Category: 2025

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”

Date

7pm, Wednesday, 9 April 2025

Topic 1/2: Experimenting with self hosting open source LLMs

Speaker: Richard O’Donoghue

Proprietary LLMs and their effects on the Internet have been a hot topic on the PLUG Discord of late. Richard has been experimenting with open source LLMs on his own hardware, which might just help to bring some balance back to the universe…

Topic 2/2: Metrics and Grafana

Speaker: Chris Winkworth

Chris will return to talk more about homelab monitoring and metrics, this time using popular open source graphing tool Grafana. He’ll show how to use and view your server’s and docker containers’ info therein.

Continue reading “April: LLMs and Grafana”

Date

7pm, Wednesday, 12 March 2025

Topic 1/2: My first Linux – Slackware

Speaker: Nick Skarott

We all started with something different, but did I start in the wrong way? Nick takes a trip down memory lane revisiting the distribution he cut his Linux teeth on: Slackware.

Topic 2/2: The Distro That Made Microsoft Chuck Its Toys – Lindows/Linspire

Speaker: Brendon Green

Brendon goes for another live install of a controversial distribution – The only one to make Microsoft chuck its toys so bad that Mr Softy took the distro maintainers to court! It’s time to look at Lindows, and its modern equivalent Linspire.

Continue reading “March: Slackware and Lindows/Linspire”