Tuesday November 9th, 2021 NCLUG Meeting

[Bob Proulx]

j dewitt wrote:
> What: Tuesday November 9th, 2021 NCLUG Meeting

Tonight's meeting was once again Short Topics.

The Creator Hub asks that we sign the liability waiver for use of the
meeting space.  People who have not signed the waiver this year please
sign the waiver when you arrive at the meeting.

The meeting was called to order.  We have been walking around the room
asking for show and tell, project talks, anything that seems fun.

Alex talked a little bit about using SDRs for Software Defined Radio.
He described using an X11 Scraping Server to bridge his root display
to VNC for remote access.  This came in handy while helping a friend
of his in his friend's journey of learning about software defined
radios.

Stephen talked about "diffpdf" a tool for diff'ing PDF files.  It's a
graphical tool that shows two PDF files for comparison side by side.
Then depending upon how the comparison is requested it will highlight
words of text, characters, or appearance.  This was pretty cool for
comparing documents that have updates but may have non-obvious
updates.

In this context we talked a little bit about pdftk.  Another one of
the cool tools for manipulating PDF files.

Bill lamented the battery swelling of his laptop.  So bad that it
burst the case apart.  Sad.  But he gave a short description of using
Docker and tools for creating and managing those containers.  Strange
how this morphed into Stephen talking about using VS Code and the only
feature he required was the ability to reorder tabs.  You had to be
there.

Boogie borked his Arch system to the point that the xfce desktop would
not start.  In the end he said the finger of blame pointed to systemd.
Some problem with one of the units.  But which one?  Bob, who
absolutely loves systemd (NOT!) then volunteered that there is a way
to find what has failed.  You can try this at home on your own systemd
systems!

    systemctl status

Does the second line show "running" or "degraded"?

    systemctl list-units --state=failed

Does that show any failed units?  (If it says "0 loaded units listed"
then everything is okay.)

Then the people who were running systemd on their machines tried that
on their systems and most of them all had failures that they did not
know about!

Amelio has been using Cygwin in his work environment.  Which is an
air-gapped system.  And is needing more tools than available in the
base Cygwin system.  Would like to install more of the Cygwin
environment.  Has been looking at WSL Windows Subsystem for Linux.
Stephen contributed that his co-workers are even running virtual
machines under WSL.  Alex talked about his co-workers using million
row Excel spreadsheet tables and about problems of doing that.  They
tried using R.  It was all a pretty crazy discussion of doing big data
in an ad-hoc less than industrial strength way.

Aaron did not bring a show and tell this month.  It was a good one
last month though!

Joe is back!  After a long absence from the NCLUG group.  Joe is
trying to skill up about the both new and old parts of GNU/Linux that
he trying to do.  This is the classic conflict between doing things on
the command line versus doing things through the graphics UI.  Also
trying to use Wine to run some various Windows software.  These things
triggered a fast moving conversation about VirtualBox versus KVM,
about libvirt, about using libvirt's virt-manager to set up virtual
machines.  Using Ophcrack to recover passwords from Windows systems.
About various and poor security practices.  Bob suggested running KVM
via libvirt to run a full virtual machine for those tasks.

Vanette is trying to replace Android on the phone.  Replace it with a
GNU/Linux based system.  Basically push Android aside and instead use
a full desktop type environment on the phone.  This is very early days
in the journey of doing this.

Howard is mostly on the Raspberry Pi these days.  Small complaining
about the Github security change that recently happened.  We then
talked about Github security and ssh keys.  The task needed to be done
is automatic provisioning of RPi systems.  Ansible and Salt and the
rest were mentioned.  Probably just scripting it up is easiest.  Then
there was show-and-tell of a custom printed circuit board used to
interface to a RPI.  The board silk screen said "Quantum Time Dilation
Support".  It's actually for use in a particle physics experiment to
study muons.  Pretty cool!  It's a rare NCLUG where we have a deep
discussion of quantum mechanics!

Then we adjourned to Slyce Pizza for dinner.  However we found Slyce
is closed for remodeling between the 8th and the 18th!  So we left a
note on the door hoping to guide any stragglers and walked across the
street to Steakout.