with in a pub
in Manchester, not that long before.
Yeah, that was super weird,
and also putting faces to names of people
I only know via online Twitter handles
or IRC nicknames,
and they tell me who they are,
and I'm like, oh you, oh okay, yes, I get it now, yeah.
Yeah, those situations are always really bizarre,
but I think they're even weirder
when it's another random place on the other side of the world,
and you suddenly bump into someone.
I had a similar experience where I met a guy
who actually lives about six miles away from me.
We had no idea each other existed,
met at an old camp,
and like, where are you from?
And we better said where we were from,
and it was that conversation of,
are you really from there,
or are you from town outside of there?
And yeah, it turns out we live about six miles away
from each other,
never knew, had bumped into each other
a ton of times at various events,
and yeah, now we meet up fairly regularly.
Well, my weirdest coincidence is not a very big coincidence,
but it is weird.
So once upon a time,
I decided I was going to do stand-up comedy,
because I thought I was funny,
and that didn't really work out,
but as part of that,
to what I was advised to make a lot of friends on Facebook
and do some networking with other people
who were in the comedy scene,
because that's how you got on and got gigs and stuff.
And so I friendly loads of people,
and then got into podcasting instead of stand-up,
and lost interest in it,
and slowly but surely unfriended people as they annoyed me,
but then I've stayed friends with people
who I find funny and interesting,
and it's a little bit parasocial.
Well, it's a lot parasocial because they don't know me,
and I never post anything.
I occasionally reply snarky things when I'm drunk or whatever,
but I never post anything about my life.
So I know, I feel like I know a few people on there,
and one time near the tube station where I live,
there's a little supermarket there,
and I was going in there one evening,
and I saw one of these people who I'm friends with
in quotes on Facebook,
and I was like, oh, your person's name,
and they said they were like, yeah?
And I had to suddenly like, oh no,
I have to explain this whole story of how I know who you are,
and you don't know who I am,
and I am really good with faces or something,
and that was a coincidence that was weird,
but it was weird because it was weird of me
to have this parasocial relationship with this person.
So I've had a few of those more recently
with having been a kind of public figure
in open source for Ubuntu,
and so there's naturally places I go
and people recognize me,
but actually, I think the first occasion when this happened
was in 1995, and I was in Ibiza on Lads holiday,
and I think I can top your six miles away story
with I was standing waiting for a friend
to go and get changed before we went into a nightclub.
So I'm standing there, it's quite late at night, it's dark,
and this guy comes up to me and he says,
you're Alan, aren't you?
And I said, yeah, I think so, yeah.
And he said, yeah, I live in your road,
and I was like, well, that's weird.
And he told me which house he lived in.
He lived down the end of this cul-de-sac,
and we lived near the entrance of the cul-de-sac.
This is what I lived at home with my mum, right?
And at the time, I had a nice car
because I got a new job
and I got a company car and it was a Mercedes.
And he kind of said, yeah, I live in your road.
We know you.
We've all seen the car,
yeah, I live in your road.
We know you. We've all seen you in your Mercedes.
And I'm thinking, oh God, I feel really terrible.
Ponsin around in this nice car,
in a pretty average neighborhood.
And I was like, it wasn't mine.
It's a company car, it's not mine.
But it was really weird to have some guy
who lives in the very road I live in.
But I guess you could argue that it's just a holiday destination
and that can happen to anyone
because the whole of the UK goes to Ibiza.
Or at least it did back then.
Well, yeah, I remember in the...
Mustard in the late eighties
when I was a little kid
and we were in Florida
on a family holiday
and I've bumped into someone from my school
in Disney World, I think,
which when you think about it,
isn't that weird,
but it felt pretty weird at the time.
Yeah, and I think I've had those situations as well
where I've gone on a family holiday as a kid
and then you've got up on the plane to go to the Lee
and you've seen someone from like your class
because you're walking down the back of the plate
and you just spend the entire thing like,
oh, please, don't be in the same hotel as me.
I think the more recent weird one
was when someone recognized me through my voice
on a train in Germany.
I was heading home
from a canonical internal sprint
and I was chatting to my boss at the time
just stood up in a corridor
on a train in Germany
on the way to the airport.
And while we were chatting away
having a beer,
this guy walked past us
and just stopped
and said,
Popeye,
and I went,
yes,
and he said,
ah, I listened to your podcast,
hold onto these
and he handed us his beers
and then reached in his pocket
and pulled out an Ubuntu phone.
He goes,
look, the Ubuntu phone,
it's here in Germany.
And I was like,
okay,
hello,
it was really weird.
And my boss thought it was very strange
that someone would recognize me just
from my voice because he heard it
as he walked past us.
It was very weird.
Okay, Jean asks,
what are your fondest memories
of just completely disconnecting
from any electronics for a while?
I had a holiday
with Claire a few years ago.
We went down to Cornwall
and stayed in a place called St. Berrien.
And we stayed on a farm
where they got a converted barn
that's been turned into
like a holiday let.
And, you know,
we drove actually onto the farm,
you know,
bumpy roads,
pothold road,
and we get to the barn.
And it was delightful.
But there was absolutely no signal there.
And we spent most of our time
lighting a little wood fire,
sitting out in the garden,
going for walks,
had a walk down to the beach.
But we really didn't use
any electronic devices at all.
I think the FM radio
in the barn
was about as technologically advanced
as it gets.
And even that didn't work very well.
Yeah, I pretty regularly
have a similar experience,
say we've got family in Northern Ireland
and we pretty regularly holiday
in a rural seaside town
in Northern Ireland.
At least once a quarter, I would say.
And the most technological thing there
is where the undersea fiber
goes from the Isle of Man
to Ireland.
But, despite that,
there is absolutely no-cell connectivity.
No internet connectivity.
And the only things in this village
are a scout hut,
a pub,
and some ex-British army
billets that have been converted
into holiday homes.
Literally nothing else there.
Say,
the first time I went there
was the first time I was
meeting my now wife's dad.
Yeah, it was a little bit of a shock
to the system.
But I think
disconnecting from the world
for a week,
due to there being no-cell service
in everything else,
actually was a really nice opportunity
to bond with him
over many, many pints of Guinness.
And, uh,
yeah, just enjoy kind of being disconnected
and taking in the surroundings
and kind of going for walks
around kind of abandoned army base
and the seaside and everything else.
And, yeah, really, really fond memories there.
End up having to do about every three months now.
And whilst the novelty sometimes
wears off,
and I try and find the exact spot
on the fireplace
to put my phone
to get enough connectivity
to stream something on Netflix.
Actually broadly being disconnected
from the world,
knowing that no one can contact me
and actually realizing
that nothing bad is going to happen
if I can't check my messages
until 8 p.m. in the evening
when I have to walk up
onto the bankhead
and suddenly get a glimmer of edge
on my device.
It's actually really nice
because I think that at home
probably become a little bit
of a slave to my phone,
carry it around in my pocket
all the time,
make sure that
I can always get notifications
just in case something bad might happen.
I'm getting physically anxious
listening to this, man.
I could not have a good time
not being connected.
And that's,
I get that some people say,
oh, that's terrible.
But like,
that's just the modern world, man.
And I like the fact
that we're all connected.
I like that I can talk to anyone
at any time
and anyone can talk to me.
I mean, I have my phone on silent.
I have it on my terms
and sometimes I might go
a few hours without looking at it.
But that's on my terms.
I'm not somewhere where
if I did look at my phone
there'd be no connection.
That gives me anxiety
to not have the ability
to have any connection.
So I think the most recent
occurrence where
I was disconnected
was last week
on a canal boat trip
with a bunch of friends
of seven of us rented
a canal boat
from a place called Naptin
and we went south
on the Oxford Canal
towards Boundbury
and then turned around
and went back.
It was only four days
or so on the boat.
We all had our phones
with us in our pockets.
Although a couple of people
just left it on charge
in the canal boat
and just didn't look at it at all.
But they're less connected people
than you or I, Joe.
I spent a lot of the time
standing at the back of the boat,
well, not navigating,
like holding onto the tiller
and making sure I didn't steer
into the side of the canal.
And so I couldn't
use my phone a lot.
I look at it now and then
and take a few photos
and when someone else took a turn
or we went to the pub
I might use my phone.
But during the day
I spent more time
talking to my friends.
Some of which I haven't seen
for a very long time.
And it was more in the moment.
I don't know people
give all these cliché,
you know, touch grass
and, you know,
live in the moment
don't live through the screen.
But it's really true.
Like, the reception
was terrible,
even in the right in the middle
of the UK,
near Oxford and Boundbury.
You'd think they'd be able
to get a cell signal to a canal.
But turns out no.
It was a zone of no connectivity.
But it was fine.
Because there was half a dozen
other people I could talk to
and chat about family stuff
and what they've been up to.
And it was lovely.
It was really, really nice.
You're making it worse telling me
there's half a dozen other people there now.
I think I find for me
that the nervous twitch of,
ah, where's my phone?
Or, ah, have I got any notifications?
It goes away after a couple of days.
The first couple of days
I found myself constantly
going over to the phone
and tapping the lock button,
seeing if there's anything on the screen.
And after a couple of days,
it just disappears.
And I just enjoy spending time
either with the people I'm with
or alone.
Like, yeah, the last time I was there,
took myself off, you know,
four or five mile walk
across the beach
to the next village
and really enjoyed it.
And actually, it was a bit of a change
to go for a walk and not listen to any podcasts,
or anything like that.
And it did feel, you know,
don't you say, Pope,
it's a little bit cliché,
but it did feel a bit more in touch
with what was around me,
despite the fact that
there wasn't really anyone
or anything around me
other than some rocks.
But I think, yeah,
that fear of being disconnected
is something that, for me,
I certainly find healthy
to go and get combat head-to-head
every now and again.
No.
I feel so bad spiders,
but I'm not having that either.
I'm not having them calling on me
and I'm not going anywhere
with no connection, quite frankly.
Or good news,
on the canal boat,
there were loads of spiders
and no connectivity,
so I had the best of both worlds.
Oh, and loads of people as well.
Yeah.
All right, Rev Carol asks,
if you had to choose a board game
to play games to each other,
what would it be?
One-on-one games are allowed.
You don't all have to play it once.
The answer is monopoly,
because monopoly is just
a more complicated snakes and ladders.
You just buy everything you land on,
and then it's just snakes and ladders.
I've only recently been really
getting into board games,
and that's because,
at the previous place I worked,
we had some time on a Friday,
which we called Team Time,
and the whole of my team
would get together on a Zoom call,
and we'd play board games,
and just chat about what we're going to do
on the weekend,
and it was,
for a company that's a hundred percent remote,
I think it was valuable for us to have
a bit of social time.
So it's been like an hour or so,
maybe an hour and a half,
just shooting the breeze,
unwinding before the weekend,
and we play some board games,
and I got introduced to way more board games
doing that via boardgamearena.com,
and I'm now assigned up,
paid user of that service
so that I can play online games.
And the game that I really want to play
with someone else,
it's called Azul,
and it's a thing where you try and collect
these little ceramic counters
and arrange them in certain patterns,
and then you win points for however many
you've got in a pan.
It's really easy to learn,
and you can play,
I think, up to five players or something.
Now, I've never actually played it in person.
I've only played it online.
The rendition of it on the website
shows these little ceramic counters
that look like the kind of tiles
you have on a wall in a swimming pool,
or like Roman patterns
that are made in the floor.
It's that kind of surrounding,
and they look like they feel really great.
I'm probably going to be super disappointed
if I ever play with this in person,
but they look great on screen,
and so I'd love to play that with someone.
I don't care who, I don't care,
where or when,
but I want to play it in person with someone
with real ceramic tiles.
For me, the answer is even simpler
than either of yours is,
Jenga, because I cannot deal with the stress
and arguments that board games call.
In my childhood,
by only memories of playing board games,
are people screaming at each other during monopoly,
or the one person failing to understand the rules.
And with Jenga,
can't really get much more simple
than knocking a block out of the middle of a tower.
And if you knock it over, you lose.
It's simple,
you can play it with more than two people
because you just do rounds.
And it's relatively low stress,
until one of the blocks gets stuck under a safe or something.
I put it to you,
the people do argue about the rules.
Oh, he used two hands.
You can't touch with another hand.
You touch that one.
You can't touch another one now.
You've touched that.
That kind of thing.
See, there's just endless arguments
with any board game.
I just don't want the stress.
And yeah, Jenga,
I find with the people I play it with,
low stress,
but like you say,
Pofy,
anyone can get stuck.
Give it up at any board game.
You should totally play online using board game arena
and Zoom,
because when you get stressed,
you just close the Zoom window
and you're done.
Just rage quit.
Yes.
That's my policy rage quit.
Thanks for watching.
See you next time.
Bye.