Tuesday April 14th, 2026 NCLUG Meeting

[Bob Proulx]

j dewitt wrote:
> What: Tuesday April 14th, 2026 NCLUG Meeting

I missed the earlier people who opened the meeting and spoke about
things.  We have some new people and I try not to put new people on
the spot.  I arrived late and arrived in time to defend emacs!  And
caught the tail end of Brian promoting using ed in scripts to make
automated edits to files programmatically.

We were going around the room and people mentioned what they were
working on.  Alex mentioned his newest find being autoxrandr which
will save whatever X display settings you have and will restore it
automatically.  Said it worked flawlessly out of the box to save his
customized resolution changes.  Stephen said he has had difficulty
between DisplayPort and HDMI one being that HDMI has a display present
signal so hotplugging it works but DP only has power available and so
it can't as easily sense when displays are changed.  But we all know
the real reason for DisplayPort is to avoid the HDMI licensing fee.

David claimed he isn't doing anything but others extracted that he did
use his Linux system to work through his taxes using spreadsheets from
a source that Morey pointed him too.

Michael is working on converting a TrueNAS to a native FreeBSD NAS
system.  He is happy to have converted three people recently from
other systems to linux systems.  Woot!

Scott continued the editor discussion with a tale about recovering a
corrupted very large multigigabyte file which was too big for any
editor on MS-Windows but found himself needing to make a routine
corruption fix.  Neovim saved the day.

Morey is working through running OpenClaw offline.  And now
volunteering with FC Public Media.  Says that next time he will
demonstrate a new AI model that replaces the computer graphics green
suit with marker balls but can do the same thing without the green
suit and ping pong balls.

Jonathan is an A/V person and is climbing the learning curve of Linux
systems.  Realizes that using a Mac sounds counter to this trend but
it is a journey not a destination.

Adam is visiting us from Seattle!  Welcome to Fort Collins!  Decided
to drop in on our meetup.  Woot!  Talked about his pen-testing project
analyzing ssh keys.  And another project to manage and automatically
create Firefox profiles.  At work people have crossed the inflection
point where everyone is terrified that AI will take their jobs to the
other side where they are terrified that AI is creating more work for
them to do.  For example using an AI vibe coded scraper to extract the
words from a web comic saved on archive.org into a format that can be
used in current systems.  Using AI to revive old games updating them
to allow them to run on current systems.  Mentioned Home Assistent and
then Scott, Brian, and other Alex highly endorsed Home Assistent with
a rousing discussion of why.

Alex says he needs to get connected to Matrix and the bridge there to
connect to IRC.  Moved his backups from Borg backup over to Restic
backup.  Random stuff around the house running on Raspberry Pis but
want to reorganize the home systems and virtualize more of them into
containers maybe Podman containers.

Bob talked about the current projects at the GNU/FSF network side of
things.  Mostly fighting the endless onslaught of the AI scraper
plague.

Victor arrived and we ambushed him.  Victor said don't look at me, I
have nothing to say.