Tuesday December 13th, 2022 NCLUG Meeting

[Bob Proulx]

j dewitt wrote:
> What: Tuesday December 13th, 2022 NCLUG Meeting

James returned the Kill-a-Watt meter that was loaned out last meeting.
His system in high graphics use easily exceeds 650 watts and exceeds
the previous UPS.  So of course we started off discussing graphics
cards and auxilary power connections.  The nVidia has had many reports
of burned aux power connectors.  The current recommendations are to
fully seat the aux power connector to the graphics card so as to get
it fully connected with more force than is possible when in the PCIe
slot.  Then installing the graphics card into the PCIe slot.  That
seems to avoid the graphics card aux power melt down problem.  Though
that issue remains a hot topic item around the planet.

More discussion about Spectre and Meltdown.  Lots of mitigations.  So
far there have been no attacks actually found in the wild.  They are
all theoretical attacks.

Bob started discussing system upgrades.  The Ubuntu system has a
do-release-upgrade script which mostly works pretty well.  But I did
have /boot fill up on one of my recent upgrades.  Nods from around the
room as other people have also run into this.  Hint!  Purge off all
old kernels not actively in use before the upgrade.  If so then
do-release-upgrade works pretty well.  But if it fails there is no way
to resume as far as I can tell.  I had to finish the upgrade on that
system manually.

But the key to a good house painting is scraping the old paint off
first.  I discussed the process I use.  I have documented this and
here is a pointer to my upgrade guide.

    http://www.proulx.com/~bob/doc/bobs-guide-to-system-upgrades-with-debian/bobs-guide-to-system-upgrades-with-debian.html

Continuing the round robin Bill says he has been working through
various training such as network training.  Various Amazon training.
"A good pilot is always learning."  My (Bob) biggest complaint about
Amazon documentation is that for anything you want to do there will be
five pages of documentation each of which links to the next and while
looking for the information you are looking for it will eventually
link back to where you started completing the circle and then you know
there is no hope of figuring it out.

Then we diverted into OpenAI and chatGPT.  That will probably become
the new corporate support very soon.  The typical discussion.  Who
owns the license for that code which was copy-pasted from other code
on the net into your program.  And AI generated art?  The entire
controversy over AI generated artwork.

We diverted to the dark side for a bit.  Talking about home automation
and home security.  Brian talked a little about the SimpliSafe
https://simplisafe.com/ products.  Closed source proprietary product.
But Brian said it was much better than anything else in the category.

Alex brought out his conference badge which was a Supercon.6 machine.
It's a learning machine.  Program in machine code at the 1's and 0's
level.  Front panel to toggle in your code.  Pretty cool!

    https://hackaday.io/project/188025-2022-hackaday-supercon-6-badge-guide