March 8 2022 NordVPN, Random forest, stepper motor, web server scripting, recycling

Brian said he had gone back to using a PBX as the interface for cordless ’phones and his mobile. The mobile connects via Bluetooth but the audio quality is poor.

He had discovered that the Raspberry Pi 2 is the minimum on which you can use NordVPN with which he is using the Raspberry Pi as a gateway.

February 8 2022 tailscale, adsbexchange.com, TensorFlow, stepper motors

Brian shared a problem he was having with tailscale which uses WireGuard; he had tried to transmit out to a network but it did not work. In Spain he can only watch the BBC on his computer but he can use Vivaldi to cast his desktop to the TV; in this way, he can log in to the BBC and then cast the programme to the TV.

January 11 2022 Korganizer, backups, Konqueror, Jellyfin, ad-silence, Thingyverse

Darren had been having problems with Kontact and was unable to use the Calendar; John suggested he locate the Korganizer std.ics file which can be opened in other calendar programs. John had done something similar when there were problems some years ago with Kontact.

John went on to share a script for backing up mysql/mariadb databases:

December 14 2021 Quiz, mqcontrol, NextCloud backups, Redis

John presented a short quiz to mark 30 years of Linux:

1. On which teaching tool did Linus Torvalds base his original operating system?
2. Which is the longest continuously available Linux distribution?
3. Which company gave its software away and told customers they could pay for support?
4. What does Debian stand for?
5. For which processor did Linus Torvalds rewrite Linux?
6. Which company did Sun buy because it was cheaper than licensing Microsoft Office?
7. Why was the Gnome desktop created?
8. When was Ubuntu first issued?
9. Apart from the Linux kernel, what other programs has Linus Torvalds created?
10. Which software does Android use instead of the GNU utilities?
11. Which is the most widely used database software in the world?

November 9 2021 Review, Home Assistant, SMARTY, TV websites

Darren reported that his DVD drive door opens whenever the machine is returning from sleep; a couple of suggestions were made: that he checks the BIOS firmware and that he checks the boot order to see if the DVD is selected prior to the hard drive.

He is continuing to explore Picroft.

He showed a Bluetooth speaker he had acquired to amplify smartphone audio.

October 12 2021 AI, Jupyter, ELIZA, Node-RED

Darren began by sharing what he had been looking at in machine learning and AI: Siri/Alexa/Picroft and a number of personal projects including

• MENACE (Matchbox Educable Noughts and Crosses Engine)
• draughts
• NIM (see this PDF)
• Jupyter notebooks, formerly IPython Notebooks, a web-based interactive environment for creating notebook documents; it is a bit like Zim in that you can import images, run programs, etc.

September 14 2021 Booting Raspberry Pi from a USB drive, cal

As no-one apart from Brian had brought anything to share, the conversation roamed across a range of non-computing topics.

Brian had however solved the problem he had had over booting a Raspberry Pi from a USB drive.

August 10 2021 Aladin, page layout, setxkbmap, Apache Bench, Met Office Datapoint

David shared the rather underwhelming photo of BepiColumbo skimming past Venus.

Bernard shared some more of his work for the Astronomy centre, focusing on the Aladin client. One of the problems in astronomy is determining a zero point from which coordinates can be calculated. Traditionally the zero point had been determined as the equinox but it is now determined by using a catalogue of distant objects which are apparently stationary but whose positions can be determined. This has led to a formal definition of the International Celestial Reference System (ICRS) which the Python package astropy will convert by using a website which gives the earth’s position at present.

July 13 2021 Raspberry Pi, AWK, Perl, Python, HTML, W3.CSS, Windows 11

Brian had been caught in Covid-19 related travel problems and was having to join us using his Raspberry Pi tethered to his smartphone to create an Ethernet connection. He commented that he was able to use iView Australia without any problems.

June 8 2021 get_iplayer, Home Assistant, MariaDB, desktop options

Brian asked about people’s experience of get_iplayer and John said that you needed to keep up with the latest version, which Brian had, but John had had no problems with it except when he had not updated it recently.

Brian then expanded on how he had added Node_RED to Home Assistant demonstrating how he could add a gauge by pulling elements from the left hand column. However, he had had difficulty getting Home Assistant to connect to the Internet.