[NCLUG] Tuesday July 9th, 2019 NCLUG Meeting

[Bob Proulx]

jdewitt at verinet.com wrote:
> What: Tuesday July 9th, 2019 NCLUG Meeting
> When: Tuesday July 9th, 2019, 6pm
> Where: Fort Collins Creator Hub,
>   1304 Duff Dr Unit 15, Fort Collins, CO; map:

Initially we simply gabbed among the group for the first 15 minutes.
A good meet and greet.  Then I was asked about a portable folding
bluetooth keyboard I bought recently.  Passed it around.  Although if
I had known it would be of interest I would have brought my
collection of show-n-tell folding and small keyboards.

We then talked about the problem of email delivery ending up into
people's Junk folders.  What can be done to improve the delivery into
people's Inbox and not their Junk folders.  And to be clear these are
individual human to human email messages and not unsolicited bulk
email.  Various discussion and suggestions.  However no clear solution
appeared.

More discussion of web URLs, UTF-8 names, unicode, and much too much
for me to capture here.

Brian was good enough to show us excursions into his DIY doorbell
camera project.  First was Linux From Scratch.  They contain much good
reference material, HOWTOs, and tutorials on the deep details of
building an Operating System distribution.  Good stuff.

  http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/

Then Brian talked about how he manages his IoT devices.  Including
Raspbery Pis and Arduinos.  He liked Tiny Core Linux which is smaller
than even DSL.

  http://tinycorelinux.net/

DietPi.  The Diet Pi web site among other things says, "DietPi is a
extremely lightweight Debian OS. With images starting at 400MB, thats
3x lighter than 'Raspbian Lite'."

  https://www.dietpi.com/

Then Brian said the excursions above brought him to "the final
solution" for his DIY Maker doorbell camera.  Instead of having the
doorbell that is outside the house and may be stolen connect to a WiFi
access point with the WiFi passphrase required to be available he
would reverse the order.  He would have the doorbell device host a
WiFi Access Point and then will have a server system inside the house
in a more secure area connect to the doorbell.  Then if the doorbell
device is stolen they don't have any special access to the WiFi
network in the house.  A very interesting solution!

Then we moved on discussion of slow devices.  And hot devices.  James
had a Samsung Evo SSD that had been installed as an encrypted drive
for his system.  But for whatever reason it was running very slow.
Very slow being in the neighborhood of 60MB/s.  (I am getting 266MB/s
on my ten year old laptop for comparison.)  A strange failure mode
because it didn't fail it succeeded but very slowly.  He replaced it
with a new Samsung Evo SSD and then was getting around 260MB/s with
the new drive.

However the Lenovo W510 laptop with the new SSD runs very hot.  Of
course everyone suggested cleaning, hairballs, heat sink compound, and
other things.  One problem process seems to be both Firefox and
Chromium with tabs open.  Browsers are continuously updating may tabs
and wasting cpu.

Then those that wanted to continue the discussion adjourned to
Coopersmith's for dinner.