July 8 2025 Writing software with AI, Bluesky, Calibre Content server, Alpine Linux, KeyPassX, LocalSend

Darren reported problems booting from a USB and thought there might be a problem with Grub but John said that booting from a USB is normally handled by the BIOS and not by Grub.

Bernie presented a simulation of the INDI terminal program which he is developing using the Textualize library.

Brian shared his experience of writing software with AI; in one case he had asked for a program in PHP to manage lots of documents with the same name in different directories and the AI software generated did exactly what he wanted it to do.

In another case, he had given Google Gemini a circuit to design with the constraints that it should use the D1 mini and that all the components should be available from AliExpress. Google Gemini cannot draw things but it can describe them and so he had got a response — which he demonstrated — but had not yet tried it out.

In a third case he had tried giving all the arguments that were possible but had not got a result.

David mentioned Bluesky and someone asked about Fosstodon; David explained that one of the monitors had adopted an extreme right wing position and the founders had left; so he had moved to Bluesky

Bernie showed off his ‘History of the personal computer’ T shirt.

Brian introduced the Calibre Content server which allows you to access your books anywhere; this is separate from the Calibre desktop program for creating e-books. David noted that there is an alternative — Cops — but this has not been updated since 2019; however, there are lots of forks.

Steve asked if anyone had any experience of Alpine Linux, which uses musl, BusyBox and OpenRC rather than the GNU Utilities; Steve was directed to Working with the Alpine Package Keeper.

Brian demonstrated a conflict he was encountering when trying to update KeyPassX on Nextcloud; it was suggested that it might be related to a timezone conflict. Steve asked how you could access files on Nextcloud and David said you could using NFS; Steve wondered if you could use CIFS and David suggested he Google it.

Brian has tried LocalSend to send files between devices but had found that there was a conflict with tailscale. He had previously used Magic-Wormhole for this.

Finally, he mentioned a security vulnerability affecting carriage returns in git-config files which had been fixed that day.

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