July 14 2026 PRIMOS, APL, Adblocking, OpenWRT, Google

David, in response to a comment about virtualisation, mentioned that PRIMOS could be run as a user session under PRIMOS but had no access to services. It was written in Fortran and was used by accountants in one department in which he worked.

John remarked that, once VisiCalc and Lotus 1-2-3 arrived, accountants swapped to using those. Darren asked about accounting programs which did not rely on a spreadsheet and John said that there is KMyMoney for personal accounting and GNUCash for business accounting.

Darren has been working on coding Conway’s Game of Life in APL; he has got this far

but rotate in the Neighbours function does not work in the new versions of APL.

John mentioned that the German Federal Government has been working towards the adoption of open standards and from 2027 will only accept ODF and PDF/UA for documents.

There was a discussion of the various software which incorporates Adblocking either inherently or if the user selects it. John mentioned PlasmaTube which relies on yt-dlp and David noted that yt-dlp will download videos from almost any webpage.

Brian mentioned that you can now use Home Assistant to handle intercoms and telephones. However, he recently had a problem after updating OpenWRT; the Wi-Fi coverage was terrible and he had to roll back to 3.8.

In order to connect to the Internet, he uses a Smarty SIM to connect to 5G; the advantage of Smarty is that contracts are monthly and so he can vary the contract each month depending on whether he is going to be in Spain or in England. That said Smarty deals for individuals are quite good and he has opted for one of those deals at present. It was noted that Smarty is part of 3 which had joined Vodafone who often lay down quite tight conditions. However David looked up the current Smarty conditions and found that they were quite generous, more than enough for Brian’s needs.

Brian also noted that Google is changing the way you can install apps on Android, to the disadvantage of software like F-Droid, while David pointed out that the European Court had recently upheld a €4.1bn fine for using the Android system to block rivals.

Past Meetings