Tuesday September 10th, 2023 NCLUG Meeting

[Bob Proulx]

j dewitt wrote:
> What: Tuesday September 10th, 2023 NCLUG Meeting

Once again not having a previous agenda we started with general
discussion.  Nader (Nah-der) has installed Void on his laptop.  First
thing was debugging the network connection.  Nader is rawdogging it
with wpa_supplicant directly.  This was quickly sorted.

That spawned off a long round robin discussion of GNOME, Mate, GTK,
Xfce, CDE, and even Motif!  NetworkManager.  Void.  Raspbery Pi.
Stuff.  Accept no substitutes.

We congratulated Stephen on his recent election as FCCH president.
Yay Stephen!

Bob gave away two fancy gaming mice with lots of buttons.  I am never
going to use them and I wanted to reduce my clutter of stuff.

Sy reported on his participation on a NASA hackathon he did this last
weekend.  It was a team hackathon.  He did it all in python.  Pretty
cool!

    https://www.spaceappschallenge.org/

Kyle gave a little demonstration of mpd the music player daemon.  MPD
supports all of the usual music formats for input.  It supports all
the usual suspects for outputs to alsa, oss, pulseaudio, pipewire.
MPD runs as a daemon and then you interact with it using the mpd
client.  "ncnpcpp" is one of the clients.  I asked Kyle to spell that
twice!  What a name!  It replaces the old npc client.  We had a lot of
fun teasing on the naming of these programs.

There is an optional bluetooth input module that also had one of those
alphabet soup names.  I didn't catch it but it had lots of 's'es and
'c'es in it.  Then mpd can play audio input from a Bluetooth stream.

There are also GTK GUI clients for mpd as well.  And I have actually
used mpd before with Emacs!  There is an emacs module which can be
used to interface with mpd as an mpd client.  Meaning I can be in
emacs and then control the mpd audio player.  MPD has been around for
a while and is often used as a player engine behind other things.

    https://mpd.readthedocs.io/

There was some discussion about multimedia keys.  Using xev the X
Event Viewer.  Then one can use something like xbindkeys to bind
keyboard multimedia keys to appropriate actions.

Mory talked briefly about more recent ChatGPT stuff he is working on.
Gave a quick demo.  Whisper.  He was recording the audio of Kyle
speaking.  Feeding that into this AI engine to do speech-to-text but
with capitalization and intelligent sentence construction.  And for
example due to the way Kyle was spelling out program names like
ncnpcpp it produced N-C-N-P-C-P-P from that particular snippet.
Pretty intelligently working.  And all working offline on Mory's
laptop.  Not connected to the network.

Tonight was mostly collective user group discussion.  People thought
that was pretty preductive though as several problems got solved for
people in little subgroup discussions.