Tuesday January 13th, 2026 NCLUG Meeting

[Bob Proulx]

j dewitt wrote:
> When: Tuesday January 13th, 2026, 6pm

Bryan started presenting "gramps" a FLOSS genealogy platform licensed
with the GPLv2+.  Which immediately turned into a melodrama as half of
us got into a spirited discussion similar to a meeting of the UK
parliament!  Concerning what platforms were supported.  But it was
fun.

    https://gramps-project.org/

Also demonstrated using a (proprietary) program to colorize older B&W
photos.  Rest assured that we harassed Bryan sufficiently for that
transgression at a Libre meet!

    https://renew-photo.com/

Bob gave a demo of clusterssh.  The command opens an administration
console and an xterm to all specified hosts.  Any text typed into the
administration console is replicated to all windows.  All windows may
also be typed into directly.  It's really very cool!  It's been around
forever.  It's the worst way to edit the same file on a dozen systems
but sometimes we just find ourselves needing to edit the same file on
a dozen live production systems. :-)

    https://github.com/duncs/clusterssh

I demonstrated running tail -F on the nginx log files as an easy thing
to demonstrate.  I usually use multitail to do this.  Aaron said that
tail could tail -F multiple files.  What?  I said demo or it didn't
happen! :-)

I handed the display hose over to Aaron who then demonstrated that GNU
tail -F can tail multiple files.  When it does this it includes a
newline and a marker that indicates which file the following output is
from.  I did not know that it would do that!  TIL something new.
Always a good day.  (Though I will stick with multitail because I like
the display of it into separate window panes better.)

Bill demonstrated working with large datasets, which often needs
example data that is a large dataset.  Everyone likes moves and using
the movie database makes for a very large database of public
information which can then be used to test working with large datasets
that is more fun that just manufacturing dry random data for testing.
Bill talked about making inferences and other tasks of working with
these large datasets.

    https://datasets.imdbws.com/

Bill then talked about https://neo4j.com/ which is (proprietary)
program for working with this data.  Once again we were called upon to
harass someone for that at a Libre meetup!

The display hose went away for a while.  Then came back to Bill and he
talked some more about using neo4j.  Bill only has one usable hand at
the moment until his shoulder heals a little more and so he
demonstrated how he created a graph by voice commands and committed it
into version control.

Bill also talked about "typst".  It's a simpler markup replacement for
the venerable TeX.  If you think of what you can do with TeX and then
think about how you would create a TeX document and then think that it
might be nice if it were much simpler using a simpler markup language
that is the target for typst.  It is actually free software licensed
with the Apache 2.0 license.  However they really use that to pull you
into their online site and the online site is SaaS with a pricing
model with a monthly subscription.

    https://typst.app/