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.

October 9 2017 MQTT, MODX and CiviCRM Meet

Bernard demonstrated the software he is developing for the Todmorden Astronomy Centre to enable members remotely to control the Remscope, a robotic telescope currently being constructed at the site.

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.