I know the feeling, some of the new M callsign holders can be worse than CB'ers of old.
Since John's demo HPSDR has moved on, they have condensed all those transceiver boards on to a single board Hermes - details at openhpsdr.org.
John's blog is at
http://g0orx.blogspot.co.uk/ and he has done surprisingly sterling work to the benefit of Linux and Android users. He started with ghpsdr and ghpsdr3 software and contributed to ghpsdr3-alex by Alex Lee (9V1AL) which supports quite a number of different SDR receivers and transceivers so I can put Hermes and/or HiQSDR on the internet using Parallella and access them from anywhere using an Android phone or tablet. Anyone can listen and if they are first on can tune. I can also use my mobile phone to receive and transmit (ID and Password protected).
I also run a HiQSDR based on a design by N2ADR and developed by DB1CC - hiqsdr.com.
At the basic and cheap end there is also the Softrock SDR's from kb9yig.com, that was where I started - fun stuff giving surprisingly good performance.
Oops! that should be fivedash.com instead of kb9yig.com
Retired - Senior Staff Specialist Amdahl worldwide supporting AMDAHL/Fujitsu/IBM Mainframes and Sun/Fujitsu SPARC servers.