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Please note our current meeting location: Fortress Software Inc., 350 Keewatin St -- Unit #2
The meeting room will be open by 7:00 pm, with the actual meeting starting at 7:30 pm. If driving, enter the lot using the most north east entrance and drive around to the south west corner of the building. You can use any of the free, ample, and safe parking spots that say "reserved" in front of units #1 through #4 before entering unit #2. Bus stops #30814 and #30880 (route 77) are only 150 meters away. The last bus leaves for Polo Park at 10:15 pm and for Garden City at 10:31 pm. Logan Ave. bus routes #19, #26, and #27 are a 600 meter (8 minute) walk to the south.
MUUG meetings also take place online (typically using BigBlueButton) for those who can't be there in person. Meeting link will be provided on the home page, prior to meeting start time.
Before that, for our mini-presentation of a “desktop app”, Brad Vokey did a quick demonstration of his favorite GUI text editor: Sublime Text - “Text Editing Done Right”. Sublime Text is a fast, mature, light weight, beautiful, customizable, expandable, cross-platform, “shareware” text editor. Brad has previously written about Sublime Text in the MUUG 2021-06 newsletter (page 5), and he now gave us a quick intro into some of its features that he found most useful.
/bin Diving/bin directory?
Some of us could probably count on our hands the number of binary commands
we actually run on a regular basis,
but if we look inside we see thousands of installed binaries
(2,691 on this editor’s system to be precise).
So what the heck are all these and what are they for?
Well what better way to find out than dive in head first
and pick something at random.
In the premiere of the /bin Diving segment,
Gilbert Detillieux randomly selected a command from the
/bin directory and attempt to learn how to use it.
After a less-than-fruitful look at uwsgi,
Gilbert took another random stab and came up with updatedb.
This became an opportunity for some group participation as we
attempted to learn what we could about the command, and its companion
locate command.
This involved not just looking at the man page, but some side-trips to
look into various configuration files, and package meta data.
Alberto's presentation focussed on the various configuration files he uses for dnsmasq on his home network, including support for VLANS, and a VPN tunnel to his mother's home network in Brazil.
Our previously-scheduled presentation, by Trevor Cordes, on his favourite browser plugins, will be rescheduled for a later month, likely in early 2025.
/bin Diving!
Wyatt's pick this month was pbmtoepsi,
part of the NetPBM package.
To get this command to do something useful on Wyatt's terminal session,
other related commands were also used and looked up,
so that we could start with a JPEG file and end up with something
viewable as ASCII art on the screen.
Additional commands used included
jpegtopnm,
ppmtopgm,
pgmtopbm,
and finally pbmtoascii.
(Better results, including colour support, were obtained by using
jpegtopnm input.jpg | ppmtoterm.)
Trevor personally hates clutter in web pages he frequents. So he’ll show you how to clean things up with ABP and uBlock Origin. But we’re not just talking ads: nope, you can remove basically any piece of nonsense on any site with a bit of extra work. You’ll see the easy “anyone can do it” way plus the “completely insane” complex way – including when sites purposely try to sabotage your blockers. Winning!
Trevor may also discuss/demo NoScript, Dark Reader and Video Background Play Fix: all things he cannot possibly live without. If you don’t leave wanting to install a few of these then you must be from outer space!
Kevin McGregor will also present an overview of a variety of user-focused, open-source applications, from typical office applications to media editing, games, utilities and more.
Please note the change in meeting date for this month, and for the rest of the current year. We are now meeting on the first Tuesday of each month.
We have a new in-person meeting location now! Brad Vokey has graciously let us use his work office for our next in-person meeting. The meeting room will be open by 7:00 pm, with the actual meeting starting at 7:30 pm. If driving, enter the lot using the most north east entrance and drive around to the south west corner of the building (see route in map detail on poster linked below). You can use any of the free, ample, and safe parking spots that say "reserved" in front of units #1 through #4 before entering unit #2. Bus stops #30814 and #30880 (route 77) are only 150 meters away. The last bus leaves for Polo Park at 10:15 pm and for Garden City at 10:31 pm. Logan Ave. bus routes #19, #26, and #27 are a 600 meter (8 minute) walk to the south.
For those unable or preferring not to attend in person, the meeting will also be available online, using BBB as usual. Stay tuned to our muug.ca home page for the official URL, which will be made available about a half hour before the meeting starts. (Reload the page if you don't see the link, or if there are issues with connecting.)
For those having video performance issues, Alberto posted some useful tips on hardware acceleration settings to the roundtable mailing list.
Help promote this month's meeting, by putting this poster up on your workplace bulletin board, or linking to it on social media.
Please note our current meeting location: Fortress Software Inc., 350 Keewatin St -- Unit #2
The meeting room will be open by 7:00 pm, with the actual meeting starting at 7:30 pm. If driving, enter the lot using the most north east entrance and drive around to the south west corner of the building. You can use any of the free, ample, and safe parking spots that say "reserved" in front of units #1 through #4 before entering unit #2. Bus stops #30814 and #30880 (route 77) are only 150 meters away. The last bus leaves for Polo Park at 10:15 pm and for Garden City at 10:31 pm. Logan Ave. bus routes #19, #26, and #27 are a 600 meter (8 minute) walk to the south.
MUUG meetings also take place online (typically using BigBlueButton) for those who can't be there in person. Meeting link will be provided on the home page, prior to meeting start time.