Date
7pm, Wednesday, 09 December 2020
End of year get together. We’ll talk bollocks, eat pizza, and play arcade games on an old telly made smart by a Raspberry Pi.
Continue reading “December: Pizza & Old Pie”Palmerston North Linux Users Group
Date
7pm, Wednesday, 09 December 2020
End of year get together. We’ll talk bollocks, eat pizza, and play arcade games on an old telly made smart by a Raspberry Pi.
Continue reading “December: Pizza & Old Pie”Date
7pm, Wednesday, 11 November 2020
Speaker: Nick Skarott
Azuracast is an open source Internet radio automation solution deployable via Docker or Ansible. Nick will explain how he has used it to stream his own content over the Internet to enjoy on the run anywhere there is a mobile
data connection.
Speaker: Nick Skarott
Just over one year ago Nick demonstrated at PLUG the beginnings of the next generation open source video codec, AV1. A lot has changed in that time in the AV1 space and it’s fitting to look at the developments, and in
particular, the work NetFlix has done (and then open sourced) with the University of Southern California and the Laboratory for Image and Video Engineering at University of Texas’ Austin campus, called VMAF.
Date: 7pm, Wednesday, 14 October 2020
As the internet grows into every corner of our lives, so too does pervasive surveillance within it. Your activity can be intercepted, analysed, and abused by many interested parties, from credit card thieves to abusive nation-states. The privacy implications of everything being networked in this way are enormous, and in most cases very poorly understood by the general public. Worse, unscrupulous and incompetent vendors take advantage of this confusion, and peddle white-labelled security snake-oil that gives users a false sense of security.
A better option for defending yourself from such surveillance is the use of the Tor network, which routes your internet traffic through multiple computers on the internet in such a way that your privacy is protected. Tom will explain the basics of how Tor works, and list some of the benefits and caveats in using it.
No meeting as our speakers are unavailable.
Date
7pm, Wednesday, 12 August 2020
Nick Skarott will discuss the great hardware that is Raspberry Pi 4.0 whilst John Flower will show how he designed this year’s Hugo awards using Blender and Inkscape.
Continue reading “August: Hugo’s Life of Pi”Date
7pm, Wednesday, 08 July 2020
Speaker: Joseph Calkin
Joseph will talk about why Git is useful for version control. How it compares with SVN and how to use it.
Speaker: Giovanni Moretti – ZL2GX and Graeme – ZL2GZ
Amateur radio is a hobby of exploring the limits of radio, electronics and digital technologies. Once licensed, you’re allocated a worldwide-unique callsign and can operate (and build) radio equipment capable of international and space-based communication.
Being an interest centred on electronic communication, there’s naturally a strong overlap with computing, with Arduino and Raspberry Pi and Linux being widely used. There are many facets to the hobby ranging from the seriously technical through to providing communications support for search-and-rescue (SAR), Civil Defence and Amateur Radio Emergency Communications (AREC).
In this talk, we’ll will give an overview, including how you can:
communicate internationally from your backyard (without the Internet or cell phones)
use both voice and digital modes on-air
design and build radio transceivers and antennas
send signals 2000km using just a Raspberry Pi and a micro-transmitter.
use Linux to link into international Internet-linked DMR and DStar (digital mode radio) networks
become involved in the ongoing efforts to build a regional radio-linked TCP mesh network
Should any of these pique your interest, we’ll finish by outlining how you can become licensed.
Continue reading “July: Some Git with a Radio”Hello, Palmy Linux User Group members!
As the world slouches slowly back towards normalcy in the wake of COVID-19, the PLUG is looking forward to resuming in-person meetings at our usual venue, hopefully sometime next month—both the lockdown and renovation work have complicated our access to the Milson Community Centre, so we won’t be able to meet there this month.
However, club President Nick Skarott has set up video conferencing software for our usage, and we are planning on holding a virtual meeting for anyone interested on Thursday the 11th of June, at 7:00pm. We’re unlikely to have a specific agenda, but the software (Jitsi Meet) supports screen sharing, which seems to work well, so if there’s something you’d like to demonstrate for the club, you’d be most welcome to do so—or, just come along to say hello to some familiar faces.
There are a few ways to connect to Jitsi; Nick has produced a helpful PDF. It works from either a mobile phone and a laptop. If you don’t have a working camera and/or microphone, that’s OK; you’re most welcome to come along and observe anyway. There’s also a text chat in the window, if need be.
The URL for the meeting will be: https://jitsi.tunadigital.nz/PLUGJune2020
Either way, the committee is looking forward to seeing you all again, and resuming our meetings in short order—in a hopefully rather more settled world!
Date
7pm, Wednesday, 11 March 2020
Chair: John Flower
Speaker: John Flower
John will discuss working with fonts using open source software and using graphic software to generate images for the TSE website.
Continue reading “March: AGM & Typographical and Nonreal Adventures”