Stellarium, looping videos and the ‘Mother of all demos’ Meet

Bernard began by demonstrating Stellarium, the open source planetarium.

John H then asked about created a looping video to run on a display probably using a Raspberry Pi.

November 13 2018 systemd, Vokoscreen, ITStuff Meet

Mike asked about getting a new computer on which to install Linux and John suggested he have a look at PCSpecialist in Wakefield from whom Brian had obtained a laptop which he was very happy with.

October 9 2018 Zim, PulseAudio, Review and Vivaldi Meet

Brian shared a problem he had with KDE Activities; there was a Default activity on the desktop but, while it was possible to give the activity a blank name, it was not possible to remove the icon identifying it.

He also mentioned a problem with File Associations for which he had downloaded a separate program but John was able to show him System Settings->Applications->File Associations which allows full configuration of file associations.

September 11 2018 JACK, Ogg Camp and LXD Meet

David C joined us briefly to share progress on open sourcing BCB; he has been able to set up JACK using Rotter as the audio logger.

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.