August 14 2018 Glances, Nextcloud, Handshake and Brian Kernighan Meet

Brian demonstrated Glances, a cross-platform system monitoring tool written in Python, running in tmux on his server.

He then said that he had installed Nextcloud using a server running on a Raspberry Pi. This is relatively easy on a Raspberry Pi 2, less so on a Raspberry Pi 3. It involves downloading the server image onto a desktop computer, copying it onto an SD card, putting this in the Raspberry Pi, booting it and then updating the image.

July 10 2018 Wayland, postmarketOS, browsers, cheating, IT Stuff and Press Reader Meet

Brian asked about Wayland which did not seem to work well with Cairo Dock; John said that Wayland with KDE Plasma was an option in openSUSE Leap 15.0 but it did not work well yet.

June 12 2018 Befunge, Python, Code Swarm, Uptime Robot and vulnerabilities Meet

Darrenshared his experiences at the June Leeds Code Dojo meeting when the programming challenge was to write a parser for Befunge whose code is written on a two dimensional grid and uses Reverse Polish Notation. Befunge was originally written to be as hard to compile as possible though compilers do exist for it. He showed the parser he had written in D.

May 8 2018 Joplin, Reaper, Yandex and Tiny Tiny RSS Meet

Brian showed us his new laptop from PCSpecialist running Linux Mint with Cairo Dock and recalled that he had been looking for a replacement for Tomboy because it does not synchronise well and cannot show anything other than text. He had found Joplin which uses Markdown and, following a recent request, now has a search within notes feature.

April 10 2018 i3, Vimium, qutebrowser, Vivaldi and Wireguard Meet

Oliver shared his recent experiences of the i3 tiling window manager. It is very easy to flip between tiles and between tiles in different workspaces which makes it easy to move between different terminals. i3 has a lot of add-ons but mostly they add bling.

March 13 2018 CSS Containers and Skipole Project Meet

Darren brought a problem he had had with some wi-fi headphones but, after various attempts to find a solution, we concluded that there was a hardware compatibility problem.

John thanked members for their contributions at the previous meeting to the GDPR presentation which had been well-accepted by non-geeks. He went on to highlight a number of changes to HTML and CSS. Ostensibly there had been very few changes to HTML — such as the removal of the <keygen> and <menuitem> elements — but the apparently superfluous <main> element which had been added four or five years earlier had been revealed as the foundation for some far reaching developments.

February 13 2018 GDPR, codewars, Meltdown and Spectre Meet

John shared a presentation he was developing on GDPR for small voluntary organisations. David S commented that the test for organisations would be ‘have you made a bona fide attempt to meet the regulations?’ He also commented on the three different uses of ‘loss’:

• loss of data by deletion
• loss of data by theft, and
• loss (harm) to someone as a result of either of the first two.

January 8 2018 LineageOS, Classic Programmer Paintings and Let’s Encrypt Meet

Brian described how he had reflashed his smartphone and his tablet. With the demise of CyanogenMod, LineageOS has taken taken over this space. First go to the Wiki and find the codename for your device; then click on that for the instructions for your device. Note that these are overcomplicated and many steps can be ignored.

Go to OpenGApps where you need to locate your Android version and your processor. You can also choose the level of Google service you want from minimal to maximum. Download the relevant zip file to your computer.

December 11 2017 Advent of Code, Skype for Linux and Wireguard Meet

Darren suggested that we look at Advent of Code, a series of increasingly difficult programming puzzles, which he did while Alice decided to apply Test Driven Development to solving the puzzles which resulted in a solution to the first of the puzzles before he had to leave to catch his train.

November 13 2017 Krack, Algoraves and maths software Meet

Darren had brought some cakes for us to celebrate his birthday and mentioned the Krack vulnerability in WPA2. David S referred to the part of this press release which refers to the early release of a patch by OpenBSD and the exclusion of OpenBSD from early notification of future vulnerabilities.