July 28th 2010: Show and Tell

No formal speaker this month, so those with something to show, got up and told us about:

• Command Line Animation
• Router Question
• The forum
• Out and about in Bradford
• SCO update...
• Picture Competition
• European PyCon
• Top 10 Open Source/FOSS applications 

July Meeting this week!

Hey folks,

June 30th: Creative Applications

Tonight we were joined by Huw Davies, creator of the Bunny web comic to talk to us about using open source products in the creative space, with a focus on images for the web and for print. He spoke about GIMP, Inkscape, and Scribus and a few useful command line tools. He gave a run down of the pro's and con's of each from his perspective, but demonstrated his enthusiasm for each of the products in the phrase 'It just works!".

Open Office Writer

Writer, the Word equivalent, looks more like Word 2003 but is right up-to-date. It even has some features you won't find in Word, like support for discontinued Word formats and for WordPerfect, handy for accessing archived files,

Open Office

OpenOffice offers the most commonly used features of Microsoft Office; it looks more like Office 2003 but will read Office 2007 files.

Firefox Continued

When you start Firefox, you will find all your Favourites under Bookmarks and you can simply carry on selecting them as before.

Firefox

Firefox is a very popular alternative to Internet Explorer that is not only cross platform (so it works on Mac and Linux computers too) but standards compliant and far more secure.

May 2010: Law, Open-Source, Linux

No. Attending: 19 We had David Forbes giving us the main talk of the evening: Law, Open-Source, Linux. In (very) brief: David put technology into sides -the Force and the Darkside The Force covered much on bringing technology to all people. He spent some time talking about making the web accessible - with reference to a case study of a blind person. The Dark side focused on licences, copyright, and how people fall foul of these legal instruments. He covered the SCO claims around Linux needing to be licensed to them. Summed up by "Establishing provenance is a about documentation"

April 2010 – Show and Tell

Among other things....

• David S – How to build your own Geographical Information System
• John Demoed – Marble Desktop for KDE
• Bernie’s Python Animation
• Wayne’s Ubuntu Netbook Edition

March 24th 2010 Privacy and the Web

Alice told the story of privacy and the Web. In the beginning, ownership was confined to a few with most people in serfdom; then mortgages allowed people to begin to own things. In computing, one started with the mainframe where you didn’t own anything; then people got PCs which allowed them to own the hardware but not the code; Linux allowed people to own the hardware, the code and the data. With Web 2.0 you once again don’t own the hardware or the code or even your data; with the cloud you don’t own the hardware. In future IPv6 will be able to be used as ID numbers.