September 11 2017 WebAssembly, Node-RED, asciinema, Review of the Year and Magicbane Meet

Shi brought some cakes, including a beautiful chocolate cake, to celebrate our ninth birthday.

Kriss and Shi introduced WebAssembly on which all the browser manufacturers have agreed to work. WebAssembly provides a virtual CPU which maps to the actual CPU in the device on which you can run C programs compiled to run on the virtual CPU. It operates at a lower level than the Java VM and the code, which runs closer to bare metal than anything else, will run in any browser — as long as the browser manufacturers are not lying. Because it runs in a sandbox, it is as secure as Javascript.

August 14 2017:VirtualBox, Node-RED, LyX, P versus NP and Firefox Meet

As a result of questions by Ash at the previous meeting and John W at this one,

John H demonstrated VirtualBox with FreeDOS running inside it. He has yet to install any DOS programs to run in it!

July 10 2017:AppImage, Slackbuilds and StarPlot Meet

Brian introduced AppImage which provides a way of installing packages directly from the maintainer without going through a distro.

June 12 2017:Guacamole, test-driven development, Ansible and Wireguard Meet

As no-one had prepared anything,

Brian mentioned that his search for a replacement for Tomboy had led him to Apache Guacamole which is currently an Apache Incubator project.

May 8 2017: Intel AMT, EdgeXFactory, Shodan and CiviCRM Meet

April 10 2017: Creating a Git Repository Meet

We welcomed Ben, a Python programmer from Cambridge, who was on a working trip to West Yorkshire.

Brian asked about notetaking apps because Tomboy was no longer synchronising properly. He would prefer a web-based app and had looked at Minimatch which uses NPM.

This provoked a discussion about developers dropping features.

Then, while David S led a private discussion at one end of the room,

March 13 2017: Farewell to Stephane Meet

Only Stéphane had announced something to share; so

John W asked about freezing rows and columns in LibreOffice Calc. This has changed recently but involves placing the cursor in the highest cell on the left hand side which you do not want to freeze and then selecting Windows->Freeze in older versions and View->Freeze cells in the newer versions.

February 13 2017: American Fuzzy Lop, SlackBuilds, LowEndSpirit, GPL violations and Jitsi Meet

As only David had come with anything to share, we rambled round a wide range of topics.

Nick, who was with us for the first time since 2015, showed us the ThinkPad he had bought for £80 on eBay and told us that he had moved on from SkyBet to Leeds University Department of Engineering where there is a lot of Linux, mostly CentOS and using Puppet, and a wide range of computing resources up to an HPC cluster which is used by, among others, the European Space Agency.

January 9 2017: TU100, automatic static website creation and Slackbuilds

Darren shared some of the problems which had appeared on the Open University TU100 My digital life forums relating to the SenseSense programming language which the Open University have developed from Scratch for use with mature students. Darren himself had had a problem because his 64-bit OS was just that; it had no 32-bit libraries.

December 12 2016: PIC micro-controller, Ham radio logging and LXQt

Roger who hails from South Yorkshire and had stopped by on a return journey from Sutton Bank shared his experiences of using Linux with the PICkit and PIC microcontroller.