Longtime PLUG member and regular speaker Richard O’Donoghue was nominated and confirmed as the new Vice President of the club at our meeting tonight, running uncontested, replacing outgoing VP John Flower. Richard had already contributed a great deal to the club at the time of his nomination, including running one of the monthly meetings when the committee at the time were indisposed. The committee is grateful to Richard for stepping up, and we’re confident he’ll do a great job helping to keep the club interesting and fun for all our members.
April: Ardour and Dokploy
Date
7pm, Wednesday, 8 April 2026
Topic 1/2: Ardour
Speaker: Nick Skarott
Ardour is a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) that is immensely powerful; so powerful, it proclaims its only limits are your system, not a license key.
Topic 2/2: Dokploy: Self-hosting made easy…yet again!
Speaker: Richard O’Donoghue
In my last talk I spoke about a PaaS called Coolify for self hosting. Yeah that didn’t work out so great so I found a better alternative.
Download slides (application/pdf, 4 MiB)
Thank you to John Flower
The PLUG committee would like to publicly thank outgoing Vice President John Flower, who has resigned due to relocating to Whanganui and no longer being able to attend meetings regularly. John took a very active role in stepping up to keep the group moving during our “time in the desert” and then adjusting to our new venue, and setting new standards and procedures for our meeting posts and mailouts that we still follow to this day. We’re also unlikely to have so knowledgeable a speaker on Blender and other design tools again, so his presence at meetings will be very much missed in many ways. Thank you John, and all the best to you!
Nominations for the new VP will be made at next month’s meeting.
March: Namespaces and lazy NeoVim
Date
7pm, Wednesday, 11 March 2025
Topic 1/2: What’s in a name(space)?
Speaker: Robbie McKennie
If you’ve used GNU/Linux a bit, you’ll be used to thinking of the mount table, the network interface list, the file hierarchy… just one of each, all visible to all processes. The kernel in fact supports having multiple instances of each of these, so that you can arrange for different processes to see different resources on the same system: a feature called namespaces. Robbie will go through some of the practical applications of this feature, focusing in particular on building and managing networks.
Download slides with speaker notes (application/pdf, 680 KiB)
Topic 2/2: Lazy coding with NeoVim
Speaker: Tim-Hinnerk Heuer
Tim-Hinnerk Heuer will take a break from his beloved competitive coding long enough to show us a demo of how he programs using NeoVim, the modern Vim rewrite, in as lazy but still lightning-fast a way as he can. With a bit of luck, this will include some LLM assistance, possibly even with an open-source model…
February: Mobile Linux and home automation
Date
7pm, Wednesday, 11 February 2025
Topic 1/2: Linux on the Go
Speaker: Camden Bruce
From the far-flung lands of Hawkes Bay, PINE64 community manager Camden Bruce will visit to speak to us about Linux working on phones…and how much easier it has become with both libhybris and mainline Linux. He’ll demonstrate using Linux on a PinePhone Pro and a Pixel 3A, including a breakdown of the history and hard work that got the community this far. If we’re lucky, we might get a quick recap of his attendance at FOSDEM 2026.
Download slides with speaker notes (application/pdf, 1.9 MiB)
Topic 2/2: A Passage Lamp With Home Assistant
Speaker: Stephen Worthington
Stephen will apply Home Assistant to put together a small lamp, a smart socket, PIR detectors, and a luminance sensor to provide an automated lamp that comes on as one walks by.
Download slides (application/pdf, 55 KiB)
Continue reading “February: Mobile Linux and home automation”
Start-of-year social meet: Beer!
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.
End-of-year social meet: Pizza!
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!
Thank you to Richard Barlow
The PLUG committee and regular members would like to acknowledge outgoing committee member and “Man at Arms” Richard Barlow, who has moved away from the Manawatu to further his career. Richard has always been a reliable member of the committee, doing the unglamorous but essential work of gear care, transport, setup, and teardown for our meetings, while also being a presenter, and even carting your humble Secretary around for the nightly McDonald’s pilgrimage. Thank you so much Richard from all of us, and we wish you all the best!
November: Pangolin and UEFI
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)
October: Asahi and keymaps
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)