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The future of WLUG
by Joshua Stone Jan. 16, 2020

Jan. 16, 2020

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

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Improving WLUG outreach
by Joshua Stone Jan. 14, 2020

Jan. 14, 2020

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

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Reminder! We've got a meeting tonight! (January 9th 2019) at 7PM. WPI Campus Center Rm 331
by Tim Keller Jan. 10, 2020

Jan. 10, 2020

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".

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Greetings Programs!
by Lexi Haley Jan. 9, 2020

Jan. 9, 2020

Hi, I'm Lexi! I've not been to a WLUG meeting since ... since a long time .... I remember a Blender talk, and a Maddog talk - and these look like circa 2003/2004.... So, absent a long time! Anyways. I am trying to find the time to come again. I've been a casual Linux user since 1998, when I installed Debian from a pile of floppies (( or should I say, my friend installed it for me, and my learning journey began )) .... and for a long time I was an exclusive user .... and at heart I think I am still - even as I flog along a 10 year old iMac. But for a couple years now, on my laptop I've been running 'Tiny Core Linux' , which if you're unfamiliar with it, it is based on the Linux From Scratch work, with an emphasis on a 'tiny' footprint. Needed additional software are mounted into ram from squashfs archives, on the fly. It is quirky, but I like it. I wondered if anyone else has used it (or uses it). I didn't feel right just asking blindly, without a vague reintroduction of myself. So - question: Anyone else use, now or previously, the Tiny Core Linux Distribution? [*] Thanks, Lexi Haley (WPI CS 2002) [*] a search on the email archives yielded no hits ...

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We've got a Meeting on January 9th! Usual Spot, Topic: Possibly TBD
by Tim Keller Jan. 8, 2020

Jan. 8, 2020

Hey Gang, I hope you all had a great holidays and a happy new year! We've got a meeting on Thursday, the 9th! Location: WPI Campus Center Mid Century Room Rm 331 (our usual haunt) Date / Time: January 9th, 2020 at 7PM Topic: TBD! Let me know if you'll be attending we'll see what we might want to do. If more people are going to show up we could do a redo of Joshua's talk, it was fantastic. Another option might be to have a round table for topics people might want to hear this year. Obviously, if people have ideas feel free to post them to the list as well! As usual snacks and refreshments will be provided and afterwards we'll head off for dinner to continue the conversation. Hope to see you there Tim Keller WLUG President -- I am leery of the allegiances of any politician who refers to their constituents as "consumers".

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STM8 blue pill boards and programmer
by John Stoffel Jan. 5, 2020

Jan. 5, 2020

Guys, I've got some STM8 bluepill boards and a spare knock off ST-Linkv2 programmer if anyone is interested. I was playing around with them this weekend and the lack of a decent IR Library meant that my interest has waned. They're cheap cheap chear, and interesting as a way to learn more low level programming. I can give you my linux notes if you like too! Or if you know of a library for STM8 that does both send/receive of IR codes, I'd love to hear about it. I'd trade for an AVR ISP programmer instead if anyone has one, since I'm now more interested in ATtiny 85/84/88/841 boards these days. I won't be able to make meetings (unless maybe if you have one the 16th of this January) for a while though, so we'd have to arrange a meetup or something. Cheers! John

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Wireless Networking for Cub Scouts
by Dennis Payne Dec. 29, 2019

Dec. 29, 2019

Anyone have a wireless networking card or computer with wireless networking they would be willing to donate to the cub scouts? For last years pinewood derby we used DerbyNet ( https://jeffpiazza.github.io/derbynet/) It was great. We want to step it up a bit this year. I'd like to have a computer running the software and tablets connecting wirelessly to register cars. This way we can take pictures of every car as they are registered. I have some old computers which could be used but none have wireless networking. -- Dennis Payne dulsi(a)identicalsoftware.com https://social.freegamedev.net/channel/dulsi

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WLUG meeting and presentation material
by Joshua Stone Dec. 21, 2019

Dec. 21, 2019

Hey everyone, Thank you again for letting me present on Silverblue, Toolbox, and Flatpak for December's WLUG meeting! I've uploaded a PDF copy of the slideshow material to my Google Drive for anyone who couldn't make it to the meeting and/or wants to look at some of the references inside: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1FJc9864buwRFS5UktivfffU7u9CySSKB Admittedly the material itself can be difficult to understand as it was made more to complement an oral presentation format, but I could continue improving on the material to make it more complete if there's enough interest, plus much development has been going on around containers that it makes sense to update it anyway. I hope everyone is having an excellent time enjoying the holidays! -Josh

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Encrypted Sorna Reviewer CD files
by Richard Klein Dec. 21, 2019

Dec. 21, 2019

I picked up a copy of some x-rays and MRIs. They're on a CD, encrypted, with Windows viewer software. Has anyone figured out how to view these in Linux? I have the password to decrypt, I just don't know what software to use (without resorting to Windows). I think it may actually be a DICOM file format. Here's a link to the viewer software: https://sorna.com/solutions/reviewer/ -- Rich

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December WLUG Meeting! Topic: Fedora Silverblue, toolbox and Flatpaks!
by Tim Keller Dec. 19, 2019

Dec. 19, 2019

Hey Everybody, We've got a meeting this Thursday on December 19th 2019! Location: WPI Campus Center Mid-Century room (our usual haunt) Date & Time: December 19th, 2019 Our speaker this month is Joshua Stone. He's going to giving a talk about a couple of cool technologies in Fedora! Josh provided me some details about these innovations so I've mashed them up and included them below. Silverblue: https://fedoramagazine.org/what-is-silverblue/ Toolbox: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora-silverblue/toolbox/ Flatpaks: https://flatpak.org/ *Silverblue* s a Fedora variant designed around immutability where a new system image is committed as the new /sysroot without affecting the state of the running system. This is reminiscent of Android A/B updates, although the update backend -- ostree -- has elements of a version control system like git. *Toolbox* is also interesting as it lets you switch into an unprivileged development environment that can be built up and torn down without affecting the host as tools are installed inside a container. *Flatpak* uses the same file storage backend as Silverblue to manage apps and shared runtimes. This app distribution technology allows you to decouple apps and operating systems as everything is built and run inside a sandbox, making upgrades easier. Compare needing only one version of an app to package as a flatpak, versus packaging for different versions. As usual, snacks and refreshments will be provided and afterwards we'll head off for dinner to continue the conversation. Thanks, Tim Keller WLUG President -- I am leery of the allegiances of any politician who refers to their constituents as "consumers".

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