PLUG

Date

7pm, Wednesday, 9 October 2024

Topic 1/2: Reverse engineering ASUS ROG laptops—Part 2

Speaker: Luke Jones

Finding and reversing binaries to figure out WMI calls and args. Plus a short demonstration of looking for info in a DLL. And if time permits, demo of reversing the ASUS ROG Azoth keyboard.

Topic 2/2: Tools, old and new

Speaker: Tom Ryder

A lot of text-based terminal tools on GNU/Linux systems have been around such a long time that when someone attempts to replace them with something that works better, nobody even notices. Even formally deprecating them doesn’t help if people don’t notice! Tom will run through a few tools that are deprecated, or at least sub-optimal, and that have widely-available replacements that are very likely already installed on a GNU/Linux system. You may be surprised how much of your tool-set has better alternatives—and no, not just more colorful ones, or ones re-written in Rust…

Continue reading “October: ASUS and new tools”

Date

7pm, Wednesday, 11 September 2024

Topic 1/2: Goodbye [insert your cloud provider here], Hello Coolify

Speaker: Richard O’Donoghue

Coolify is an open-source and self-hostable platform as a service (PaaS) alternative. Richard will show us how it works.

Topic 2/2: Reverse engineering ASUS ROG laptops

Speaker: Luke Jones

Luke will walk us through his work making ASUS ROG laptops first-class citizens in the Linux kernel.

Continue reading “September: PaaS and ASUS”

Date

7pm, Wednesday, 14 August 2024

Topic 1/2: Network modeling with NetBox

Speaker: Tom Ryder

Whether you’re managing an ISP or just a somewhat ambitious home lab, over time it gets difficult to keep track of assets of your network as it expands. The first thing people might think of is keeping track of how all of your IP networks and addresses are assigned—the classic IPAM concept (Internet Protocol Address Management). In NetBox, this concept expands to model many other properties of a network: cable connections, hardware positions in racks, services, virtualization, power…

Tom will demonstrate how to get started with a self-hosted NetBox instance, including the first steps to modeling a simple home lab.

Topic 2/2: The Tech Sector’s Unfair New Swearword

Speaker: Nick Skarott

Developments in both hardware and software have turned one aspect of our digital worlds into the ultimate tech sector swearword. Nick thinks this is grossly unfair as it has very useful applications when used right. Nick has been looking into one such application of this swearword that is lightweight, unintrusive, and practical.

Continue reading “August: NetBox and swear words”

Date

7pm, Wednesday, 10 July 2024

Topic 1/2: ReactOS: How hard can it be

Speaker: Brendon Green

Brendon will attempt a live install of ReactOS. Following off the success of live installing at plug OpenBSD, Brendon has set to ratchet up the difficulty by atempting a working live install of ReactOS – a ground up open source recreation of the (shudder) Windows kernel.

Topic 2/2: Backups

Speaker: Richard Barlow

Richard will talk about how he runs his backup regime. This will be a brief topic with a large section for Q&A.

Venue

Milson Community Centre

Cost

$2 gold coin donation

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

Agenda (Timing is not absolute)

• 7:00pm: Welcome (Richard B)
• 7:10pm: Topic 1/2
• 7:55pm: Tea and coffee break
• 8:10pm: Topic 2/2
• 9:00pm: Doors close

Date

7pm, Wednesday, 12 June 2024

Talks

Last November (2023), we ran lightning talks, shorter technical talks of up to 10 minutes each in length, instead of the usual two longer talks. The feedback for this was really good, so we’re having another go this month. We have the following speakers and topics scheduled, probably in this order:

* Tom Ryder: Shell quotes
* Nick Skarott: Stuff the big three
* Joseph Calkin: What it takes to serve an endpoint
* Richard O’Donoghue: LinuxGSM
* Chris Winkworth: check_mk
* Josh Sunnex: Docker and Wireguard

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, 8 May 2024

Topic 1/2: PiSCSI: Emulating a SCSI Hard Drive with a Raspberry Pi

Speaker: Adrian Hayes

Reliable and operational SCSI hard drives for vintage Macintosh computers are getting rarer and harder to find these days. Emulating SCSI hard drives can give your vintage Mac a new lease on life, with a number of modern upgrades available, one being the PiSCSI adapter.

Topic 2/2: GNU command-line tools

Speaker: Tom Ryder

The GNU core utilities is a suite of command-line tools that do basic file, shell, and text manipulation. A few of them, like ls(1) or cp(1), are among the first and most common commands a GNU/Linux user would use. But how about basename(1), to strip a filename’s path or extension? Or fmt(1), to format text to a given width? Or factor(1), to print the prime factors of a number? Tom will go through some of the lesser-known coreutils programs, and show a bit about what they do, along with a few other tools in the same vein that are usually packaged separately, including bc(1) and units(1).

Continue reading “May: PiSCSI and command-line tools”

Date

7pm, Wednesday, 10 April 2024

Topic 1/2: Plasma 6

Speaker: Nick Skarott

KDE’s Plasma is a known and loved desktop environment for many Linux users. Being relatively clean while being fully featured without much system load, it’s long been a go-to for those who want a well supported environment that’s prettier than XFCE, but faster than GNOME (at least in the presenter’s opinion). Nick went to have a look at the new version of Plasma, while tackling an arch-nemesis head on to see if, once and for all, his most-feared distribution can be tamed.

Topic 2/2: Exploring OpenBSD

Speaker: Brendon Green

How hard can it possibly be to install and use OpenBSD in 2024? Let’s find out together. Inspired by xkcd #349.

Continue reading “April: Plasma 6 and OpenBSD”

Date

7pm, Wednesday, 13 March 2024

Topic 1/2: Headscale

Speaker: Richard Barlow

Headscale is a re-implemented version of the Tailscale VPN coordination server, developed independently and completely separately. It allows people to use the official Tailscale client with a self-hosted command and control server. It uses the WireGuard protocol.

Download slides (application/pdf, 956 KiB)

Topic 2/2: DigiKam, Meld and my favourite utilities

Speaker: Giovanni Moretti

Giovanni will show us a few more of his favourite tools:

• DigiKam: Photo management
• Meld: Visual diff and merge tool
• …and perhaps others…

Download slides (application/pdf, 1.3 MiB)

Continue reading “March: Headscale, DigiKam, and Meld”

Date

7pm, Wednesday, 14 February 2024

Topic 1/2: “Pi”wer Overwhelming

Speaker: Nick Skarott

The Raspberry Pi is the credit-card sized computer we all know and love. Nick has spent the Christmas break getting to grips with the latest iteration, and what makes the Pi 5 an even bigger upgrade than the previous generation was.

Topic 2/2: Web archiving with ArchiveBox

Speaker: Tom Ryder

Web pages staying online has never been very reliable, but over the past few years in particular, link rot has got a lot worse, especially as information centralises onto big proprietary platforms whose providers don’t have much of an interest in keeping things online. The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine can often rescue a page for you, but it can’t capture everything, all the time. What if you could have your own archive of web pages, so you could easily save content exactly as it appears in case it gets taken down, trying multiple methods of saving to do so? This is what ArchiveBox allows. Tom will give a brief demonstration of ArchiveBox for day-to-day personal use.

Download slides (application/pdf, 768 KiB)

Continue reading “February: Raspberry Pi 5 and ArchiveBox”

It’s been a great year for PLUG, and you’re invited to celebrate with us, with some pizza and good company!

Weather permitting, we will meet at The Esplanade, at the tables near the paddling pool, on Wednesday December 13th, at 6pm.

The weather did not permit! We will instead meet at Milson Community Centre, our usual venue, on Wednesday December 13th, at 6:30pm—note, too, the change of time!

Please bring $10 in cash to contribute to the pizza. Also bring along anything else you’d like to eat.

Family and curious friends are welcome, as always.

We’ll look forward to seeing you all there!