But we don't have an MC to announce it. It's okay.
That's okay.
Welcome to the… January 2025, SHRCOM meeting for St. Louis Unix users group Actually, on Monday, December 30th.
And we shall turn the floor over to the secretary since our illustrious leader is MIA currently.
Hopefully he's coming because I'm getting hungry.
You too.
You taking notes or candy?
Start the recording. And yes.
Okay, start the recording.
All right. This is the steering committee meeting. It is December the 30th.
2024 so this is actually a steering committee meeting do the January stuff.
So of the usual crew right now, Lee, Stan, and Ken are here.
Along with me, Gary. And… to our agenda.
Yes.
Stan, go ahead and lead off.
Well, who's going to do the recordings? Am I going to do it or is Ken going to do it?
I'm doing it.
Okay.
Okay, let's see. Do we need any agenda changes?
I don't think anybody's read the thing, so probably not.
Yeah.
Good accurate call on the saving affairs, yes.
Yeah. Does Secretary have anything to report?
No.
Okay. And… Lee put the treasury balances in.
And… gotten anything wrong.
No changes. I didn't have time to do the calendar report, so I'll have to wait till after the meeting and But I did do the subscriber report. There's the numbers on a That is, they're about the same.
Meetup jumped from 881 to 897. You know typical thing uh a lot of people A lot of names being signed up, but not a lot of people showing up at the meeting as new folks.
Mm-hmm.
The announced number dropped one. From four fifty seven to four fifty six they discuss numbers the same at 198.
Also, steercome number went up to 24 And I think it may be just a duplicate.
Depends on how awake I am when I count that stuff.
Sysadmin stayed the same at 22. There's a lot of people on the steer comm and the sysadmin list that I never see them. I don't know who they are.
Maybe we ought to purge that.
And the attendance report for the numbers. A typical holiday kind of thing.
First part of December, just Gary, myself, and myself lever to steering comm meeting. And I don't even think we recorded it, did we?
Nope, we didn't. We mostly talked about everything except business. Did we?
I thought we did.
Okay, I might have a recording of it somewhere too, or maybe we did. I don't know.
Let's put it this way. I looked at all that stuff after the meeting and since I wound up going to Vegas.
For the holidays, I don't remember what I saw. It's hard to say. At the first of the month, the Slack meeting was seven.
Slug meeting was 24, which is Pretty good.
I thought. St. Louis Linux user group was eight. And… No.
Oh, I think I got the numbers swapped there. It should be 20 for St. Louis Linux and 8 for the new Linux. I got them in the wrong place.
Sorry about that. That needs to be changed. Should be… Go ahead. Yeah.
I can fix that.
Was in a hurry because I did all the editing about the last half hour that I put together.
So…
Well, while Stan's looking at that, I'm going to apologize to everybody At the last steering committee meeting, it crossed my mind to trying to hold this meeting.
During the holiday weeks probably was going to cause conflict with people's schedule.
Certainly it has with mine. So I apologize for not quite having my act together.
Dragging everyone else into this.
Yeah, well… Thank you.
Okay, that's been fixed.
Yeah. And the new Linux thing was really low. And I think that may be because Gary thought that the meeting was canceled.
And postage as such on the… meetup.com.
And the day prior, I caught that and I changed it to meetup.com.
So… Wasn't a lot of people there.
I kind of hoped there had been more.
That does suggest that people are looking at that for information.
Yeah. Yeah.
Much as we hate meetup.com, if we get it wrong there.
Yeah.
Scooch things up. And I think you're right, Ken. I think some people look at that instead of our our own calendar.
It is.
And oh, I also had to change it on the Google Calendar, so… Whatever. When we make mistakes, we make mistakes because… We're human and we're human Not a lot of Indians around here. Too many chiefs.
Anyway.
Stan, you've got SIRCOM for November 4th on Bach.
I do.
Looks like you're missing October, though.
Where? On the…
There's recordings there for 11.4, but not for October.
Oh, okay. I probably uploaded it and forgot to write the link. I'll have to go back and check it.
Thank you.
Where, where?
Anyway. So much for the reports, meeting review comments december Secondly, you know.
I wrote that it was not recorded, but we didn't cover anything but i may be wrong about that.
Maybe my brain is foggy. Comments.
I missed that one, unfortunately, so… I have nothing to say.
If there's a recording, I'll post it but As I remember we didn't really cover a lot of business. We talked about stuff, but we didn't do it in any real logical order and follow the agenda or anything like that from what I remember.
Okay. About Slack meeting.
Yeah. December 5th. Yeah.
Correct.
Yeah. I had to… I had to take somebody to the airport so phil and ed covered the meeting while I was on… Or me. And so I wrote that in there.
Okay. Right, right.
And I've got nothing further to say. The next Slack meeting is going to be on the I'm going to be on the second.
That'll be covered. I don't have anything. No more comments about the SWAC meeting.
It was small but small Pretty good. We generally have a couple of guys consistently show up. The guy from Canada, Ron BC, And Tony C and… Sometimes, Sean.
Shows up there and i think uh we had the guy from california show up so And… we don't often have anybody come in and new that has a problem but when we do or don't when we don't those guys get off on tangents and they're pretty interesting
And we start talking about all kinds of stuff. It's almost like a just a free format meeting, whatever.
They're good.
How dare these unfamiliar people bring up new topics?
Well, you know. Yeah. Oh.
A whole topic.
Okay.
Well.
On a Slack meeting, I did record it. I had the recorder running on that.
And I go back over that. And listen to what's covered when I wasn't there.
Got back much later than I thought I would be able to.
But I never post those up on the internet. The only thing I do is… using for my notes and attendance. That's all I use them for.
Oh.
Okay, well, how about…
About comments on the… meeting on the 11th.
Lee did the thing on the GCE vulnerability scanner thing with the docker set up and everything that was Very informative much Found out much more about that tool than we ever got out of Tony Z.
Okay. No.
Yeah, I remember. I thought there was a lot of good information there.
Yeah.
Appreciated it.
I don't know. Don't know what else to say about it. That was good.
Lee definitely pulled it together.
All right. And what about…
Maybe. The distro box thing that Tom Clark did Actually, I never watched that video Oh, I'm not, you know, I don't know what happened on there so I never watched that portion of the video.
What do you think of it, Gary?
Sorry, I just put a scoop of salad in my mouth.
Okay.
Great. Quickly remind me what drop was that?
Distro box. Distro Box, yeah. Yeah. And that worked out pretty well.
It was a good presentation. I haven't had a chance to talk to Sean yet to see I think it was Sean who originally proposed you can do a talk on DistroBox versus Toolbox.
But I think this is going to work out, I think, because I think This guy's already done a really nice presentation on distro box And now, John.
Can talk about toolbox just in terms of of you know what differences are And I'm sure it'll give us more of an insight into crystal box, too.
I think it'll be a nice a nice combination.
So yeah, I think it was a good presentation
I find more and more of these these presentations with Docker and presentations aws and aws remote stuff they're interesting but I never intend to using that stuff. So it goes in one ear and out the other kind of.
Mm-hmm.
For me, well.
I think this one especially this one
I'll kind of say as an exception to that. Because it's kind of like, you know, okay.
You're not using it as a tool just to have a virtual system out there You know, for production reasons, but rather you're using it as a tool that lets us you bring up another distro and not for general use by you know
30 other customers or 30 other users. Just for you, just to give you the quick access to you know if you're running Ubuntu, so here let me see how Sousa does it oh okay So I thought it was kind of good that way.
I think I'm just overwhelmed with a lot of things anymore.
Well, I think that's true of all of us. And if I could say all of us folks who've been doing it for a number of years.
Hmm.
That's why at times I find it really interesting talking to, what shall we say the younger the younger members of the organization.
Much like what you said earlier about earlier you know people were picking stuff up off meetup And it's like, yeah, I mean, there's some people that's their first thought. They'd look out on meetup. Why would you look on a web page
I think all of us here on this conversation, maybe not so much Ken, but we're used to We're used to the old tools and the old way of doing things. I'm not saying that's bad.
But it's just that at times the newbies, the younger folks They look at just the opposite of, you know.
Why are you guys doing it that way?
Whoa. I use Meet Up a moderate amount
And…
I'm sure.
It can certainly be a kind of a frustrating platform They do seem to have the idea that, oh.
Well, we need to make a change because we need to make a change.
And some of us… don't really buy that reasoning.
Yeah, we've…
Mm-hmm.
And Gary and I both have found that they've changed stuff in the way we try to edit something and you can't do it that way anymore.
Or you do it and it breaks stuff and the fonts get all screwed up and just da-da-da.
And what the hell happened? You know?
And also in talking to Jonathan Drews, he's of the firm opinion that a lot of it is a lot of those signups are just bogus names.
Because people sign up and he never sees them. And it's the same with us.
You know, I see people say, yeah, I'm going to come and they never show up.
Maybe it's just that it's too complicated. They can't figure out how to get to the the remote meeting with the instructions that I've been posting up, you know, because the way I do it And I wind up the instructions go strictly on the webpage.
You know, on the next button. You know the and uh Well, I mean, and then those instructions go out to discuss and they go out to our mailing list discuss and our mailing list announced.
And I just, I have a link on the webpage i don't I don't spell it out on that page, on the web page. I don't go back and put it on Meetup. I don't go back and put it on
The calendar, you know, that's 27 more steps that I don't want to have to do.
And, and… Honestly, sometimes I think it's an intelligence test to get into our meetings.
You know, it's certainly a lot of people don't have enough patrons to read any damn thing.
You know? And sometimes I see messages from meetup.com is, where are the instructions on how to get to the meeting?
Didn't you read the damn page? You know?
That's our membership test. If you can't read the instructions that far, yeah, you're not going to make it in the meeting.
Yeah. It's like an intelligence test and half of them, you know, all We'll get 10 or 15 people say they're going to come to the meeting and three will show up maybe.
Spanish being… being kind.
You know?
Not accusatory. There are, of course, the other two points of the other two possibilities.
One is that these people actually do exist And they're putting this in as resume stuffers because they want to show that Yes, they signed up for going to sign up for going Linux or a Unix user group meetings, they can put that on their LinkedIn page or their resume
And even if they don't show up for the meetings. But okay, at least it shows they said they were there.
And I don't, you know, and meetup.com has a facility where you can go in and say.
Who showed up and who didn't. But that's too damn much work.
So we don't do it.
And that's also more recent. Facility didn't used to be in there, I don't think.
Oh, it's been in there a long time. Yeah, I've been in there for years. It's just too damn much work.
Oh yeah, okay.
Okay. The other possibility, and we've talked about this before, and that is that it's beat up who's generating fictitious users that people don't exist meetups just for their own interest padding the numbers to make it look like they're more
For you.
Yeah. And as administrators, we keep getting messages from them saying, oh, you're doing so well. See how your numbers have gone up.
Bullshit. You know?
And…
Well, I think we have actually looked that we are getting people who show up seemingly from meetup because you're coming from around the country coming from British Columbia. So it's definitely a good thing there is You know, a usefulness to it.
The disappointing thing is the females show up and they never come back.
Oh, it's even worse than that. When you look at the people who sign up.
Yeah.
Yeah, I… sometimes get curious and look at the people who are signing up and they're every month there are female names. Some of them have pictures of nice looking ladies and Almost none of them ever show up at the meeting. Hey, you know what my
Old piece of wisdom is. If you can't play with them, don't get excited.
Yeah.
Yep. It's a waste of hormones.
Yeah.
So what about the new Linux meeting on the 17th? You mentioned, of course, that there is the scheduling problem. Anything else?
Free format. Yeah. That was fun with the eight guys that were there. It was good.
It was fun. It's free format. I can't remember from one meeting to the next how much fun we had. So don't really have anything else to say about it.
Of course, I think that was one where I actually, I had turned the recorder on but I screwed up and I didn't have the sound on so I couldn't hear anything. So all I was able to do is pick a head count.
But I really didn't want to admit that.
Oh, well, I've done that too many times. The one advantage to the one advantage to Zoom over… Jesse, is it If you remember to turn the recorder on, you get a decent recording with sound.
All I can say. However, it doesn't give you the headcount thing. All it does is show the people that speak so the the participants panel doesn't show up.
Oh, yeah? Okay.
In a recording. Unless somebody shares their entire screen, which is not doesn't happen very often.
Almost never.
Okay.
The St. Louis beating on the… Linux meeting on the 19th that was Scott Graneman did the computer history thing and uh Yeah, I thought it was really good. You know, despite the fact that he got less than 24 hours notice from Gary.
Mm-hmm.
Which really wasn't too much of Gary's fault because he had two people that he had scheduled that bailed him in the last minute.
Yeah. And, uh. And Scott said he was putting stuff together and it wasn't complete, but it was pretty darn good, I thought.
And…
Yeah, that was good. I knew he'd be able to pull something together because he's he's done that type of lecture to his college classes and so I think what he was doing in that short notice was just kind of cleaning it up, making sure that
It fit me a lot of time frame for us and the information was properly up to date.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
Question you want me to Ding Grant about doing Bach? Got their luck in January.
Let's see we're still coming up on that as a future topic.
And I guess… We may have two takers here.
We got some other options? Yeah. Oh, okay. Anyway, are we done with… talking about last month?
I think so.
I guess let's move on to next month. And we can get to Lee's answers.
Hmm. We got your Slack meeting coming up on January 2nd. That'll be another free format meeting.
I'll be able to handle that. I already talked to Phil, he's going to be there.
So that always helps have two people. To kind of share the burden of it. But it's all free format. So it's always fun when people show up it's It's… It's even better if somebody's got a problem and we try to troubleshoot something but
Sometimes we get people are just They just ran across a Linux meeting and then you know they're Just now getting into it. We've done, since it's free format we've I think two or three meetings ago, Slack meetings ago, all we did was tell a guy about all the things he could do with Linux and you know and
Give them an idea of some of the tools were available, the whole nine yards, where to start, you know, that kind of stuff.
Yep.
Which is you know which is the intent of the new Linux user group. But hey, since it's three more format, what the heck?
Okay, that's on the second and I'll be handling that. Then the next meeting in January 8th, the SLU General meeting with base and In Maine? Gary?
Skip uh skip over the base for a second. And so for maine Last month, one of the speakers who canceled out Was Crocodile Joe.
And when he canceled out, he basically said, so how about let's just do it next month?
Meaning January. So I sent Joe an email My fault. I didn't get around doing that email until today.
And then I screwed up his email address and didn't notice the screw up until I called Stan on the phone this afternoon.
And he pointed out where I went wrong. And so I haven't seen a reply back from from Joe yet.
But hopefully he'd be able, this is the talk on the unpronounceable word plot.
Anyway, it's a… it's a sniffer thing Wi-Fi.
You basically, like you can go to bread co sit down in Bredco and you send out a signal And it'll go out and it knocks people off the Wi-Fi connection forces their system to do a new handshake But then your computer is sitting there
And analyzes the new handshake and basically makes it so you can watch other people's conversations or traffic on the Wi-Fi.
So joe did it as a… 2,600 hacker group talk and uh talk So yeah, it's definitely got technical information in it and uh So he's done it before.
Says he can do it for us again. But I haven't got a confirmation yet other of whether or not he'll do it on Wednesday.
I did include in the email, hey, if you can't do it on Wednesday.
How about Thursday the 16th. But as soon as I find out from I'll go one way or the other.
Backup. Is what I'm thinking of for the Thursday meeting.
Let me ask you… Can you spell the name of that thing?
Let's see.
I was looking for her. I'm sorry?
Oh, and that would be for Maine, right?
Yes. Yes.
That would be the…
Oh, yes, that would be for me.
And I'm okay and so and then how do you spell that thing
Well, I won't find it.
I don't see it in a planning schedule. We just drop it out of the planning schedule, Stan?
We just drop it off the planning schedule when it got canceled?
Say again.
It would be in there somewhere, but I don't think I ever put it in there because I never got enough information on the damn thing.
Yeah, there's no Wi-Fi in here and Joe is only in here twice neither one of those.
Yes. You're wearing a black vest and a great sweatshirt.
Thank you.
Can anybody still see me? Okay, because you… Because the only thing I've got with Zoom right now is the meeting chat thing. Everything else just disappeared on me.
It means you lost your tiny window. Look at our different workspaces. It should be on top.
We're to… I've looked on all of them and I can't find it anywhere.
I looked up.
Well, it hit the tux key. Well, you almost, yeah, if you can't spot it, you almost have to look at them all.
I have looked at all of them and they're not it's not there.
I'm a bitch.
You guys double click on the chat and blow it up, at least you'll see something.
Okay.
Shit.
Let's see. Ken, are you ready to take a spelling?
Yes.
Okay, P as in paul W-N-N-A.
G. O. T as in tango.
C as in Charlie. Hey, you're saying hello.
Aye.
Onagati, deep reinforcement, learning for Wi-Fi pawning.
Raspberry Pi dies.
Okay. Bye. Possibly KJO on Panagotchi Wi-Fi mischief.
Okay.
So… What about the base?
Ken, I'll drop a quick summary in chat here if you want to grab it.
Actually put something informative in the minutes.
Sorry, Gary, what was your next one? Uh… the backup for that would be what I'd prefer to do at a log meeting and that would be I've been meaning to ask Sean if he would be willing to just talk about toolbox
Now that we've had a separate talk on DistroBox, Sean had originally said he would do a talk called distro box versus toolbox And so I'm figuring, okay, this is basically You just need to do half the talk. It's obviously a little more than that.
But yeah, I'd like to see sean do the distro or the toolbox talk. So last month's distro box talk is impression of people's minds but i have not yet ask Sean that. As I said, this is my fault of presuming that there'd be
Time to do things during the Christmas holidays
Oh, bother.
So if all goes well, I would say toolbox for the log meeting on thursday And walk to town.
On a gotchi. Would be the Wednesday main.
Okay, so we're… Still empty on base, right?
Correct. Still need a base.
I was going to volunteer. And there's a neat tool that somebody put on my iphone.
It's the uh it's the cell.
So network. Tool you gave me, Lee?
I did. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Network show info late. Yeah, yeah.
However, that tool has ceased working for me for some reason.
That's the tool. For me, obviously. So anyway, my first thing is I have to fix that tool just to find out what's wrong with it on my phone.
And uh but uh So yeah, someday I'll get around doing a presentation on it, but it probably ain't going to be ready in a week.
When was the last time you did a presentation, Gary?
It's been years. I don't remember why in the last 20 years.
Been decades is more accurate, yes.
All right. Hey, Stan, now I can see you, but you're upside down.
Isn't that cute? I did that upside down on purpose, trying to see if it had any effect.
But I still can't see the session at all. It just wants me to sign back in.
Well, your session's active, you just lost your window somewhere oh um hit the window, your Windows key and type zoom Or do you have the app or do you have a browser?
Did the app.
Okay, well, you should, you know, just type z hit Windows and Z and start and grab the app again and it should in large wherever you were.
Window.
What do you mean by windows?
Your your tux key your windows key Super key.
Oh, super key and Z. Nothing. Nothing.
Yeah. Well, you don't have a Zoom app then.
Wait a minute. I guess you're not using gnome, are you?
No. Well, it should be. It's Linux Mint, and that uses GNOME underneath.
It comes out of Ubuntu, which uses gnome.
When you hit the windows key you get the screen shrinks.
Well, then it's not the Windows key on your window manager.
Does nothing.
Okay.
Do you have an apps? Bow on the top left.
No. I don't know what to do.
It's just gone.
Or if you share your screen, Stan? I see. Right, right. Never mind. Sorry.
I can't find the share your screen button. And right now I can see the narrative going on. I can see that.
And that's it.
Now, I do have a Zoom function, but it allows, you know, it goes through the Oh, that ain't gonna work.
All that is it wants me to join the meeting. I've got a Zoom workplace sign up. That's all I got.
Besides the i see the the narrative going by when I talk.
And other people talking.
Well, what do you need that you don't have? Well, what do you need? Not what you want. What do you need?
Everything else.
I need to sign in again is what I need to do.
No, you got an active session.
Can you kick me off? Sure, go ahead.
Do you want me to?
How will that affect recording?
Stan. Okay, you ready to kick off?
Yep.
You're gone.
Ken, I'll take this moment of silence. I just sent you an email that has kamikaze joe kamikaze Cathol's name.
Along with his email address just so Yeah, that was in it.
Again, we still have you, correct?
Yeah, I'm grabbing that.
Let's see.
Oh, there it is.
Well, I guess they killed Stan for good.
You have to be careful with that kill command. No, I just removed them. I didn't kill him.
We hope.
Well, while we're waiting for Stan to log back in. Anybody else have any?
Thoughts on possible tutorials, basic talks
But who might be in a position to do one. Not necessarily one of you two Who else can I put the fat finger on?
For Wednesday? Mm-hmm. 10 days from now.
Nine days, actually. Let me ding. Grant, see if he'd be interested in doing it. Cool.
By the way, while I was being quasi-silent there, I did just send off a message to Sean.
To see if he'd be willing to do the toolbox presentation.
Rephrase that. If you'd be willing to do the toolbox presentation at the LUG meeting this month.
Right.
Sorry, the number you have dialed is not That was 289-1183.
Pardon me? I thought Stan's number was 2891183.
Excuse me.
Sorry, the number you have Are you sure that kill command works correctly?
We're sorry, the number you have dialed. Oh, there he is. He found it.
Is that any better, Stan?
I had all the numbers and everything and I tried five times and it just kept saying.
They wouldn't let me in because the host had thrown me out.
And then… I don't know what I did this last time.
Shit. Oh, well.
Oh, okay.
Yes.
Okay. While you were gone, Stan. I suggested to… Lee and uh ken If either of them had a suggestion of who I could put the uh who i could put strong arm on to do to do the tutorial.
When is that? That's the eighth.
Yeah. Yes. Yes. It's only eight. Yes.
I'm sure I can. I couldn't understand that.
Oh.
Well, I'm trying to think of anything that I've
Been doing that might be of interest to somebody else I can think of two possibilities.
One would be… a discussion of INXI.
As a, you know, as a valuable information getting tool.
You know?
And the other one would be…
I don't know why, but your voice is being echoed or something. So INXI, and I couldn't understand the next thing you said.
As an information getting tool. And I don't know what's wrong with I'm like…
It sounds like it's over modulating.
Maybe this is better.
A little better. Keep going.
How about this?
And much better. Yeah, it is. Thank you. You know, the volume's lower, but at least it's more understandable.
Okay. The other possibility would be some discussion of Oh.
Different approaches for different Oh.
Wiping the contents of solid state drives.
Wow. Okay.
Okay, I'm going to suggest, I don't know much about INXI.
Anybody can overrule me on this. I'll suggest the wiping solid state drives because obviously the the talk on the talk on pawn got sheet, pawn gotchi.
I mean, the talk was really done at 2600 to a hackers group And it's basically software, although it could be useful for just technical people in general.
It's got a lot of heritage in the hacker community. So yeah, talk on wiping a drive would possibly be attractive to the same sorts of peoples that may uh we're going to shoot a better crowd that night yeah
No.
Yes, well…
Either one of those topics would be of interest uh I've seen forums where the problems that people were having with sound cards they would not respond unless you put an INXII results.
In with your request. To help you with your sound card Or any kind of audio problems.
What is…
What was that, Lee?
What is INXI?
It's a command line program. For displaying information about the system where it's running.
Oh, okay.
It's the sort of thing that… They might use the slack or the newcomers meeting.
Very good for troubleshooting.
Okay, so the wiping, I can do the wiping solid state drives thing And… At some point, there'll probably be a slide that says, you know, if you have classified information or information of that degree of sensitivity.
Don't wipe the drive, shred it.
Yeah.
You know, you need to be realistic. I asked a couple of people lately.
Have you ever had any classified information on these drives? Because they do work in in an environment where they have to have Security clearances.
And they said, no. Great.
Mm-hmm.
In that case, we can just wipe it. If they had said yes, we would have taken the drive out and broken it into pieces.
Because you just… You don't mess around with that stuff.
Yeah, I've seen floppy drives that had the entire European plans for response to the Russian attack.
That was supposedly wiped. And it was there.
Yeah, well… Anyway, okay, well, the other thing is, because that's a wednesday I will need to leave as soon as I'm done.
Yeah.
You know, as soon as I've answered questions… I'll have to leave.
Okay.
Yep.
All right, let me put this in. Let's see here.
Title.
Where is that? There it is. No, that's not it.
The wiki seems like a really good thing, but once in a while it all looks alike.
To me. So if it's not available anymore… What goes in there? Under status.
Dunn seems like it would be we've already done it. Thank you.
Oh, confirmed. Confirmed
Okay. While you were talking, I just received a response from Sean.
Sean has accepted a a teaching position in a college And… So he's kind of he's kind of busy preparing lectures for his coursework this semester.
Oh, my…
So certainly he will not have time and inclination to do it here in January.
Or anything else for months.
Probably.
Oh, golly. Nice to have him while he was here.
Golly, what about this? The rebuilt web pages.
Oh, golly.
It seems to be working. At one point a while back, we were going to go live with it.
Since nobody's interested in doing anything that's interested in doing somewhere on the list.
For future.
Oh, God.
In Z, is that how you pronounce it, Ken?
No idea. No idea at all.
Command line system information tool. Okay.
Well, then let's… For the immediate questions, which is this month's stuff We've got Ken presenting the tutorial.
We don't have a confirmation yet from Joe. Hoping that he can do the main on Wednesday.
And now we're back to needing a Thursday.
Log topic so I go back and look through my list of possible future speakers.
You mean the planning report?
Okay.
Yep. All that and my… memories of who I talked to recently that might be available.
Actually, one that i'm… thinking right off is… Bryce.
Because he wasn't at any of our meetings this semester because he was teaching class on those nights.
Yeah.
So… Depending on what his class schedule is for this semester.
Upcoming semester.
Yeah.
I'll send a message off to him to see if he's had a possibility.
Interesting, Ken. It's installed on my main workstation.
That's not a big surprise. I think there are a fair number of distros that install it by default.
I know it's installed by default. On… Bunsen Labs and that's… fairly minimal.
Moderately, let's say moderately lightweight
Well, we could always plan on doing Bach unless you could come up with an option.
Yeah. Yeah, I guess we'll put that down as the backup and just start aiming at it, see if I get any. In fact, if Sean can… can break away can break away. We could do the web stuff.
Either or both.
See one of my Christmas gifts?
I see. Well…
Ooh.
Meow?
I got a bike trainer. You know, something you can set your bike on I needed another Well, let's see. I thought it would be useful to have another arrow in my rehab quiver.
I'll throw you in mind it's just tool for taking airplanes apart.
This would really be tacky of me to tacky suggest that the Russians already seem to have that tool.
Okay, where's my video?
What the hell? Yep. Can't even, oh, never mind. The other way.
Here's my Christmas gift, tool for taking airplanes apart.
Wow.
That's the battery.
Or…
Best thing is that.
Now I can't think of his name, but our alumnus who… was working at…
Yeah, more you turn faster go. Yeah.
The bug the bug The drug services company and then went off to work for Google.
I'm sorry, say that again, Ken, please.
Our alumnus who used to work at the Prescription management company and then went off to work for Google.
Can't think of his name. Before that, he was working in South America.
Oh. Yes, yes, yes.
Andrews.
Andrew, yeah. Andrew liked DeWalt because it was easier for him to find the yellow colored stuff.
Andrew liked DeWalt because it was easier for him to find him The yellow covered stuff. Okay. Okay.
The yellow colored stuff.
Okay. I got a couple of tool bags you might want yeah You bring up an interesting name, Ken, because yeah It occurs to me that, you know, boy, andrews disappeared from town and disappeared from the group you know early on in COVID.
I've been meaning to maybe send him an email or something Trying to catch up with him. I don't know if you've heard from him at all.
Recent times.
We've, well, we've created some email, but it's been a while.
You know after he left.
Yeah.
Let's see. June is 23.
Okay, it's probably more recently than I heard from him.
Out of curiosity, do you have any idea where he is these days?
Colorado.
Okay.
I mean, as far as I know. I mean, the last I heard he was working for Google but that may or may not have changed.
Yeah. Last I heard, he was in Colorado. Yeah.
Okay.
Possibly Denver. I don't know.
Big state. Oh, golly.
Yeah, unfortunately, he doesn't believe in linkedin Okay.
All right, so what else do we need to do? Okay. Anybody have any other suggestions for the Thursday?
Nothing viable.
No sense sitting here and listening to me choke about it so Everybody, keep your thinking caps on. And if anybody has it Any brilliant breakthrough thought.
Sending an email to everybody, so pursue it. Okay, thank you. Let's go on to… What's the next point in the agenda?
Well, there's a new Linux meeting on January 28th.
Reformat, nothing to talk about.
Good enough. Old business server admin buck upgrade.
I don't have anything helpful to say, so…
You're probably the most knowledgeable on that. What's that? Vodka.
What do you mean probably he's the only one who knows what the hell's in.
Going on.
Once again, I failed to deliver the proper irony tone. Well, nothing's happened in what five months, something like that.
Yeah.
I suggested earlier to Lee that we just pick out a time and just start doing something.
You know, and people which would… Then be interested. Nobody wants to commit to anything.
But they are nosy as hell.
Well, let me turn that on its head. Basically.
Since it's serving as a presentation, it's nice if someone… has some narrative comments of this is what we're trying to do and this is how we're trying to do it.
The next bright flash you see will mean that it didn't work the way we expected.
Yeah. And the system's down and we no longer have email or web pages or nothing.
But this does mean that this does mean Lee and those who have… done the legwork up to this point.
Have to be prepared to run the show that night so that night so It may be a good idea to plan on doing it Thursday night.
But that would be, as you said, Lee, it'd be nice to see if Grant and Sean.
I guess Mike Knight hasn't. He won't join. He wouldn't even join the meeting.
No, he wouldn't show up.
Well, but he did give me some clues
He does a lot of research that is very helpful, but, you know, he does… You wouldn't.
He posted some notes on fisherman list about how to do it without blowing it up.
Yeah.
So basically the idea would be I'll shut down for an hour that afternoon. We'll make a fresh clone.
Or before the meeting and we'll leave mark disabled temporarily.
Until the meeting's over and decide whether we run the new one or Shut the new one down and bring up the old one.
Does that include a backup before you mess everything up?
No, no. You missed it.
Oh, you do a backup like I do. I just buy a new hard drive and copy stuff over and that's it.
No, we shut down Bach. Upgrade to…
Yeah. Cologne. I clone the hard drive and that's my new system and the old one is the backup. That's okay.
All right, that works. Yeah, it's a whole virtual system, I know.
Yeah. Well, except it's not a hard drive. It's the
Yeah.
Like I said, I guess the key thing is just to touch base with the other The other guys have been working on the project.
Hopefully they'll all be willing to show up that night. Cool.
All right.
I wonder.
Hmm.
All right, what else we got? My Chromebook just went into a reboot.
Hmm.
So I'm blind for a second.
Inhale.
How often does it do that?
Too often. Multiple possible reasons a I'm running short on disk space.
B, I am a tab hog. I've got like 40 tabs open.
Which is way more than the limited amount of memory that's available in this box should be doing.
Yeah.
And thirdly, it's an old Chromebook and it is already past its expiration date. So it needs to be put out of its misery.
Rd, you only paid 20 bucks for 10 years ago from the high school kid that threw it away, so you deserve it, I guess.
More likely, yeah. God.
Hey, I wanted to live the Chrome experience. I've lived it.
Okay.
You know, I could… I could set you up.
I don't do that. I don't have a bad note. I think room is a good thing.
I could set you up with a 12-year-old ThinkPad.
16 gigs of memory.
I have loaned machines to Gary in the past and never gotten them back, so… they always wind up
Yeah, I wasn't expecting to get it back.
Well, I've given machines to Gary in the past, but he never plugged them in.
Well, those you give to him, he gives to some female.
So it has been a useful experience for me, Lee. And you really think some female is going to appreciate a case that much?
God.
Or a computer that much? Bright shiny objects. Boy, was that a sexist comment?
Damn.
We're going to have to clean up this recording. Okay. Anyway.
Jesus.
But thank you for the offer, Ken.
Let's see. Okay, anyway, now I'm coming back up I still haven't found.
Bye. Agenda here yet. What are we talking about next year on the agenda?
Website maintenance?
Scroll down there. I guess that becomes a Sean question, as we just pointed out, with Sean question.
Starting to teach class.
Okay, so I mean, the meeting in november
We were left with go live sean will make it happen when he has some time.
And it sounds like… Not too long after that, Sean got a new job and doesn't have time anymore.
I think that summarizes it.
That may be hitch. He didn't say that explicitly. But… He did say that he's… will be teaching a new class this semester.
But that may have just been because i specifically asked them if you Salad caught my throat.
I specifically asked him if he could… come through on the toolbox presentation that we had talked about And it was wise of him to say, probably not a good idea, but that doesn't mean that he wasn't taking into consideration that he was also going to make the website happen.
But I will specifically ask him.
So for now, I'd say let's go on to the next point.
The uploading presentations.
Oh, I've been doing them. They're up there on the archives except for the Last steering committee thing. I don't remember for sure whether we did a recording or not.
I can't find a recording for December. I don't think it got made.
Whatever.
Right.
Okay.
November 4 recording was in the trash and there's no steer come in there and between that and the current one.
Yeah. Okay.
Meetup.com maintenance. Any comments, Gary?
Okay.
Oh, regular comment. Meetup sucks. Uh it uh As usual, like you were describing earlier, there seems to be always little changes I'm thinking probably my fault. I know there are a couple of things you're supposed to sign up. There's a meetup administrator and uh
I haven't taken advantage of going in there and going to their latest little seminar.
Online courses or whatever
I consider that all bullshit. I get this stuff all the time. I never do anything about it.
Maybe.
Anyway.
There are just times when it seems like they change the way something behaves and it probably would help if a new to expect that it's coming.
Whatever.
I think that's enough. I think that's enough about that. That's enough about that.
But as we know about it. Yeah. Okay. As we point out earlier in the meeting, though, it is still a useful tool in that uh I think we do pick up.
Pick up people from having the exposure.
Next. The internet presence and social media.
All right.
I noted that… Lee had posted something about a Discord. We have a Discord site.
Something or another.
No, we… Grant and I were yakking about IPv6 and everything was getting muddy in the email thread so i just started set up a discord site for i for slug projects.
Yeah.
And we have four threads going, IPv6 fundamentals obtaining a block, addressing schemes and routing
And I was curious and I went in there and read all that and understood none of it.
At some point, we probably ought to have somebody talk about IPv6 again.
And I pointed out earlier talking to lee that Dave Forrest had done an IPv6 presentation, what was it, back in 2017?
But we've got slides, but that was before we were doing recordings.
Yep.
Oh, damn. Yeah, we really didn't start doing recordings until COVID, and that was about 2020 yeah
Yeah. And… Anyway.
Which brings up a point I was going to maybe call and just see how Dave's doing. I haven't talked to him in quite some time.
He has been to a couple meetings in the last three or four months.
I think. Oh, no? Okay.
I haven't seen him at the meetings. Last two months. I did call him about two months ago and talk, you know, just say hi.
And… I don't know what to say.
It's been two months ago, at least. Anyway.
Let me skip back for a second. Good.
Go ahead. Quick. Hurry. Hurry.
You and Lee have heard me grumble about this before, but I'm going to grumble in front of Ken and see if he's got any good thought for me.
And basically, Ken, it's why I pushed Scott Graneman to do the social media for techie talks.
Three months ago? Okay, so now we've got a mastodon sign up.
And it's like, no, it's a Discord site. I'm sorry, a Discord site. Okay.
But we've got other conversations where we were talking about Sean putting up a mastodon and And this is where what I wanted Scott to address. Ken, if you have a quick two-sentence answer It's like, pardon me?
Why? The big question, why bother?
Yeah, why are there so many damn answers to this i mean you know it's like Seems like the proliferation of all these different possibilities is just confusing the issue.
It's always…
Well, um…
I'm involved with one group that uses a discord server
And they are, for the most part. People quite a bit younger than I am.
I suppose that… I'm guessing that it may be simpler
I think it's simpler to set up a Discord server with an assortment of discussion threads than it is to
Set up a… an email server with an assortment of mailing lists.
Okay.
You know, basically… the discord people have done a lot of that work for you.
Okay.
I mean, that particular group, you know, they have a number of You can have different discussions. You know, one of them is about One of them is about their meetings. One of them is about other events that they think
Their members would be interested in.
There's sort of a couple about different activities that that group sponsors you know activities that their group sponsors in different categories.
It supports a messaging function. And I assume there's probably an app for your phone to make this to make this you know.
Easier, more attractive, although I have not tried to use one I've only used a web browser.
For me To me, it's all essentially like news groups only with pretty buttons and you can send graphics and sound and And you can have a stage where people can do presentations or talk like a podcast kind of thing and you can stream it to YouTube.
All these they've done, you know, it's a lot of… whiz bang stuff all put together.
And you can lay it out like we used to have the news groups.
Lee, do you remember back when we had a news group for Slug?
You remember that?
Vaguely, but I never used it because to me it was wasn't very functional
Essentially. The way I see it these A lot of them they call forums And in the forum, they'll have a category for For example, let's say hardware issues. And I'll have another category for this is a software release that we did you know the latest release and this is you know troubleshooting
So you can set up all these different categories whatever you think is appropriate.
And people can go into that category and it's a little It's a little discussion group there.
For that particular category. And… I don't know. And with Discord, I joined Twit TV's uh Twitch Club.
And they were on their discord. And they… They do their podcasts.
And then they take their recordings and they take out the commercials and they put them available up through there.
And I found since then that since I was signed into Discord, I was able to join the Slug Discord. I was able that you set up.
I also said I've joined the Linux mint Discord.
Saying. And also the linux mint
Discord and there's and there's one that's… that Ed Holland has set up.
And, you know. And if a graphical front end of this thing and it's Well, you see what it's like the discord that you set up, you got the four categories that you set up Well, those other groups, they've set up categories differently because it's
The i you know it's whatever idea they had. And they all look a little bit different.
And you can do things like you can follow somebody. So whenever you see somebody's post something, the system notifies you that they posted something.
And… It's just too many bells and whistles and buttons and knobs and things that are overwhelming, I think.
But Ken, I appreciated your explanation because I think that may have hit the nail on the head is that For somebody who is somebody who is new And for them, it would be a learning experience to figure out how to set up a mail server
And then set up the list server on the mail server And then the next, but what you're saying is, yeah, discord is… Like, okay, just learn to set up Discord and all of that kind of comes. Well, there is no setup. You just…
Give them an email and create a password. And you can create your own.
You know it's it's open source. To me, it's a lot better than Slack because Slack is also commercialized nowadays. All they want to do is sell you shit.
Yeah. Golly.
Let's move along. Let's move along. We're getting nowhere with this.
Yeah. Yes, yes, yeah. Well, no, actually, I'm finding it enlightening, but it's not what we're here for tonight so Okay.
Our presence on social media, I guess we've talked about that enough. Announce mailing lists uh I don't think there's anything new to comment on there, is there?
Nothing to talk about. It's useful and works just fine.
Amazon microphones no new information. We still haven't found the microphone with the spaghetti stain on it and the projectors are probably still sitting in Stan's kitchen. No, he's got one. I got one. Oh, okay.
Yeah.
One narrow one here. Attendance database. Let's see.
I put some entry. What the hell? I thought I updated that.
I put those two entries in their last meeting, and the one thing I didn't put in was that you Gary and Lee and I kind of… agreed that I only needed to keep like three years worth of data in that attendance database so i'm going to
Clean it out. I haven't done it yet, but that's the only thing to say about it.
And it works just fine. Next item, planning schedule report database.
Gary uses it. That's great.
Yes. Definitely an invaluable tool.
I'd like to go be one-on-one with you and kind of move some stuff around and eliminate some stuff if you… you would, but you never have time to do anything. So that's a moot point.
Next, handouts. I had intent, you know.
Let's see. Yeah, I put in there, I didn't have any time this month to actually, I typed it in.
To actually modify or update any handouts due to the unexpected trip my My trip to my trip to to Vegas this month was kind of unexpected and I didn't really plan on going, but I wound up doing it anyway.
Anyway, that's all I have to say about that. Organizational papers. Kira, you got any of those?
There's rumors that there's that box in my basement. It's just a rumor.
He says… November, he said he found the box but did not look inside.
Okay. Is that anything like Schroeder's cat or whatever the dog's?
I agree.
Name is.
Yes. There's either a dead cat in that box or not.
Yeah. Okay.
Sponsorships. Oh, boy, let's see. Primary sponsors are right here in the meeting tonight. Ken, thank you.
Lee, thank you.
I'd like a raise.
And yes, Stan, I think, do we hear a motion to double Stan's pay?
I'll motion to quadruple it. Oh, okay. There we go. Is there a second?
All right. All in favor of Six Flaggerants have signed the repo in the snow. The eyes have got it.
Sure.
There you go, Stan.
All right. 4 times 0 is what?
We'll talk about that later. Well, there's only one thing it isn't.
As female. Amen?
With…
Because that's the first thing on top of Gary's mind every second of the day. Oh.
Damn. Okay.
Hmm.
You ever get to play with any of them? Please, is the right term.
God.
Okay, we need help. God, do we need help. I'm sorry, Ken.
I think we're off topic.
Ken, I talked over your statement. What was it?
Yes.
Yeah.
I said, I think we're off topic. And I haven't eaten supper yet, so…
In fact, I think we should take this we need help out of there because It was dead harsh.
Yeah.
There's no reason to advertise it.
Write a note there to be removed. And I'll take it out next time.
All right. New business.
We can't handle the old business. I move we adjourn.
Yeah. Let's see. Hold on. We got to take a quick look at something, a recurring requirements, what's coming up.
We do need to determine very soon what the open board seats are.
Determine that here. Somewhere in early January.
Okay.
Irs forms set automatically. The 990s? No, I got to do it in february
The the uh the
Stlinux.org, that's automated. Okay, that takes us up to March.
Should be good and good.
Bribes to Stan. Get those in early.
Sir?
Two, one.
Bribes, get your bribes into Stan early so your name will be on the ballot.
Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Yes. All right.
Recognize useful efforts. Hey, if it wasn't for the three of you guys place would be a bad house.
But thank you all very much for keeping things fairly good order. It's amazing.
All right. Blue Sky Recordings. I don't think we have any comments we're going to do in blue sky tonight, do we?
Hearing none, motion to adjourn. So move. All in favor say.
No.
A second okay all fair say, well, you've signed the brief on the snow.
Second.
A. Hi.
All right, bookend. The eyes of God. This has been the December 31st 2024 steering committee meeting for the St. Louis Linux Unix users group It's basically been talking about the January upcoming stuff.
And with that, good night, everybody.
Thank you.