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.

March 18 2020 Meetings and Covid-19

The absence of any reports on the meetings in February 2020 and March 2020 did not mean that the meetings did not go ahead but that those attending pursued individual projects and there were no presentations.

The Covid-19 pandemic means that we are unlikely to meet face to face in the near future but we are exploring the possibilities of virtual meetings.

Keep in touch through our mailing list.

January 14 2020 PineTime, watch, computer games and 3D printing Meet

Mike had had problems applying a patch to dhcpcd and so David S talked him through the process while the rest of us got on with the meeting.

December 10 2019 Inkscape, xfig and Scribus Meet

David had been demonstrating shaders in GIMP and Mike sharing his experiences with broadband and servers when John arrived rather late with a demonstration of using free and open source software to do something which had originally been done in proprietary software.

November 12 2019 Thought Bubble, Astronomy Project and IT Management Meet

After an exchange of various news items, Bernard mentioned his visit to the Thought Bubble Festival in Harrogate the previous week where a wide range of novel and comic book authors had appeared; Bernard had attended a panel on web comics which had looked at the artistic issues and the technical ones — specifically that web comics do not pay, though it is possible to raise money through patrons or kickstarter funding.

October 08 2019 DNS, Freedombone, Minetest, CSS containers and Mastodon Meet

Mike raised a problem he was having with DNS and Rob, joining us once again after a long absence, explained that the big players and the Content delivery networks were effectively operating a new version of DNS. The only answer was to get a domain hosted by one of the majors like GoDaddy. He went on to say that, notwithstanding the objections from state actors to encryption, end to end encryption would become the default with IPv6 and IoT because it was the only way to make IoT viable. Whatever happens, it will involve changes to hardware, firmware and the Linux kernel. Interestingly, the US Navy which uses Windows is using Linux containers for security.