Category: 2025

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.

Continue reading “November: Pangolin and UEFI”

Date

7pm, Wednesday, 8 October 2025

Topic 1/2: Drunk on Asahi

Speaker: Jared Feekery

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, 1.3 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.

Continue reading “October: Asahi and keymaps”

Date

7pm, Wednesday, 10 September 2025

Topic 1/2: Wireless Freedom and New-Found Superpowers

Speaker: Robbie McKennie

Make your router into what it always wanted to be, with OpenWRT.

Download slides (application/pdf, 896 KiB)

Topic 2/2: Self-hosted bots

Speaker: Chris Winkworth

A small look at what it’s like to self-host and manage bots for a Discord community.

Continue reading “September: OpenWRT and Discord bots”

Date

7pm, Wednesday, 13 August 2025

Topic 1/2: The i3 Window Manager—experiences of a new user

Speaker: Giovanni Moretti

Do you keep losing windows and seem to be forever resizing windows on a large monitor? Those points were frustrating me so, about six weeks ago, I decided to try a tiling window manager (i3wm) combined with Ubuntu Mate. In this talk I’ll be covering my experiences in learning to use i3 and adapting it as a new user.

Download slides (application/pdf, 700 KiB)
Download Giovanni’s i3 config (text/plain, 16 KiB)

Topic 2/2: Haiku Live Demo

Speaker: Brendon Green

BeOS inspired
Not Linux nor BSD
Haiku Beta Five

Download slides (application/pdf, 700 KiB)

Continue reading “August: i3wm and Haiku”

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”

Date

7pm, Wednesday, 12 February 2025

Topic 1/2: Red Hat 6

Speaker: Brendon Green

Let’s start the year by talking about our first experiences with Linux.

Topic 2/2: Syslog da Lab

Speaker: Chris Winkworth

Syslogging is a great idea for homelabs because it centralizes log management, making it easier to monitor, troubleshoot, and secure your systems. Chris will demonstrate how he manages this with his own fearsome home-lab rack.

Continue reading “February: Red Hat and syslog”