October 14 2025 LineageOS, AOSP, AI, W3.CSS, Alpine.js, htmx, OpenWrt
The meeting began with a political discussion and ended with a political discussion in the middle of which we discussed some computing matters.
David noted that LineageOS is excellent for getting updates which manufacturers have stopped providing but various programs won’t work on it because they know that it is not proper Android. Brian mentioned that Android Open Source Project (AOSP) offers an alternative.
Brian reported on the results of his investigations into AI. The first program he had requested to use PHP to sort files out had worked OK. However, all the other four programs had generated variables which did not appertain to what Brian wanted or did things which Brian did not want. David commented that the less you know about AI the more you trust it.
John mentioned that there had been a Google Summer of Code project Building a Semantic Search Engine for Any Video which used a variety of programs including some AI to search for content in a video.
Bernard shared his experiences of using a number of libraries to develop a website that can handle instrumentation and is easy to update:
- W3.CSS which gives you a ready made CSS file to enable you to use all the features of CSS;
- Alpine.js which gives you ready made JavaScript attributes which you can insert into HTML tags to do various things; and
- </> htmx, a JavaScript library which enables you to insert ready made JavaScript attributes into HTML tags which communicate directly with the server; there is no need to update a whole page when a change is made within a page. Also, if more than one person is accessing the page, simultaneous updates are made to all the pages being accessed.
He went on to demonstrate the code in action.
Brian had purchased a Dell OctiPlex 3060 from 2017 but found that he could not get any memory for it or it was very expensive. He also asked why, when he deleted a container, it did not change the size of the partition. Steve said that he assumed he was using LVM and went on to demonstrate how a Proxmox server can be added to a cluster after which you can migrate VMs from one server to another; you can even do this while one system is running and, after the migration, it will close down the original system. Steve added that all nodes in a cluster must be operational in order for a cluster to run but you can give votes to a cluster to ensure that there are enough votes to keep the cluster running.
Bernard mentioned the release of the Raspberry Pi 500+.
Steve asked if anyone had any experience of the OPNsense firewall/router; he is currently using pfSense but had a catastrophe and wanted to look at something else. Brian uses OpenWrt; the input is on DHCP and output is 10.10.10.10. He uses tailscale to connect to Nextcloud, his Calibre Content server and Readeck.
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