PLUG

Date

7pm, Wednesday, 14 June 2023

Topic 1/2: Boardgame Boxes in Blender

Speaker: John Flower

John has been exploring ways to organise boardgame tokens. Many boardgames supply them in plastic bags that are fiddly. Or worse, shrinkwrapped cards that are then left loose to scatter in a big box after unwrapping. A good organiser can reduce the time to set up a dramatically. He will demonstrate his trials using Blender, Inkscape, and FontForge on Linux to create designs for laser cutting, engraving, CNC routering, and printing to develop solutions.

Topic 2/2: PCem

Speaker: Nick Skarott

Over the last few years, Nick has presented many tools used in emulating various game console and personal computer plaftorms in the name of historical preservation. PCem is an open source emulation tool attempting to accurately emulate platforms AND peripheral hardware, supporting not just CPU platforms but also Graphics and sound cards in an attempt to enjoy not just DOS era games but Windows 9x era games without having to stress over old hardware that’s starting to flake out.

Download slides (application/pdf, 206 KiB)

Continue reading “June: Blender boardgame boxes and PCem”

Date

7pm, Wednesday, 10 May 2023

Topic 1/2: IPv6: Kicking and Screaming

Speaker: Tom Ryder

You do have to use IPv6; you do have to learn it; you do have to deal with it. You cannot escape. IPv4 is exhausted, and Carrier-grade NAT is a fever dream from which you must awake. So: how would you like to do this? The hard way, or the even‐harder way?

Tom will give a state‐of‐the‐onion on IPv6, and explore how it improves on legacy IPv4, and some of the challenges and problems that have made adoption so slow and so difficult, with particular attention paid to the GNU/Linux networking stack. Please do not shoot your humble messenger.

Download slides (application/pdf, 378 KiB)

Topic 2/2: SnapRAID and mergerfs

Speaker: Chris Winkworth

Chris Winkworth is a force of home‐networking nature that cannot be stopped. His ever‐expanding home server setup has storage needs beyond the ken of most mortals, and this month he will explain to us two new feathers in his cap: SnapRAID, a backup program for disk arrays, and mergerfs, a union filesystem to simplify storage and management of files over many devices.

Download slides (application/pdf, 529 KiB)

Continue reading “May: IPv6, SnapRAID, and mergerfs”

Date

7pm, Wednesday, 12 April 2023

Topic 1/2: Writing a Linux desktop app with a client library

Speaker: Scott Davies

Are you sick of editing text files manually and doing the same thing over and over in bash? I’ll use some simple scripts and a widget toolkit to show why GUI apps should not be forgotten. Simple Linux desktop apps are easy, they can save you time and they’re more friendly to others than the command line. And you don’t have to set up a web server, manually change user, or copy and paste anything every time before you can get things done. I might event drag in a example of using it with redis for storage, too.

Download slides (application/pdf, 304 KiB)

Download source code (application/zip, 12 KiB)

Topic 2/2: LastPass post-mortem

Speaker: Nick Skarott

The 2022 LastPass hack exposed a huge amount of private user information, including stored password databases, and in doing so exposed some glaring security and process failures on LastPass’ part. Nick will explain what happened, and why.

Continue reading “April: Desktop apps and LastPass post-mortem”

Date

7pm, Wednesday, 8 March 2023

Topic 1/2: Facial recognition for GNU/Linux with Howdy

Speaker: Richard O’Donoghue

One of the login methods provided by Microsoft Windows’ software Hello is facial recognition: logging in to your computer by having your face recognised by camera. Richard O’Donoghue will show how this same functionality can be arranged on GNU/Linux, using Howdy. He writes:

If you’re lazy like me and used to using Windows Hello face recognition and would like similar functionality under linux, this project hits the nail on the head.

Download slides (application/pdf, 57 KiB)

Topic 2/2: Roaming SSH with local echo using Mosh

Speaker: Tom Ryder

Mosh: the mobile shell is a terminal application that allows an SSH-style remote terminal while supporting roaming between connections without losing state, and showing instant feedback from pressing keys on high-latency connections: a kind of intelligent local echo. Tom will demonstrate how this works, and why he found it so useful while working on his servers from the other side of the planet.

Download slides (application/pdf, 428 KiB)

Continue reading “March: Howdy and Mosh”

Date

7pm, Wednesday, 9 November 2022

Topic 1/2: FFmpeg for Owncast

Speaker: Tom Ryder

FFmpeg is a library that can do far, far too much with video and audio of all sorts—a kind of multimedia Swiss Army knife. Tom will demonstrate a narrow set of some of its more useful functions in the service of running an Owncast video streaming instance, an alternative to proprietary platforms. This will include video filtering, resizing, conversion, and “hard” subbing.

Download slides (application/pdf, 280 KiB)

Topic 2/2: Recalbox

Speaker: Nick Skarott

Recalbox is described by its makers as “the ultimate retro-gaming console that lets you replay all the games from the consoles and computers of your childhood.” Compatible with Raspberry Pi’s, old and new x86 (both 32 and 64bit) PCs and also the ODroid single board computers. Replacing RetroPie as the retro gaming project of Nick’s choice, he explains what makes it better over RetroPie including Recalbox’s included free content, simple board overclocking for the Raspberry Pi, and more advanced Raspberry Pi drivers.

Continue reading “November: FFmpeg for Owncast, and Recalbox”

Date

7pm, Wednesday, 12 October 2022

Topic 1/2: Speeduino: Open source / Open Hardware Engine Management

Speaker: Richard O’Donoghue

Speeduino is an open source and open hardware Arduino-based system for managing engines. Richard will talk about some basics of engine management, the software, and what the hardware can do.

Download slides (application/pdf, 248 KiB)

Topic 2/2: LVM (Logical Volume Management)

Speaker: Tom Ryder

Managing partitions on disks is a pain, especially on hardware disks. Logical Volume Management (LVM) for Linux-based systems provides a means to perform volume management much more dynamically and flexibly, including creating snapshots and drive redundancy, without needing to reboot. Tom will give a demonstration of the basics of using LVM, including using it at install time as part of an encrypted setup for Debian GNU/Linux and other distributions.

Download slides (application/pdf, 588 KiB)

Continue reading “October: Speeduino and LVM”

Date

7pm, Wednesday, 14 September 2022

Topic 1/2: Self-hosting continued

Speaker: Chris Winkworth

Chris will return with some more details about his home media network setup that he last spoke about in July, since there were so many questions from the audience last time and people doubtless want to know more about his astonishing setup.

Topic 2/2: 10 Years of OBS & VDO.Ninja

Speaker: Nick Skarott

OBS or Open Broadcast Software has become a linchpin piece of kit for many video livestreamers around the globe. It has powered everything from basic talking head livestreams to full on productions with switching and live graphics and has produced many other key tools to produce graphic overlays and even inject others desktops into livestreams. Nick will go over what’s new since PLUG was first introduced to OBS, and give real world examples on how he has used OBS and a new free tool, VDO.Ninja, to produce commercial-grade live streams.

Continue reading “September: Self-hosting, self-casting”

Date

7pm, Wednesday, 10 August 2022

Topic 1/2: Running Windows programs with Wine

Speaker: Tom Ryder

In many cases, people who want to switch to GNU/Linux as their operating system are held back by only one or two programs native to Microsoft Windows running on their machines, for which there’s no suitable free software replacement. One option in this case is to use Wine, a compatibility layer that allows running programs built for Windows on Unix-like operating systems. While it’s not perfect, it’s pretty impressive what Wine can do; Tom will demonstrate a few of the things it makes possible, including demonstrating the PlayOnLinux frontend.

Download slides (application/pdf, 716 KiB)

Topic 2/2: Design for Military Crests with Inkscape

Speaker: John Flower

John Flower will return to demonstrate some more of the design that free software allows him to do. This month, he’ll demonstrate how he’s been using the vector drawing program Inkscape in tracing and working with military crests.

Continue reading “August: Wine and Ink”

Date

7pm, Wednesday, 13 July 2022

Topic 1/2: Self-hosting software

Speaker: Chris Winkworth

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is a business model to run the software sold on a company’s own servers, and provide people with access to their accounts only remotely, usually through a web browser, and on a subscription basis. This is opposed to the older “on-premises” model where the software is run on a customer’s own computers. Unfortunately, companies can still exert a lot of power over customers who buy licenses to their software this way; the risk of censorship is particularly troublesome. Chris will give us an overview of self-hosting: running applications in a similar way to the SaaS model, but moving control back to your own computer, an approach particularly compatible with properly free and open-source software.

Topic 2/2: Adventures in Codeland

Speaker: Tim-Hinnerk Heuer

Tim will return for another demonstration of competitive programming on Leetcode, this time using C++ specifically, with the C++ compiler from the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), and the Vim text editor.

Continue reading “July: Self-Hosting and Adventures in Codeland”

We have had to cancel this meeting due to the speakers, meeting chair, and Vice President all being unwell (!). Nothing serious for any of them (and negative rapid-antigen tests), but we understand that people are extra-cautious given the COVID-19 pandemic. We have asked the speakers to reschedule and hope to see you all next month.