September 10 2019 Postfix, Raspberry Pi, Chromebooks, Wuthering Bytes and Gramps Meet
Mike had encountered a problem with Postfix in that it didn’t start after it had been stopped for a reboot. A quick search revealed that a similar problem had been around in 2016 in both the RedHat and Debian versions of Postfix when it had been traced to a file being left in the wrong place. After discussion, it was suggested that Mike write a script which periodically checked that Postfix was running and then started it if it was not.
Kriss and Shi then showed off the 3.5 inch Touch Screen with Case for the Raspberry Pi; it has a program which uses a number of the GPIO pins to copy the HDMI output to the LCD screen, thereby not affecting the HDMI output.
They have also purchased 18 Toshiba CB30 B Chromebooks on which they have installed Xubuntu for ÂŁ40 each for the proposed Hackspace in Little Germany which is still under discussion.
Otley Maker Space has opened in the Courthouse.
Bernard shared some of his experiences at Wuthering Bytes. During the Saturday talks, he had been given a Z80 microboard which Shi was happy to take away. John noted that the Z80 is still used in devices like lifts where its capabilities are more than adequate. He had also been given a 3.3V/8MHz Pro Micro board for which he had found an app in the Debian repositories; he had also found a Blink program for which he had been able to find the correct pins to use and demonstrated the board alternately blinking two LEDs. Other Saturday talks included Jenny List demonstrating flashing conference badges and Ken Boak the Gigatron computer created entirely from TTLs.
Among the Friday (Festival Day) talks had been Derek Woodroffe’s demonstration of Tesla coils playing the Wuthering Heights music, Heather Williams’ talk on the PET scanner which works by highlighting the most active areas of the body reached by previously ingested fludeoxyglucose, Jo Hinchcliffe’s talk on small satellites which orbit the earth so fast that they need lots of amateur radio hobbyists operating ground stations to pick up their signals and the Atomic Gardener.
He noted that Georgina Ferry had been challenged in her presentation on A computer called Leo (reviewed by John in August 2014) about the role of women in computing at the time.
John rounded off the evening with a demonstration of the genealogical software Gramps which Brian reminded him he had talked about before!
This uses relational tables to link individuals with families, events, places, sources, citations and media. You can start with a single individual and add others in as information becomes available; events can be dated according to the Gregorian or Julian calendars and places can be identified by longitude and latitude. Because of its relational nature, changes are reflected in all those linked by a relationship.
There is a dynamic relationship chart allowing you to explore an individual’s family relationships and one allowing you to move backwards or forwards though generations, and a great many report options which draw on the material in the database to create, for example, a report on all a person’s ancestors or all the current birthdays and anniversaries of people in the database.
Past Meetings