Tuesday February 8th, 2022 NCLUG Meeting

Bob Proulx bob at proulx.com
Tue Feb 8 19:46:35 MST 2022


j dewitt wrote:
> What: Tuesday February 8th, 2022 NCLUG Meeting

We were having a good time chatting over the top of laptops.  This
week pretty much everyone brought a laptop.  It was a good social fun
chat geeking out about stuff.

There was eventually a lull.  We decided we should get more organized
and have something that might be confused with a meeting.

Bob started with a short rant about in Windows Hell this last week.
Working trying to get a classroom setup of Garmin G1000 aircraft
avionics simulators for CAP training sessions.

Aaron Learning about Salt.  Salt is a python based infrastructure
management system.  Aaron's group uses Salt for managing some 1500
systems with everything that a system might need.  Updates passwords.
Updates packaging.  When using an infrastructure management system one
doesn't manage a single machine but a networked collection of systems.

    https://docs.saltproject.io/en/getstarted/system/python.html

Says Salt is better than Ansible for doing incremental baby steps at
admin.  Such as changing one password across all systems.  Or updating
GRUB timeouts across the set.  Or whatever!

Stephen guesses he is Stephen but has been mostly working on hardware
and Creator Hub stuff this last week.

Phil is trying to pull drawings into an electromagnetic simulator.  If
you have transmission lines it will compute the impedance.

James says he has been doing a terrible job of re-installing his
previous install of his new well equipped laptop.  Mostly with
problems trying to use the corporate closed source nVidia driver.
Mainly has complaints about controlling the brightness rather than
performance.  (All eyes and fingers point toward Stephen!  Who at one
time worked on that driver.)  At which point I jumped in because I had
exactly the same problem on my Thinkpad X220.  And even better I have
documented what I did to get those buttons working!

    https://www.proulx.com/~bob/doc/thinkpad-x220-laptop-keys/thinkpad-x220-laptop-keys.html

I am using the Radeon driver but since it is in the Linux kernel this
seems like it should work on an nVidea driver too.

Meanwhile...  He has mostly been working on his work machine.  And
then he related that he was happy that he missed out on the MS Surface
Pro purchases.  Various problems.  He was glad he dodged the problems
his co-workers have experienced.

Brian has a Surface Go and there was conversation about it but at that
moment I was getting a direct link from Alex for a LAN riot server he
was running for a shared video session.

Brian then talked about the main thing he came prepared to talk about
tonight!  Brian says, "I intend to talk briefly about open source watches.
One of the links is rather long, so I thought I'd email it to you for your
notes..."  Excellent! :-)

    Numerous links to open source watches:
    https://www.cnx-software.com/2022/02/08/mutantw-v1-an-open-source-esp32-smartwatch-designed-with-autodesk-fusion-360-and-eagle/

    PineTime Watch: https://www.pine64.org/

Those are a summary of "good" open source watches.  Brian calls out
"Paul's 3D Things Open-Smartwatch".  It's a form of Arduino and has
built in WiFi.  Really liked the resources for open source watches on
this page.

    https://shop.espruino.com/banglejs2

Bangle.js 2.  A watch that runs Node.js.  Cautioned that the v2 is
replacing the v1 and much more desirable than the v1.  I'll quote from
Brian, "If I can get it to work then this is going to be great."  Now
that is quite the endorsement! :-) Some assembly required at this
point.  But it does look like it has great potential.

Eric was having a problem with input lag for games running on Steam on
his Pop! OS system.  Which was actually one of the reasons he showed
up tonight.  He was hoping to share the problem and see if group think
of the people had any solution.  But then at the point of trying to
reproduce things it was all working just fine.  So just the threat of
getting the group mind of NCLUG members onto the problem seems to have
been enough to solve the problem.

Alex suggested various Steam related debugging tips.  Bob suggested
simple things.  "htop" to see cpu use.  "sudo iotop" to look at
storage I/O bandwidth.  If bus I/O bandwidth is max'd out then that
will really cause the machine to bog.  Someone mentioned overheating.
If the cpu gets too hot then the cpu will throttle and slow to reduce
overheating.  That will cause the appearance of system freezing.

Alex then gave a demo of the riot server on the LAN.  We just passed a
10.* address URL around.  He was the server and I grabbed the display
for my laptop to show the use across the net.  Since we often struggle
with having the right display adaptor to hook to the projector.  The
project is HDMI natively.  Many laptops have that.  Many have Display
port.  Aaron's machine couldn't display today because he has the
smaller Mini-DisplayPort and we didn't have an adaptor for it.  (Note
to self, acrquire a Mini-DP to HDMI (or DP) adaptor.

Brian, Alex, Bob, others then had a discussion about hardware KVM
switchers.  The problem with 4K monitors is that once you start
upgrading then everything needs to be upgraded!

And that completed the round table and brought us to 7:30pm.  At which
point all organization was lost and we had a half dozen separate
conversations denoting the end of the organized part of the meeting.
But it may have been the best part of it.



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