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.

May 11 2021 Home Assistant, Bluetooth, hedgehogs, Xubuntu 20.4

David had set up Home Assistant in a Docker container. There are four ways to install Home Assistant:

April 13 2021 Wireshark, adb, Cordova, MariaDB authentication

Brian showed a device he had which measures particulates, in particular the PM_2.5 particulates which are particularly dangerous. They had recently experienced sand being blown onshore from the Sahara but there had been none of usual cases of people being affected by the sand particles because people were wearing masks because of the pandemic. Bernard said that he had once experienced sand particles on snow when skiing; when snow later fell on the sand, it turned orange.

March 9 2021 Zigbee, Raspberry Pi Pico, VNC, Chrome sync, MariaDB authentication

Brian finally managed to sort out John’s audio by clarifying that in PulseAudio the settings in the Playback and Recording tabs should be 100% and any volume adjustments made in the Output and Input tabs.

February 9 2021 UMLet, Data Points, git-stash, Pico, IPFS, mariadb, IERS

As there were still problems with the sound on John’s new laptop, we started with a discussion of sound on chromium, whether it might worth trying Firefox, which did not recognise John’s external microphone, or whether it might be worth trying another microphone, without coming to any satisfactory conclusion.

January 12 2021 LXD, openstack, 3D printing

Brian, John W, Bernard, David, Darren and John H joined the meeting this month. Brian began by describing some of the neighbour trouble he was having before

Bernard demonstrated how the content of the four projects contained in LXD containers on the Webparametrics website

December 8 2020 Picture of the day, Kdenlive, wave-share, Tasmota, B4RN

As no-one had prepared anything specific for the meeting, the conversation wandered over a wide range of computing and non-computing topics.

November 10 2020 Nextcloud, Enhancer, ARIA, Agile, INDI and backup

Brian has swapped from Digital Ocean to Amazon because he only needs a web server and not a website but he was puzzled by the output of free -m which suggested that he had very little free memory. David explained that the Linux kernel uses whatever memory there is for cache and so will reclaim memory from cache if it needs more than the free memory available.