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.

October 13 2020 ssh, systemd, Codewars, Sphinx and LoRa

Brian shared the problems he was having connecting over ssh behind carrier grade NAT. A number of possible solutions were discussed including using wireguard or socat or following the SSH Port Forwarding Example and the problem was eventually solved.

September 8 2020 12th birthday, browsers, MS and packaging

David S is still looking for a decent Android text editor. This query led on to a discussion of Android Firefox problems. Bernard, Darren, Brian, David, John and, later, Nick joined the discussion.

August 11 2020 Microtik OS, Dlang, virtualisation and Anaconda cloud

Brian shared a number of problems he was having configuring a VPN with the Microtik router OS; the only suggestion people could make was to use Wireguard instead for what he wants. Brian also mentioned that he had had a look at Boxee Smart DNS as a possible way forward.