Per the conversation regarding pgp, it got me thinking about my "email flow"
Currently I'm using gmail in a browser, but I realize that unless I want to
install a 3rd party add-on for chrome I can't really do PGP.
What are people using for mail clients on linux?
Later,
Tim.
--
I am leery of the allegiances of any politician who refers to their
constituents as "consumers".
I saw that one of the researchers for the https://zombieloadattack.com/ Zombie
Load attack is working on a Ph.d at WPI!
Would this be something that people might be interested in? If so I'll
reach out and see if he'd like to give a talk at WLUG.
Later,
Tim.
--
I am leery of the allegiances of any politician who refers to their
constituents as "consumers".
Hi everyone,
I keep noticing several encrypted emails flying back and forth on the WLUG listserv. It occurred to me that we haven't done a PGP keysigning party in a couple of years - maybe we're due for another? It could also be a way to introduce some new student members to the group.
Ian (from mobile device)
I've come into possession of a brother embroidery machine!
I'd like to get it working with linux, but I'll just be happy to start
putting WLUG and the tux penguin on a polo shirt!
Hopefully for the Feb. meeting I'll have something!
Later,
Tim.
--
I am leery of the allegiances of any politician who refers to their
constituents as "consumers".
Somewhat off-topic for this list, but we often discuss 3D printing...
I'm sitting in a SolidWorks user group meeting. The presenter mentioned
that Windows 10 includes a 3D paint program (or maybe it's a 3D mode in the
regular paint program). You can paint in there and import the files into
SolidWorks for further editing.
He also mentioned that he thinks 3MF files will replace STL because they
carry more data.
Hey all,
Last night's meeting was excellent, and I'd like say thanks again to
Tim for giving me a ride home!
Last night's discussion gave me ideas of ways we could improve general
activity, increase attendence, and improve outreach efforts. Hosting a
meetup.com group would be certainly improve discoverability, and
getting in touch with WPI's computer science group would be great too.
I think what a lot communities are doing nowadays is having a text chat
format for users who want to communicate more easily over the internet,
especially with mobile devices. As an example, there are Discord
servers for Fedora, Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, etc, and they have room sizes
generally in the hundreds or even well over a thousand. Even before
Discord they'd use IRC for providing support, posting updates, etc.
Having a text chat of our own would certainly help improve
participation -- I think Matrix would be a good option here because it
has many nice features and has a fairly polished user experience:
- Numerous clients available on desktop, mobile, and web (
https://matrix.org/clients/)
- Persistent chat history
- Link previews
- Various bots to choose from for adding functionality (
https://matrix.org/docs/projects/bots/)
- User moderation
- Server federation
- Self-hosting available, both client and server are completely FOSS
- File sharing
- Voice/video calls
I have a screenshot if anyone wants to see what a Matrix chat room
would look like:
https://i.imgur.com/aVILcWB.png
Or you can join the room I made:
https://matrix.to/#/!EiTljkvagZDFKfQfFu:matrix.org?via=matrix.org
Alteratively, if you have a Matrix client already:
#wlug:matrix.org
Any thoughts?
-Josh
Not sure we are the oldest, but we /might/ be the oldest still in
operation. Is GNHLUG still in operation? If so, they are probably
older. I was inspired to dig into my archives:
An early email from our founder, Andy Stewart:
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Sat, 26 Jul 1997 22:22:18 -0400
From: Andy Stewart <astewart(a)world.std.com>
To: "Worcester Linux Users' Group" <wlug(a)mass-pc.wpi.edu>
Subject: [Fwd: Caldera Inc. IT Forum]
OK, gang, tell the man what you think!
Remember, he is the gentleman who graciously donated the tee shirts and
CDROM discs from Caldera...
Andy
----------------------
Date: Wed, 23 Jul 1997 12:30:22 -0600
From: Paul La Fluer <paull(a)caldera.com>
Organization: Caldera, Inc.
To: astewart(a)world.std.com
Subject: Caldera Inc. IT Forum
Hello Andy, I hope everything is going good. I am in the process of
organizing a conference while in New York. My goal is to rent out a
large ballroom in a hotel and have all the usergroups in the area come
and listen to Bryan Sparks our CEO and other talk about Linux and
OpenLinux. There will be presentations plus a Q&A session. I would like
to hear your feedback on the idea and if your group would attend. We
would be giving away door prizes like OpenLinux Base and Standard and
handing out t-shirts, papers and OpenLinux Lite and OpenDOS to all that
attend. Please give me some feedback on this idea. I need to know soon
to get things set up.
Thanks,
Paul La Fleur
----------------------------------------------------------------------
An email about our SECOND meeting (that refers to the first meeting):
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Mon, 04 Aug 1997 21:29:13 -0400
From: Andy Stewart <astewart(a)world.std.com>
To: "Worcester Linux Users' Group" <wlug(a)mass-pc.wpi.edu>
Subject: Next WLUG meeting
The next scheduled meeting for the Worcester Linux Users' Group (WLUG)
is August 21, 1997, at 7 PM in the Gordon Library on the Worcester
Polytechnic Institute (WPI) campus in Worcester, MA.
We had a great turnout of about 20 people at our very first meeting last
month - I hope to see all of you come back, and I'd like to extend a
welcome to anybody who would like to attend.
I would suggest parking in the "lower library" parking lot and hiking up
the 102 stairs to the library (not to mention the 12 or so more stairs
in the library to get to the 2nd floor!).
For more information, feel free to send me E-mail at:
astewart(a)world.std.com
Look for the penguin signs! Hope to see you there!
Andy Stewart
WLUG
----------------------------------------------------------------------
I'd guess our first meeting was about July 23 or 24, 1997, or perhaps
the week before, July 16 or 17.
But maddog from GNHLUG forwarded this, which says "as always, the
meeting are free..." which implies that July 30th is NOT their first
meeting. If they had monthly meetings, that would place their first
meeting in June 1997 or before.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Mon, 21 Jul 97 10:28:09 -0400
From: "Jon 'maddog' Hall, USG Senior Leader" <hall(a)zk3.dec.com>
To: gnhlug(a)zk3.dec.com
Subject: GNHLUG - Linux Cluster meeting July 30th at Martha's Exchange
Hi,
We now have a venue for the July 30th meeting of the GNHLUG, with Loki,
a cluster of 16 Pentium PRO 200s, running Linux as the topic of the talk.
We will be meeting on the *second* floor dining room of the Martha's Exchange
Building in beautiful downtown Nashua. I will be picking up the speaker in
Cambridge that day and transporting him to Martha's for dinner, arriving about
1730 hours. For those of you who wish to join us for dinner, please RSVP.
The meeting itself will start at 1900 hours, with the speaker probably getting
up steam about 1915 hours.
As always, the meetings are free and open to everyone, and as a FINAL
enticement I will be handling out *free* CD ROMS with the V1.2 Debian release
for Intel on it.
M. Patrick Goda, a principal of the Loki
( http://loki-www.lanl.gov/ )
project at the Theoretical Division of the Los Alamos National Labs, a Beowulf
( http://cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov/linux-web/beowulf/beowulf.html )
style computer will be our speaker. I have convinced him to present a talk
on the Loki project, one of linking together 16 Intel Pentium Pro machines to
create a system that has:
o high reliability
o high throughput
and generally 16-node IBM SP2 performance (over 1.2 GigaFlops) at 1/20th the
cost (about $60K)!!
Pat is a friend of mine that I introduced to Red Hat Linux when he was a
graduate student at the University of Hawaii (long story).
Due to the fact that Patrick is a rare find, I will invite the Boston Linux
User's Group and the Worcester Linux User's group to join us that night, so I
have arranged for larger quarters.
Some additional Beowulf pages are from my own alma mater:
http://einstein.drexel.edu/beowulf/Beowulf_concept.html
including exerpts from the original Beowulf story:
http://einstein.drexel.edu/beowulf/original_beowulf.html
Warmest regards,
maddog
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Nevermind, GNHLUG is definitely older by several years according to their web page:
http://wiki.gnhlug.org/twiki2/bin/view/Www/PastEvents
1996
When Where What Who How Many
31 Jan 1996 UNH Durham Linux Linus Torvalds 200+
1994
When Where What Who How Many
19 Oct UNH (?) First meeting Members ???
On Tue, Jan 14, 2020 at 04:13:25PM -0500, Richard Klein via WLUG wrote:
> What do we know about WLUG's history? If it really is one of the oldest
> LUGs, it might merit a Wikipedia article. It would be great if we could
> flesh that out, too.
>
> This article seems like it could use a list of LUGs:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_user_group
>
> On Tue, Jan 14, 2020 at 1:43 PM Dennis Payne via WLUG <wlug(a)lists.wlug.org>
> wrote:
>
> > The NatickFOSS group uses gettogether.community instead of meetup.com. I
> > don't know that it has gotten us any visibility but the software is open
> > source. I've been tempted to join meetup to go to Boston Indie Game
> > Developer meetings but have so far held off.
> >
> > The NatickFOSS group also gets a booth at the Science on State Street
> > event at Framingham State. It is a free STEM activity fair for kids. My job
> > at the event is to generally occupy the time of the kids so the other
> > members talk to the parents. First year I had a playstation controller
> > hooked up to my laptop and held it out to any kid that walked by. Last year
> > I brought the arcade machine assembled by my son's cub scout den. Any idea
> > if WPI does any thing similar? Even if it is something only for WPI
> > students it might be useful to alert people to the group's existence.
Hey all,
I thought I'd like to continue the topic about what we could do to increase
attendance meeting.
I think working with the community at WPI would be a great thing for us, so
long as we try to understand more about the student culture. I've learned
that one of the most important things about WPI is that a sense of
community and working toward a greater goal are included as part of the
curriculum. One of the earliest classes a WPI student takes involves
thinking about the biggest problems impacting the world and makes strides
to tackling such problems head-on.
https://www.wpi.edu/project-based-learning/wpi-plan/10-things-to-know
I believe WPI also has a strong background in bioinformatics, and that's a
field that can surely benefit from FOSS as we want to encourage openness
and ethics when being on the forefront of scientific research that could
have sweeping societal impact. The last thing we need is more companies
like 23andMe hoarding genetic data for profit.
Perhaps WLUG can do more to be involved in such things, emphasizing the
importance of "ethical" computing with the problems of DRM,
spying/tracking, proprietary software and data formats, software patents,
and licenses that lock away data that the community could benefit from.
Essentially we could give people more of an opportunity to think about the
social aspects and ramifications of technology, and can use that as a
framework for creating a better future.
These are still ideas I'm throwing at the wall, hopefully something sticks!
-Josh
Hey Everybody,
We've got a meeting tonight. I'll be in our usual haunt (WPI Campus Center
Mid Century Room (rm 331)) at 7PM.
As this was a short notice meeting, I suspect the attendance might be
sparse.
Josh, why don't we plan for February so you're not on the spot and I can
get the word out a bit better.
I'm thinking tonight might be a bit freeform which is always fun! We can
also talk about things that we might all find interesting for up coming
topics.
As usual snacks and refreshments will be provided and afterwards we'll head
off for dinner.
See you there!
Tim.
--
I am leery of the allegiances of any politician who refers to their
constituents as "consumers".
