3rd Birthday Meeting, Sept 2011

Happy Birthday to us, and thanks (once again) to Andrea for the baking. Yum!

September 28th 2011 - 3rd Birthday Meeting

Doesn't time fly? BradLUG (BradGNU/LUG?) is now 3 years old. It's one of those "queen's birthday" things as September has been chosen as the official marker of the years. John has produced this graphic to try to illustrate the different things that have happened in that time. You can download a higher pdf version if you'd like to give a closer inspection. As for September's meeting. We're just discussing that. As ever, your biggest conundrum is to work out whether or no the talk of cake is a lie! Download: Third year of Bradlug

31st August 2011 - Darktable, buses, desktops and HTML5

David Spencer presented Darktable, which does similar things to DigiKam, Shotwell and F-Spot but generally does them better. Its key feature is that the original photos remain untouched; instead Darktable manipulates a history stack of changes, including changes to the metadata, which can then be exported elsewhere....

July 27th 2011 - Distros, Raspberries, and Microsoft

A select group discussed distributions, including Galpon Minino, a Debian based Spanish distribution which will run on old computers and their version for children ( http://gruvi.galpon.org/minino/miscelanea/PicarOS.avi) and the Turkish produced Pardus distro (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=viEQ-DWxX50), progress with Raspberry Pi (http://www.raspberrypi.org/), due out in November, and setting up Myth TV.

June 29th 2011 - Open VPN, Truecrypt, Bitcoin...

At last night's meeting we discussed OpenVPN, Truecrypt, Bitcoin and Tomboy Notes.

The slides from the talk on OpenVPN are available from Github, but probably don't make any sense on their own.. We covered the use-cases for OpenVPN, along with discussion on problems setting it up people had encountered and tricks and tips. We also quickly installed a server on the night, so hopefully people feel more comfortable setting it up now.

Tomboy

Tomboy can be used for multiple note taking and then all the separate notes are available, in a list, for you to consult.

Images and photographs

Images, whether graphics, figures or photographs, can be included in almost anything a voluntary organisation produces from newsletters and manuals to a website.

May 25th 2011 - Open source, intellectual property and all that jazz – the MIT licence

Robert concluded his presentation on IP law by looking at US, European and UK law and taking a detailed look at the structure and content of the MIT licence. Members digested the news that Linus is thinking of starting kernel 3.0.0, John summarised where we are with the FOSS articles for Bradford CVS and invited contributions and Nick introduced the Raspberry Pi computer: http://www.raspberrypi.org/

April 27th 2011 - Open source, intellectual property and all that jazz

Robert took us through the first part of his presentation on the legal fiction of IP covering copyright, patents and trademarks pointing out that IP law is framed by lawyers for publishers to maximise investor returns and imposed on consumers, producers and distributors. John then introduced the Cabinet Office survey on open source standards which is very much aimed at integrators rather than individual users and David demonstrated Quantum GIS.

Desktop publishing

Most voluntary organisations need to advertise themselves, publish information or produce newsletters. Often using an Office suite or Microsoft Publisher is enough. But what if these don't give quite the polished finish you want? Enter Scribus.