But wait, Tim! I want my turn to apologize, too! My training as a physicist demands a full analysis - and hopefully, one or more potential solutions.  :-)

Jill and I had planned to present the wonders of Fotoxx from our home in Natick, where a big TV screen and the Internet are readily available. About 5:30PM, Jill had mostly prepared our dinner and was about to slide it into the microwave oven. I was checking for late-afternoon e-mail, and read this short message (sent 5:05PM, but who's counting?): "See you there tonight, in person!"

What say? In person? Well, there's just about time to do that... I ran down to the kitchen to consult with The Boss, and we decided to Go For It. I e-mailed back (sent 5:43PM, but who's counting?): "CU there! Have computer, will travel." Jill disassembled our dinner, as I assembled trusty Dicknote (my laptop) and a few accessories, chucked them into a shoulder bag, and we were off - into unusually thick 6PM stop-and-go traffic. That's when it started raining hard; almost the entire trip was tense driving. We arrived about 7PM, knowing where the meeting was but not where we were to park the car. We eventually parked in a big garage and, as person after person referred us onward, found a nice young lady who sketched us a map of our hike-to-be through the rainy WPI quadrangle and -- well, we arrived somewhat later than any of us had expected.

Not good, but we were there. We quickly set up for our Fotoxx demo. That's when I discovered that my laptop accessories did not include a critical HDMI adapter for Dicknote's display port. My goof - in a hurry and under pressure, but my goof. With WLUG's help, we found an alternate adapter that failed to work, tried a loaned laptop with a hard-for-me-to-handle different GUI, tried running my favorite Ubuntu-Unity 22.04 LTS in that laptop's RAM (booting from my Ventoy thumb drive), and finally gave up. I ran the rest of the presentation from Dicknote, without my normal link to the room's big screen, to the Internet, and to so many of you.

Folks in the room sat close by, looked over my shoulder, and tried Fotoxx themselves as, with frazzled nerves, I presented about half of what I'd intended. And that, said the physicist, is why we were online so very briefly.

The Physicist's Phyx: A check list, printed on paper but as if carved into stone, for the items to be In The Bag for talks:
Dicknote, appropriate power supply, Ventoy thumb drive w/appropriate demo software aboard, at least one Display Port to HDMI Adapter. Long HDMI cable, Tux penguin and other interesting goodies optional. A dime for phone call home, and an emergency parachute.
Keep copies of said check list in carrying bag, in wallet, and in head. Keep the computer version of same, and copy it into each appropriate calendar entry. Carrying case closed!

Sorry about that! "The Kingdom was lost, all for the want of a two-penny nail!" Well, what with the falling dubloon, about $2 today. We sell these mighty HP EliteBook laptops (14" 2560x1440 display, Core i7 CPU, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD and more, plus power supply and that critical Display Port adapter) populated with Ubuntu-Unity's Linux OS and vast amounts of FOSS with more on tap) all for about $700. So, we stock that display port-to-HDMI adapter; had we stayed home (he said, ruefully), all would have gone well. Well, we did enjoy meeting some of you, but...

For second prize, I offer you these:

1. You can read a detailed description of Fotoxx and download various flavors of the latest Fotoxx 22.35 from Mike Cornelison's home base.

2. From within that Fotoxx article, I recommend downloading the appropriate appimage package. Right-click on it, click on Properties > Permissions and click to check the box to make it executable. Close that window, double-click the appimage icon, wait a minute, and you'll have Fotoxx up and running in RAM - even after a Suspend, until you Close it or power down! You can try out Fotoxx and, when/if you wish, double-click its Install Fotoxx icon to add it to your computer's riches (from which it will load quite quickly).

3. You'll have its copious Help documentation aboard (even with the in-RAM version) and, in any Fotoxx operation, you can tap the F1 key to get specific documentation on that operation. I think most of you can adjust its settings to find YOUR Pictures folder, etc.

4. Several of you already have reported early success and interest, and I welcome such messages.

5. Think you're getting good at the many instant capabilities of Fotoxx? Then you're ready to try my challenge.
Starting with this unpromising smartphone through-the-windshield sunset grab shot:


Fotoxx enabled me to quickly and accurately convert it into this (rather like our WPI drive might have been):


If you choose to accept this challenge, upon your request I'll e-mail you the smartphone's full-sized (4160x2340x8) grab shot.

Last, but not least, Mike Cornelison's own 54-min. Fotoxx Demo And Tutorial will reveal far, far more of its wonders than I did in twice that time.

Gentlemen, start your Fotoxxen!

Cheers from
--Dick Miller, Partner, MMS <TheMillers@millermicro.com>
   Co-Leader, FOSS User Group in Natick (NatickFOSS.org) <-Click here to learn about our VIRTUAL MEETINGS, join, or view later!
--
| A. Richard & Jill A. Miller            | MILLER MICROCOMPUTER SERVICES |
| Mailto:TheMillers@millermicro.com      | 61 Lake Shore Road            |
| Web: http://www.millermicro.com/       | Natick, MA 01760-2099, USA    |
| Voice: 508/653-6136, 9AM-9PM -0400(EDT)| NMEA N 42.29993°, W 71.36558° |

Sent from an awesome, inexpensive, non-proprietary, no-lock-in, no-bloatware, virus-resistant, free open-source software, Linux PC - with Ubuntu-Unity 22.04.1 LTS and Fotoxx 22.35 making the most of the tiny camera within a Samsung Galaxy A53 5G smartphone.
On 10/14/22 12:55, Tim Keller wrote:
I'd like to apologize for the online meeting failure last night.

Going forward our Jitsi game is going to have to be upped a bit. To this end, I'm putting together a wlug "go-bag" that'll have a tripod, a dedicated camera/mic and a laptop to run the whole shabang. Along with that I'm going to toss in a whole bevy of "X to HDMI" adapters as well as our own nice long HDMI cables, etc.

This will eliminate delays in dealing with the student center, allow for seamless virtual meetings, and properly record them to put up on the youtube channel.

Thanks for your understanding,
Tim.
On Fri, Oct 14, 2022 at 10:52 AM Keith Wright via WLUG <wlug@lists.wlug.org> wrote:
Patrick McEvilly via WLUG <wlug@lists.wlug.org> writes:

> We lost the room on the web call.  Will you guys be back on tonight?

Right.  That didn't work well.  I was on jitsi within
minutes of 7pm.  At first I thought I had technical
problems because I couldn't see or hear anybody.
A few minutes and a few named rectangles showed up,
including the all important "WLUG Meeting".

But the guest speaker was not there.  It was noisy and
hard to hear anyone who was not near the mike.  Around
7:30 there was talk of booting from a flash drive and
then "WLUG Meeting" vanished.  There were three of us
left, me and two rectangles named jstone and PMcEvilly.
We talked a bit about our computers, but didn't really
have much to say.  At 8pm the computer that runs ntpd
(NetTimePro) said it was time to move along.

This is not a gripe, it's a bug report.  Jitsi actually
seemed to work better from the public library.  This
is a bit frightening.  WPI has been teaching over
video chat for years.  We did video chat meetings
with the equipment in the student center back in
the Andy Stewart days.
Patrick McEvilly via WLUG <wlug@lists.wlug.org> writes:

> Will you guys be back on tonight?

I'm not sure what to make of that question.
WLUG meetings are traditionally 1/month.
On the other hand, I think the jitsi room
is open all the time.

  -- Keith, Programmer in Chief,
     http://www.free-comp-shop.com/

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