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.

July 14 2020 Python venv, Tasmotizer, Sonoff and INDI

Unfortunately, there were problems with the audio in particular this time which meant that several people who joined us left the meeting. For those who remained

Darren demonstrated a simplified version of cat(1), written in Dlang. It had only one loop, two variables, and three function calls to the D standard library.

Bernard demonstrated using Python virtual environments.

June 9 2020 Linux on Lenovo and the Hedgehog diner

Darren drew attention to the announcement that Lenovo will be supporting Linux across its range with Ubuntu and RedHat and providing full web support. John mentioned that the number of Linux desktops connected to the Internet had now overtaken the number of XP desktops and was approaching the number of Windows 7 desktops; however, there was a long way to go to overtaking the number of Windows 8 desktops.