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.

May 12 2020 Odroid, Debian 10, openSUSE, Home assistant, Advanced Research Computing, Remscope

Ten people, three cats and a hamster participated at various times and in various ways in our second online meeting.

David reported that he had managed to install the Ubuntu 20.4 Mate image on his Odroid but had encountered various problems and was now awaiting the Arch ARM image.

April 14 2020 Paperwork, websites and 3D printing

Brian, John, David, Shi, Kriss and Yoghurt took part in a Jitsi meet.

Brian demonstrated the Paperwork which allows you to store documents in any format, including image formats, and then search (for) them using the inbuilt OCR which gives it an advantage over purely text based search engines.