[NCLUG] December 10th, 2019 NCLUG Meeting

[Bob Proulx]

jdewitt at frii.com wrote:
> What: Tuesday December 10th, 2019 NCLUG Meeting
> When: Tuesday December 10th, 2019, 6pm
> Where: Fort Collins Creator Hub,
>   1304 Duff Dr Unit 15, Fort Collins, CO; map:

Stephen started the first set of demos by describing that he started
out looking for a tool that could record his desktop.  Found Kazam.
Demo'd Kazam and it truly was a straight forward screen video
capture.  It is packaged and readily available.

  https://sourceforge.net/projects/kazam/

But then of course you want to be able to edit the video so that you
can spiff it up and improve on the presentation by chopping the
beginning and ending off and things like that.

But first let's talk about AppImage.  "Linux apps that run anywhere."
The version of the kdenlive that was desired was not packaged.  But it
was distributed as an AppImage.

  https://appimage.org/

Since kdenlive was distributed as an AppImage that's the way it ran.
Just download it.  Drop it on the desktop.  Make it executable.  Then
run it.  Bam!  It's running.  Pretty slick!

  https://kdenlive.org/en/

Running this as an AppImage was pretty slick.  It encapsulates
everything that is needed to run in a temporary file system which gets
mounted in /tmp/.mount_foo/ .  So apps need to be able to access files
by paths that work when running in other directories.  But that isn't
generally a problem.

There are scripts that can be used to create your own AppImage.  This
is definitely something I will need to check out for me in the future.

Then a demo of kdenlive video editing.  Introduction to features.  It
looked quite full featured.  Can add screen titles.  All of the
expected features such as fades and dissolves are available.  Color
adjustments.  Other effects.  In addition to the mouse there are
keyboard shortcuts.

Bob then gave a quick run-through of some DDoS attacks previously
experienced and the seat-of-the-pants mitigation that was applied to
mitigate against the attacks.  Starting with a typical Wordpress
linkback spam attack and using fail2ban to mitigate it.  Then some
review and show-n-tell of the currently active DDoS attack against the
GNU Savannah software forge systems.  Basically with some bubblegum
and bailing wire generated a list of 50,000 IP addresses that were
abusing the system.  Reduced that to a list of 1,200 /24 subnets.
Then blocked those subnets.  At that point the systems became quite
functional to the valid users of the system.

The room was opened for discussion.  Talk of 3D printers.  Cyber
Monday electronics deals.  Chromebooks.  How Android is almost the
universal operating system, with just a few exceptions.

We discussed the use of Signal.  We had disagreements as to whether
one could or could not get Signal to work on multiple devices.  And
whether it was an Apple iOS specific problem not not.  There was a lot
of finger pointing.  All good though.

Bill brought up a demo of asciiflow.  This is a web site drawing
editor for plain text ascii graphics.  Useful for diagrams and other
similar uses.  (Think artist mode in Emacs!)  asciiflow is pretty
cool!  Check it out!

  http://asciiflow.com/

Then Bill demo'd a fun little python REPL thing where he replaced the
various prompts with Unicode Emoji.  Fun!

And then someone mentioned 'Dia' a useful simple free software drawing
tool useful for doing diagrams.

  https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Dia/

And then we adjourned to dinner.