Tuesday February14th, 2023 NCLUG Meeting

[Bob Proulx]

j dewitt wrote:
> Please join us Tuesday at the Collins Creator Hub Crafting area,
> 1304 Duff Dr Unit 15, Fort Collins, CO 80524.

The FCCH door unlock was reported as broken and so that caused some
difficulty.  Let's hope you were kept waiting outside in the cold and
wind for too long!

Stephen shared that the FCCH spent $1,700 for just the last month.
Wow.  So if people were so inclined to help them out with this they
would very happy to accept the donation.

How can any gathering of more than one person not include talking
about the current balloon crisis!  So of course we also had that
discussion too.

Many of us always show up with a laptop and then we research things
during the very interactive discussions. j One of the folks who showed
up came with a Panasonic Toughbook.  Which the group has not seen for
a while.  So of course we plied twenty questions about battery life
(excellent with at least 13 hours) and otherwise good stuff.

In typical chaos fashion we migrated to talking about window managers
and the problems of awesome, xmonad, and others of that sort.  (I am
using i3 myself.)

Not having a scheduled talk item for tonight we did the usual thing of
doing round robin around the room.  If someone has something they want
to talk about then great!  If not then we just move on.  I didn't have
anything interesting to say about Free Software topics because I have
been working on my airplane.  And that then triggered a bunch of
questions about, "Airplane?" and so I talked about the current trials
and tribulations of owning an old airplane.

Stephen had already given a pitch for the Creator Hub.  Veruy quick
overview of other things.  Alex hasn't been working on his SDR
projects so much lately.  Phil is still looking into the modeling of
semiconductor devices.  Concentrating on C++ side of things.

A little diversion into HS Meet on the other Tuesdays.  I gave a pitch
that on the Tuesdays that we don't meet for NCLUG that we get together
and meet for something we call Hacking Society.  It's mostly just some
of us who get together to be social and to share brains on problems.
It's very helpful to have a little help to get over something we are
stuck with working on with our projects.  We are currently meeting at
Dutch Brothers Coffee west of Campus West.  The address is on the
https://www.nclug.org/ web site.  Drop by to visit!

The internet there is very good.  This triggered a discussion of local
Internet service providers and speeds that are available.

Frank OpenMP in C.  It's in C so there is no protection of newer
languages and you are in C with all of the classic C issues.  Was
playing around with Elixer previously, which is crazy good for
parallel programming.  Now back to C but the newer standards.  Has a
lot of the safe constructs from C++ in standard C now.  OpenMP though
is astoundingly fast on problems when you can get all of the cpu cores
running in parallel.  Tasks that would take quite long times serially
then can scream along very fast with all cores running.

Sy came with a Toughbook!  Sy recently migrated from Artix to Gentoo.
I asked what was the hardest thing about it?  Use flags.  Getting
going is a little daunting but then after you figure things out it's
very empowering.  Has been having fewer problems now that things are
going.  Has been working most recently on a modern day cell modem
manager.  Most current possibilites are really pretty inadequate.
Difficult to impossible to use SMS/MMS.  Has been attacking this
problem.  Some cool stuff!

James is having frustrations because his work is swapping his work
laptop hardware.  He develops on Ubuntu but it is an older system and
not upgraded.  Had problems upgrading a copy of the VM.  But is now
forced to move to the new hardware so needs to work through either
upgrading or copying or cloning or installing.

Kyle has been playing with https://www.passwordstore.org/ as a
password manager.  It's free software under GPLv2+.  There is an
awesome program that integrates with dmenu to interface with it.  It
works with the clipboard but then automatically clears from the
clipboard removing access later.  It follows the Unix Philosophy and
so is more appealing.

Steven is a technical writer.  Has been in the classic Unix sector
previously doing technical documentation.  Steven is looking to
continue doing technical documentation professionally.  IT technical
writing.  Steven is hoping to network with other technical people, get
hooked up with LinkedIn, find further employment with companies.  If
you need a technical documentation writer then Steven would like to
talk to you.

And then we adjourned.  Several of us then headed over to Slyce Pizza
for slices and continued personal networking.