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Hey Know How crew!


G+_Matt D
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Hey Know How crew! I liked your segment on the Raspberry Pi web server, though I do have one concern. You've already self critiqued yourself as far as the amount of information in the video goes and the show notes make up for it. My concern is just that you're not really explaining what some of these commands do. It's just an arbitrary list of instructions to follow without any knowledge going into it. The one thing that comes to mind that I can compare it to really is what script kiddies do. Commands like sudo and chown and editing conf files is something that IMO someone needs to understand before really getting into running a web server.

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There's a thin line between consumer tech and hobbyist geek, and I believe they try to balance it all out, but you're right, there needs to be some further info either on this show or another. Then again, if you google steps to do something in Linux it's usually a list of commands with no description either. I'm surprised there hasn't been a Linux 101 class yet.

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Matt D -- Here's the thing... If I were to explain each step so that every audience member had a thorough understand of what the command is, what it does, and all the possible permutations, each RasPi segment would take about 6 hours. 

 

We can't do that... 

 

What we CAN do is to show the process, and then count on the individual to say, "Hmmm... I wonder what "chown" is... and why is it so important"... then to look it up and get learned.

 

As Brent Burnette mentioned, we're trying to walk that fine line between education and entertainment. Furthermore, what we've found is that when we dedicate an entire 20-45 minutes episode to a single topic, very few people watch it.

 

We can always expand on topics in the future, but a "start to finish" project involving the RasPi in which all the commands are explained in-depth, is probably not in the cards.

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Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ , I get that and that's why you I'm glad you guys go through the trouble of putting great show notes together.  I'm not saying to do an advanced Linux 101 every episode, because you're right, that would be boring.  But maybe mentioning "now we need to change ownership by typing...." But, at the end of the day, you make up for that gap in your show notes.

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I think you will find it easier to learn tech things if you are willing to treat some things as "boiler plate" and just type them in.  This is extra true when it is a one-time event to set something up that will run for months that you are unlikely to adjust.  

 

     You mention script kiddies, but how many web designers know what the "html xm lns ="http www w3 org" " means at the top of every web page? It doesn't need to be understood, just typed in to get the web page off the ground.

 

     Lots of web servers are set up to be run day-to-day after initial setup from a gui from another computer (on the same LAN) without ever using the command line.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Maybe KH could "farm out" detailed treatments to viewers (videos/blogs/tumblr), who have domain expertise, with a short <3 min. "viewer video" tease segment. GizWiz has such a segment with an "I invented that" category but their audience isn't too technical I think.

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