Palmerston North Linux Users Group
Date
7pm, Wednesday, 13 November 2019
Speaker: John Flower
Drawlloween is a challenge for artists to draw a Halloween character each day for October. John will showcase his entries and the design process behind them.
Continue reading “November: Drawlloween with Blender”Date
7pm, Wednesday 9 October 2019
Speaker: Tom Ryder
Re-using the same passwords on multiple sites causes a lot of security problems, but humans aren’t good at remembering a large number of passwords. Part of a good solution is a secure password manager. Tom will demonstrate a few Linux-friendly options, including his own favourite, password-store.
Speaker: Nick Skarott
AV1 is another in a line of freely available patent free video codecs. But despite the fact other free codecs exist like VP9, adoption of this codec outside of YouTube is next-to-non existent. What makes AV1 different to the point that has streaming giants like Netflix and Twitch to all the big hardware vendors like Intel, AMD and Nvidia joining the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia)?
Continue reading “October: Password managers and AV1”Date
7pm, Wednesday 11 September 2019
Speaker: Nick Skarott
Speaker: William Bell
William will be talking about Proxmox Virtual Environment (PVE) and how it’s made running an adaptable and secure server easier than other options he has tried in the past. He’ll give a quick demonstration of how to use its basic functionalities and a suggest ways to set it up to make things faster and easier to manage.
Continue reading “September: Streaming & Proxmox”Date
Wednesday 14 August 2019
Speaker: Stephen Worthington
Most of us have used cron to schedule something. But often what we thought was cron was actually anacron, a completely different program with a different purpose.
Speaker: John Flower
John will share his experience of teaching his twelve year old niece how to use Inkscape and how that led to the company he works for (Trophy Specialists & Engraving Ltd) using it to assess suitability of job applicants. He’ll also demonstrate a Wacom tablet using Blender.
Continue reading “August: Anacron, Inkscape, & Blender with Wacom”Date
Wednesday 10 July 2019
Speaker: Nick Skarott
Nick will talk about he came to be using the Manjaro distro.
Speaker: Tom Ryder
Incremental backups are a method of storing complete snapshots of a set of files over time, allowing restoring any file from any day, including de-duplication to save disk space rather than storing identical files more than once. Tom Ryder will talk about doing this in a homebrew way on GNU/Linux, focusing on the use of rsync and its Perl frontend Dirvish.
Continue reading “July: Manjaro & Incremental Backups”Date
Wednesday 12 June 2019
Speaker: Bob Bailey
Bob will describe how big corporates are creating things like Wayland, Snap, & Flatpaks and lead a discussion about the impact this may have on the GNU Linux world.
Speaker: Giovanni Moretti
Giovanni will be giving a talk on Orgmode, which is a widely used extension that’s now part of Emacs.
Continue reading “June: Are Big Corporates Good for GNU Linux?”Date
Wednesday 8 May 2019
Speaker: William Bell
William will be providing an insight into DNS and how it controls most of the internet services we use daily, as well as a short example detailing how to set up a small Bind9 server on Debian.
Speaker: Tom Ryder
Expanding on our new knowledge of DNS with BIND, Tom Ryder will give a short presentation on how the free and automated certificate authority Let’s Encrypt works, and demonstrate requesting a new secure certificate for HTTPS using simple DNS verification.
Continue reading “May Meeting”Date
Wednesday 10 April 2019
Evangelising Linux in the Workplace
Speaker: Bob Bailey
Bob Bailey will outline two campaigns he waged in two separate workplaces: one failed completely, but one resulted in significant adoption. He will analyse the differences in approaches and share what he has learnt about about selling the penguin!
Non Photo Real rendering in Blender
Speaker: John Flower
John Flower will demonstrate creating stylistic renders with the newest version of Blender (2.8).
Date
7pm, Wednesday 13 March 2019
State of the Gaming Union
Speaker: Nick Skarott
Basic (and free) games such as the beloved Tuxracer used to be the staples of gaming in Linux. In 2013 the game development company Valve changed the landscape bringing their digital games distribution platform STEAM to Linux, and with it a buzz word – SteamPlay – highlighting cross platform games that work on Linux from small independent studio titles, to huge AAA titles from the likes of Square Enix, and beyond. Recent developments have changed things for the better in Linux, and Nick has been looking at them in great detail. Could 2019 truly be the year of the Linux Desktop from a gamers point of view?
Text Editor Miscellany
Speakers: Tom Ryder, Giovanni Moretti
Tom Ryder and Giovanni Moretti will show a few tricks with the venerable text editors Vim (Vi IMproved) and GNU Emacs, respectively. If you don’t already use one of these editors, and you’re curious to try one, this might be useful to you. (These presentations may be somewhat off-the-cuff!)
Date
Wednesday 13 February 2019
The Chronicles of GNU Linux
Speaker: Tom Ryder
Tom will give us the story of how we got Linux from Unix and it’s unlikely marriage to GNU libraries and user space tools. He will cover the tension between Linus Torvald’s pragmatism and Richard Stallman’s idealism and Linux’s expansion in the 90’s.
The Fediverse Alternative: Distributed and Federated Social Networks
Speaker: Giovanni Moretti
Google has decided to shut down Google+ leaving its two million+ users looking for another home. This decision illustrates how vulnerable users of centralised social media sites such as Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr and Twitter are to arbitrary changes by those running the site. Giovanni will discuss alternative distributed social networking options such as the Fediverse and the IndieWeb that free users from centralised control.
Annual General Meeting
Nominations for club officers are:-
– President – Nick Skarott
– Vice President – John Flower
– Treasurer – Joseph Calkin
– Secretary – Tom Ryder
– Sgt-at-Arms – Richard Barlow
– General Committee Member – Don Esslemont
Continue reading “February: Chronicles of GNU Linux, Fediverse, & AGM”