July 9 2024 AWK, Alexa, Plasma 6.1

Brian commented that nmap is not working as it used to [as from 7.90, it changed its licence and is no longer considered free; the alternative would appear to be ZMap].

Darren is working on a demonstration of AWK, the data extraction program. He demonstrated some examples of basic conditional printing and of combining patterns to achieve more sophisticated results.

June 11 2024 Python+ncurses, Raspberry Pi Ltd, EMF Camp, Alexa

Bernie has been working on a console based interface which he can use with SSH to manage devices controlled through the Instrument Neutral Distributed Interface (INDI) using Python and the ncurses library.

In the specific example he demonstrated, he sent a new target to change the temperature. But in practice, by setting vectors to be values, you can have the controls to manage multiple devices, as long as there is a driver for the device. It can be used with any instrument though Bernie has in mind those using INDI.

May 14 2024 systemd, tailscale, Raspberry Pi Connect

As we were not able to have the expected presentation, we just discussed things we had encountered.

David noted the takeover of sudo by systemd.

Mike enquired about loading tailscale onto his Huawei smartphone and was recommended to use F-Droid.

April 9 2024 Giraffe Academy, jsDelivr, Redis, Tasmota

Mike has been getting on with MODX but had problems with cPanel; Brian recommended looking at Giraffe Academy which offers up-to-date information on things you can do in the HTML and CSS rather than Javascript.

March 12 2024 code golf, KDE6,YubiKey, MODX, pfSense

Bernie had circulated a Python3 script to address the first of the challenges set by Darren at the previous meeting.

The inclusion of an f"<string>" in Bernie’s script prompted a discussion of f"<string>"s. Bernie explained that you can include a variable within a brace in the string and also that you can use a format specifier followed by a : in the brace. David noted that every language has different format specifiers; C got them from the Fortran format operator.

February 13 2024 code golf, SimpleScreenRecorder, Kdenlive, Audacity

Mike raised a problem he had had. Having changed a setting, he was unable to get back in to change it back. He knew where to make the change but could not find a way to get there. John suggested SystemRescue which has the virtue of not touching anything unless you tell it to do.

Once running, enter:

fsarchiver -v probe

to identify the partitions and their names. Mike can then mount the relevant partition in /mnt, go into the partition, make the change, for example, with nano and quit.

January 9 2024 code golf, darktable, Raspberry Pi 400, AI, Niklaus Wirth, PDF/X

Calyx meet was down for maintenance and Brian wasn’t around to invite people to Discord; so we used the openSUSE Jitsi instance.

Darren said that at the York CoderDojo he had had a go at code golf in which people aim for the shortest possible code to solve a particular problem.

Mike said that, while Ansel, the fork of darktable, is being cleaned up, it has still got a fault in it; so he has been using Rawtherapee + GIMP but will go back and look at Ansel; Bernie noted that there has been a new release of darktable at Flatpak.

December 12 2023 darktable, Raspberry Pi 5, Pi Zero, package managers, macros

For the first of our new style online meetings, Bernie, Darren and John started on Discord while Steve and Mike started on Calyx meet before we all moved to Calyx meet where we were joined by David and John W.

Mike has had a problem with sound disappearing; John suggested that he use PulseAudio to diagnose which sound sources are recognised and whether any have been muted. Mike has also had a problem with darktable and has been told he needs to get a coredump. But for that he needs the devel files and to compile darktable with -g set. Steve looked up the source on github which provides all the information about how to build darktable.

November 14 2023 Book publishing: LaTeX and Scribus

Transport problems prevented two members arriving and delayed the start of the first of our planned quarterly face-to-face meetings; we began with a couple of news items.

Bernie reported that there was a pop-up Raspberry Pi shop in the Victoria Centre in Leeds. Buying them from a shop was a bit different from ordering them online!

September 12 2023 Fifteenth birthday, Let’s encrypt, Home assistant, ESPHome

John started to present the Fifteenth Birthday presentation but did not notice when his notebook needed plugging into the mains and ended up describing it rather than presenting it! David S mentioned that David Carpenter is using Oracle Cloud Free Tier. He also mentioned a problem with the Let’s Encrypt challenge; having set up auto-renew for a domain, he set up a manual challenge for a sub-domain but, when he wanted to change it to auto-renew, he found that the Let’s Encrypt database had it down as a manual renew and would not let him set up auto-renew.