December 11 2018 Stellarium, looping videos and the ‘Mother of all demos’ Meet

Bernard began by demonstrating Stellarium, the open source planetarium.

John H then asked about created a looping video to run on a display probably using a Raspberry Pi. Kriss said that any Raspberry Pi would do this using Omxplayer. [John later found a page about Looping multiple videos with Omxplayer.] You can create the image using QEMU and the monster-mesh scripts. There would need to be a USB power source and there might be problems with a power low message appearing on the video output if a cheap USB cable was used which would need to be suppressed.

John mentioned that there appeared to have been an upgrade to MTP in the most recent release of openSUSE Leap — which means that some USB cables will no longer connect to a smartphone using MTP whereas others will — possibly because cheaper cables do not have all their pins connected.

Kriss and Shi mentioned that they have just returned from a tour demonstrating OpenGL Shaders.

David S then suggested that we should mark the 50th anniversary of Doug Engelbart’s ‘Mother of all demos,’ the first demonstration of a graphical user interface, hypertext and many other things which we now take for granted, by watching some extracts from it.

Past Meetings