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.

Brian demonstrated how you can use the KDE Wallpaper settings

to access the Bing Picture of the Day:

He also mentioned that Windows mobile ’phones are prized by asylum seekers because it is safe to contact their families because people don’t hack Windows ’phones.

John demonstrated Kdenlive which he had been using to create online material during the pandemic. He had initially found it confusing because it was not self-evident that you had to select Project->Add clip before you could do anything. Brian commented that he had had a similar problem when he started to use Node-RED.

John demonstrated moving a clip to the main editing channels, cutting it and removing a section. Through manipulating the clips graphically, you in effect create a script which you ultimately ask Kdenlive to use to render the video. Kdenlive accepts clips in almost any format and it is best to set the main editing channels to the highest resolution you intend to use. Then you can select mp4 or webm for high resolution output, for example, to put a video on Youtube. You can create DVDs by the selecting the Old TV/DVD option which creates videos at 720×576 resolution. There is a Custom DVD format but this does not create videos which will play on older/more basic DVD players.

Brian mentioned that, having become frustrated with the Apache directory listings, he had download Nginx and found it no less frustrating.

Thereafter the conversation drifted off into Brian’s neighbours, the contents of his snack and sourdough starter hotels (search the Internet) until Brian brought the conversation back to wave-share, a proof-of-concept for linking computers wirelessly using WebRTC browsers and sound.

He then shared a screenshot of an extract from default-ssl.conf which he had used to set up a reverse proxy for his AWS server:

David asked about the use of ip4 and suggested Brian enter

netstat -pant

with revealed that Brian was in fact using ip6.

David also asked about using Tasmota from the command line and Brian later came back with the answer that, assuming you are operating a MQTT broker, such as Mosquitto, you can just use MQTT commands.

Thereafter the conversation drifted into more general topics such as wi-fi availability, electrical connections, Brexit, Covid-19 and the vaccine rollout with brief excursions into B4RN, which offers Gigabit Ethernet to rural households in the north of England, Wireguard, Tubi, which currently requires a US location permanently to access its material, and whether WhatsApp web provided the same level of security as using WhatsApp between two mobile ’phones — the jury was out on this one.

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