PLUG

PLUG is ready for 2026, and this year we’ve decided on a social meet for January.

Please join us for dinner and/or a drink at Rosie O’Grady’s Irish Bar, 96 Fitzherbert Avenue, Palmerston North, on Friday the 16th of January, 2026, at 6:00pm.

If you’d like to come along, please RSVP by email to secretary@plug.org.nz, by 11am on Wednesday the 14th, with the names of those coming, so that your humble secretary can make a reservation. We’ll add a couple of extra seats to our booking just in case, but please don’t bank on this. Newcomers, family, and curious friends are welcome, as always.

Attendee Robbie is prepared to be a designated driver for anyone in Palmerston North or Feilding who would come but for needing to drive. Please contact him on 021 245 6893 if you would like a ride. His car seats five.

We’ll look forward to seeing you there! Note that our usual technical meetings at the Milson Community Hall with presentations from our members will resume in February.

PLUG has had yet another great year, and now 2026 looms. To celebrate, you’re invited to join us at our end-of-year social meet—for pizza!

We don’t have technical presentations at these end-of-year meetings, just good geeky company, hopefully in some summer warmth and sunshine. Feel free to bring along any family or friends!

Newcomers are welcome, too! We don’t have a formal membership beyond the mailing list, and you don’t have to have attended any meetings this year.

Weather permitting, we will meet at The Esplanade, at the tables near the paddling pool, on Wednesday December 10th, at 6:30pm. If the weather is looking bad, the venue will change to the Milson Community Centre. We will update the post here and send another email to the list if this happens.

Please bring $10 per adult in cash to recoup the costs of the pizza. We’ll get at least one vegetarian pizza, and some garlic bread, but if you have dietary restrictions, it would be wise to bring along anything else you’d like to eat.

We’ll look forward to seeing you all there!

Date

7pm, Wednesday, 12 November 2025

Topic 1/2: Newts, Gerbils and a Badger—Supercharging Tunnels

Speaker: Nick Skarott

Take a Newt, add a Gerbil, and throw a Badger in for good luck. Roll them all into one ball and you get Pangolin—Nick’s favourite brand of open source project; one that rolls a bunch of other open source projects into one lovely little ball. Pangolin wraps Traefik and Wireguard with some custom coding in Go and Typescript to present an “Identity Aware Tunnelled Reverse Proxy Server” that has some serious chops, able to be used for basic reverse proxying all the way up to enterprise level access control to your web apps.

Topic 2/2: UEFI, HP, and Me: A Bootloader Love–Hate Story

Speaker: Brendon Green

How one stubborn laptop taught me more about firmware psychology than I ever wanted to know.

Download cover notes (application/pdf, 36 KiB)
Download slides only (application/pdf, 2.1 MiB)
Download slides with speaker notes (application/pdf, 1.2 MiB)

Continue reading “November: Pangolin and UEFI”

Date

7pm, Wednesday, 8 October 2025

Topic 1/2: Drunk on Asahi

Speaker: Jared F.

Apple Silicon Macs are great machines, But what happens when Apple eventually drops support? That’s where the open source community come in, to breathe new life into these machines in ways that Apple never intended.

Download slides (application/pdf, 1.4 MiB)

Topic 2/2: QWERTY, Dvorak, and other abominations

Speaker: Joseph Calkin

Joseph will go over what is required to re-map keys on your keyboard in Ubuntu or Mint.

Download slides (application/pdf, 948 KiB)

Continue reading “October: Asahi and keymaps”

Date

7pm, Wednesday, 10 September 2025

Topic 1/2: Wireless Freedom and New-Found Superpowers

Speaker: Robbie McKennie

Make your router into what it always wanted to be, with OpenWRT.

Download slides (application/pdf, 896 KiB)

Topic 2/2: Self-hosted bots

Speaker: Chris Winkworth

A small look at what it’s like to self-host and manage bots for a Discord community.

Continue reading “September: OpenWRT and Discord bots”

Date

7pm, Wednesday, 13 August 2025

Topic 1/2: The i3 Window Manager—experiences of a new user

Speaker: Giovanni Moretti

Do you keep losing windows and seem to be forever resizing windows on a large monitor? Those points were frustrating me so, about six weeks ago, I decided to try a tiling window manager (i3wm) combined with Ubuntu Mate. In this talk I’ll be covering my experiences in learning to use i3 and adapting it as a new user.

Download slides (application/pdf, 700 KiB)
Download Giovanni’s i3 config (text/plain, 16 KiB)

Topic 2/2: Haiku Live Demo

Speaker: Brendon Green

BeOS inspired
Not Linux nor BSD
Haiku Beta Five

Download slides (application/pdf, 700 KiB)

Continue reading “August: i3wm and Haiku”

Date

7pm, Wednesday, 9 July 2025

Talks

This month, we’re running our take on lightning talks, shorter technical talks of up to 10 minutes each in length, instead of the usual two longer talks. We have the following speakers and topics scheduled, probably in this order:

• Richard O’Donoghue: Terraforming your home lab—An introduction to Infrastructure As Code (IaC)
• Tom Ryder: Bash toolbox sampler—download slides (application/pdf, 132 KiB)
• Robbie McKennie: Lightbulb moment—download slides (application/pdf, 964 KiB)
• Joseph Calkin: Mermaid diagram software
• Nick Skarott: Penguin with a side of rice
• Brendon Green: First looks at KolibriOS—an entire modern GUI operating system on a floppy disk

Venue

Milson Community Centre

Cost

$2 gold coin donation

Coffee and biscuits will be provided, but please feel free to bring along your own snacks and drinks.

Agenda (rough)

• 7:00pm: Welcome (Tom Ryder)
• 7:10pm: Lightning talks begin
• 7:50pm: Tea and coffee break
• 8:10pm: General business (Nick Skarott)
• 8:20pm: Resume lightning talks
• 9:00pm: Doors close

Date

7pm, Wednesday, 11 June 2025

Topic 1/2: OpenSoundMeter

Speaker: Nick Skarott

Sound is always a subjective matter; what one person thinks sounds amazing another thinks is bad. This is unavoidable. But some level of objectivity can bring consistency. Nick has been looking into the free OpenSoundMeter, a project designed to give a free alternative to packages like SMAART and other audio tools used in live sound to bring not only consistency but visual representation to what is going on audibly in a room.

Topic 2/2: Document conversion with Pandoc

Speaker: Tom Ryder

One website wants DOCX, another DOC (and you don’t have Microsoft Office anymore), another PDF, another is just a plain-text field… all this converting between different document formats is a pain. What if we could write a document in a plain text format like Markdown, and just convert it to whatever format our correspondent requires? Pandoc enables just that, and all in free software!

Download slides (application/pdf, 620 KiB)

Continue reading “June: OpenSoundMeter and Pandoc”

Date

7pm, Wednesday, 14 May 2025

Topic 1/2: Infiniband Demonstration

Speaker: Stephen Worthington

Comparing 40 Gbit/s Infiniband and 2.5 Gbit/s Ethernet between two PCs.

Topic 2/2: Self-hosting, self-defense

Speaker: Tom Ryder

Through March and April this year, Tom’s cgit instance was getting hammered with requests by what looked like an enormous botnet of nearly three million IPs, each making only one or two requests, crippling the server and making conventional IP address blocking impossible. He’ll run through the whole sordid story, and talk about how to mitigate attacks on self-hosters by a new generation of threats.

Download slides (application/pdf, 656 KiB)

Continue reading “May: Infiniband and Botnets”