All right, record started.
Certainly. Gary, go.
Let me say something?
Oh, something, something.
Okay, and…
Still… Okay, this is the steering committee for the May the… Yeah. Yeah. Of 2025.
So a usual list of suspects. Steve, Grant.
Stan, myself. We're going to talk mostly about what's coming up this month and the future.
What about Lee?
They're not mentally hotter than this lead. I'm just a hobbit that keeps everything running in the background.
We are grateful for the hobbit.
Yes. All right so With that, what do we got next?
Oh, yeah.
Secretary Report.
I mean, you could be reading those numbers, you know, while I type.
I'm still banging on my machine to get it up and logged in.
Oh, well, we could be reading the numbers and saying that we got to…
Okay, so Lee, treasurer's report. We didn't spend anything last month. That's good.
No expenses. Well, we didn't make anything either, did we? Nope. All right. Okay.
Nothing for the month. Okay.
Okay. Calendar report.
Put some numbers in there. It's $378 for the month.
That's good.
And I did all the other prior ones so Of course, a lot of that stuff up there needs to be cleaned up because there's a lot of x's and question mark thingies still there.
I'm still counting. I'm counting everything with a date. Not a date, a time on a day.
And so what that
All right. Yeah, obviously the number is getting bigger when you look back over the years, same month it's
Oh, right. Yep.
Yeah, well, and we're adding these remote sessions for, you know, Atlanta and Lug and belt and Lug in California and in the arizona Bob, just slug that one, whatever.
Any comments I should… If you put here.
The new item I had was regarding the calendar And the… like the calendar of various events.
Okay. Yeah, I think so.
We want to talk about that here since we're talking about I started playing with a utility named Remind.
And its purpose is its purpose to create reminders, reoccurring events, etc.
And it seems very, very, very good for things like we have on the Google Calendar.
I think there has been interest in potentially finding something that could be not Google affiliated.
For calendar alternatives. And it's a little text-based utility and it can generate HTML calendars I've started poking at it.
It seems… promising, but I wanted to bring it to people's attention.
As a possible replacement for the Google
Yep.
Um… The reason I settled on the Google Calendar years ago went to like 40 of the darn things.
Google had the best. The Google Calendar had the best control of future dates and repeating dates and skipping around and all kinds of stuff like that.
Mm-hmm.
And just… You know, just N plus… I don't know.
It just worked for us better than anything else. I mean, there was quite a few other things. There was one thing that that Scott Graneman had been using for a while and pointed to it.
Tried that, but the Google Calendar as far as the Plus the fact that, you know, if you put something on the wrong date, you could actually click on that item and just drag it into the next day.
Yeah.
Things like that. A lot of real neat features but it just seemed like it worked better so This application called Remind, that's correct?
Okay. Yes.
Is it available in the Debian? I mean, in any repositories or is it some site or something and
It was in Gen 2 Portage. It is open source available many places. I expect it is in Debian and Ubuntu repos.
Okay.
And…
And so you're thinking maybe we might be able to replace a Google Calendar with that. Okay.
Yeah.
I don't know. It was just something I thought there had been some mild heartache regarding Google Calendar and it was something I'm
Although there's mild heartache with everything. We do. One shape or another.
Yeah.
And yeah, I had the heart, you know, I have heartburn with it too. I would rather not be using Google anything.
Right.
Yep. It's just a question of making these square objects fit into round holes.
And… Oh, gosh, you know.
You have ground holes. I have moon-shaped holes. Not the small sliver.
But mine… appear and disappear at various phases of the moon.
Ah.
We may…
I don't have any, I don't think I have that much problems with Google Calendar.
It's not a problem with the… application it's a problem with me.
Just getting in there and doing a little more cleanup before I try and turn it over to Rudy.
Yeah. Well, I keep telling you, don't do the cleanup before turning over.
Let him start doing some of that cleanup as getting his feet wet.
Yeah, you're right. You're right.
Whose feet are we talking about?
When was the last time you talked to them about this?
Rudy, Tyler, still willing to do it. Rudy Tyler.
Let's see, there's COVID.
It's been a while.
God. And… From what I understand, Gary, you've been spending almost all your spare time assisting in a hospital stay for the last, what, 12 weeks?
Yeah, I put a little note on my chest tonight saying the patient in the other bed Just to make sure they don't start poking on mates.
Yeah.
But yeah, you got the right idea, Grant. I need to Just a few things that I want to kind of document like, okay, you know, we don't want to totally obliterate history so that uh amazingly enough at this point
Our calendar is probably the only record of some of the groups in St. Louis of some of the talks that have been done.
Because some of these groups just cease to exist. God only knows what would happen to their archive.
Yeah.
What's Rudy's last name? Rudy is his last name, isn't it?
No, I lose his last name.
Hell.
That's a good point. You know, clean it you know you try, you know.
There's also the Gary's been cleaning up for multiple months to hand it off.
Thanks, Gary. You're a busy man.
Yeah. Well, and he has honestly hadn't been doing as much as that as he would like, I know.
Really, it's… personal life is interfering with the maintenance of our system.
Yeah, personal life has been very busy the last
Priority Street.
Say again, Steve.
Got to get your priorities straight.
Yeah. All right. Okay.
I told the guy in that bed in the hospital it's like hey Would you hurry up and get better? This is getting to be a problem.
Gary, were you in the hospital or were you visiting somebody?
Yeah.
Oh, this is a family member that I mean, he's 89 years old.
Having some real health problems. Part of it is an infection in the spine.
So it was like at this point, every time he turns it hurts So…
When you get that far along unless you've got really dedicated family support that you get ignored.
By the system.
Have we discussed this enough here? Should we go on?
I guess, like I said, I really don't I'm trying to remember if I have any real problems with Google Calendar.
I think every now and then it amazes me because they'll have changed something like the number of lines, the number of characters have an algorithm.
Running hoses
What? What did you say, Steve?
Nothing.
It seems like maybe they changed the number of characters you can have at a in a calendar entry or something like that.
It's all kind of just pissy stuff. They're changing with the times. I haven't learned the new way yet
Well… And… It's been pretty stable for the last couple of years and and uh good grief. I wish meetup would be that stable. I mean, every time we turn around, about every two, three months, Meetup does some screwy thing and
It doesn't work like it did before. I don't know.
Yeah, that's part of the problem.
I may wind up moving this stanza to someplace else for next month, creating a new topic, new item or whatever, but just Anything more to say on this before we move on?
Yeah. That could build it. Yeah.
Okay. Okay.
Subscriber report numbers, those are in. Yeah.
Meet up and you know consistently increasing, although, you know, same stuff uh announces down slightly, dropped one off on disgust. It seems disgust kind of kind of sticks around 200 or so.
I'm just starting to wonder if it's 150 uh what do they call them spiders Who knows?
Shoot. Not too much change there.
Okay, any comments on that?
What is the what is the high watermark on meetup before they start charging us more.
Okay.
Well, I was under the impression it's 1,000. And because in the past, I went back and, you know, we were getting, you know, back in uh may hit 1,004 and I thought, oh, that would just… in one day of 2004, and I immediately went in there and started reducing things.
Because… I don't know. Really, you know, Ken Johnson is paying for this thing, but, you know… There's no reason for us to keep the numbers that high because we don't get that much response out of that.
We'll get every month there'll be about 10, 15, maybe 20 additions, you know, and maybe at a meeting we'll get two or three people to show up.
And some of them never come back. Some do. I mean, you know.
I say, Grant, that's how you found us, I think, right?
No Fettyverse, Michael W. Lucas.
Oh, okay. But… But, you know, there's a couple other people that did show up uh through meetup.com.
You know, either they stick with us or they don't. You know, it's uh I was disappointed.
Well, I'll get to that later when the other further down. Do we need to say anything more about these numbers for
Yeah, we just pulled up something It says that there are two VETA plans.
The basic plan is 50 members The unlimited plan is unlimited members. If your group grows beyond 50 You will need to upgrade to the unlimited plan, which is more expensive.
So…
So apparently Ken is playing for the unlimited thing.
I wonder if that has changed. Since we started using meetup and it's now just the under 50 and over 50 and it used to be different numbers.
Yeah.
Possible yeah i think so. I seem to remember something about 50 10 years ago
Okay. We don't really know because I think we've asked Ken once or twice about the details and he just said, never mind, I'll pay for it.
You know, don't worry about it. That's true. That's true.
I'm grateful. I just don't want to waste his money.
Exactly.
But, you know, I mean, going through there and going back and seeing people that joined up You know, three years ago and they never come to any of our meetings There's no reason to keep him in there.
Especially if some gal that all she does is basket weaving and yoga Although Gary would definitely like to meet her.
Right?
Oh, for the days of the personal face-to-face meeting But even few came to those even fewer.
Yeah. Any more?
Yeah. Well, you know, that… When our 24-day deodorant quit, they decided us to Not to come back.
Any comments I should put here?
Yeah, I think we're in good shape.
Attendance report. Here we go. Down here. Oh. Should we keep these up here, all this old stuff or just blow it away or what?
I'm just wondering. Okay.
I'd say keep them up there. I had this ambition somewhere in the back of my head I want to feed it all into a spreadsheet, make little graphs but I've had that for a long time now.
Why bother with those small numbers, really? You know?
I don't know. Anyway, looking at the numbers for April and May, May… The Slack meeting was on the 1st of May, so that number sticks out there, 13 people.
I'll get back to that in a second. Stericom was six people last meeting.
The Slack meeting was 11 in April. That was good. And the schloog was 18.
St. Louis Linux group was was 21 and the new Linux group was only seven. I was really disappointed.
I mean, a lot of stuff coming out about, you know, the buy-bye Windows 10 and you know that you would sank to derby more things going on. And this, as a matter of fact, this last week there was a
Some guy named cutie pie or Whatever. Some guy that's got like, you know, 10 million followers on YouTube. He… He posted a really good video on saying, I've switched to Linux. You should too. That was his title on it.
Hmm.
And, you know, and this is a guy that, you know, I… I figured he had like… In the first three or four days, he had 5,000 views.
And it just kept growing and growing. I mean, he had something like 3,000 views in the first hour.
Oh.
After he posted that thing. And so there's a lot of people that are gamers you know and he He really went through what he's done and he he Very, very positive about Linux and a little pretty much kind of balanced.
You know, for a guy that, you know, does gaming and he So I don't know if I… I think that somebody posted it on Discuss. I can't remember who did what, where.
I think I may have, if I didn't post on discuss i think i may have just forwarded it to you but uh
I think I remember seeing it on Discuss.
Okay. Keep it.
Thank you. Anyway, uh. Just to have seven people, it's very disappointing. However.
The SLAC meeting the following week was up to 13, and that was a very good meeting. I'll talk more about it when we get down further in.
But… This… Num.
Ron Howard or somebody did publish the PewDiePie.
Switching notebooks to discuss.
Okay. Oh, Ron BC from Ron BC from Canada posted that.
Yeah.
He's one of the new guys that came in. I'm pretty sure he came in because he found us on Meetup.
But he's been very helpful at a lot of meetings and he's a very positive kind of guy.
And he attends the Slack meetings and the new Linux user meetings and A lot of times he really carries the ball. Him and a guy named… Rudy, no, Randy, Randy van houston.
And… Another guy, Tony C, another guy that Pretty positive, those meetings.
Quick request for any requests. Interesting suggestions from y'all.
They've just kind of been winging it on. During the announcements.
That there are tuesday and i'm sorry, Wednesday and Thursday meetings telling people or old experienced people Yeah, come to the new log meeting. Come to the Slack meeting because amazingly you learn something even if you are kind of experienced and you're the one who
Shares with other experienced people. Am I going about that right? Is there a better pitch I can make to people or
No, either people are gonna
October.
Whatever. Anyway, we're going to review the meetings. Any comments about the uh SteerCom, we had march
Um…
Yeah, or…
Nobody raised their hand saying they weren't there.
That's true. That's right. We had a meeting.
Not… A lot of… Entries.
Yeah.
You know. You know we recorded the meeting and the video is up there. That's all i can say.
Thank you.
Oh.
But anyway, April was the minimal viable git thing that Grant did.
And… That was really good.
I've forgotten how to spell Git.
T-i-g.
Ah. Any comments to say about it?
I liked it.
I think it was… A very good collaborative session I took some updates away.
And added it to the slide deck before uploading it.
It went a whole lot longer than I anticipated it would.
And I think that was purely the interaction.
I thought it was fun to see people pick up ideas and really join the discussion.
People were getting into
Yep.
One of those great Great talk presentation because it it gave enough… enough fresh material that it got people talking.
Generated more information. Cool.
That was the idea. And to avoid the quagmire that you can easily get mired down in.
I'm making up shit as I go along here, guys. Did Steve die?
We know.
Please asleep.
Oh, okay. Any more to say about that?
Hey, Steve, you need to be careful. You're going to break your neck leaning back like that.
Can we tell Steve about that moth we saw fly into his mouth?
You're muted.
I don't disagree. I didn't sleep last night. I had a lot of back pain.
Anything more to say about Grant's… marvelous session there. Glad we got it recorded.
I'm big.
Yeah, just very good and thank you very much.
You're welcome.
And, um.
What I want to know is if that was the minimal boy, what are you going to do when you do the complete talk wow How many years do you have?
Hmm.
It takes about 20 to learn Git, apparently.
Yeah. Yeah.
Moving on. Rescue your firewall when this.
Moving on.
Stuff hits the fan. By Lee.
You're fun.
I like how you were able to show what you were doing on the screen, that real-time capture I would like to know more about that.
A presentation.
A presentation about presenting. Yes.
That almost sounds like a recursive program.
Yeah.
And you're now getting your answer. This is the presentation on presenting.
Yeah, talk. Right there.
Yeah.
Well, we're getting it recorded so
Okay.
Here's the bottom.
So if somebody volunteered to do a little presentation there?
Well, Lee's doing one real time with his camera right now.
Okay.
I was going to ask, what's he doing?
I'm showing you the widget.
I stopped sharing so that you guys could see that.
And so this, friends, is your teaser for an upcoming presentation at some point in the future.
Yeah, golly.
When we first talked about hybrid meetings before COVID for first year of COVID.
I tried to figure out how to capture the presenter's screen.
And that's and the husband said no no show up ever since then.
Nice. It worked out well.
I think I figured out a way to do it on VGA too
Nice.
Yeah.
Well, maybe sometime So we can talk nicely, maybe.
Maybe we can borrow his machine. Maybe borrow a lead to do a presentation.
Or maybe somebody else can do a presentation with four. What'd they do for him now?
Yeah.
Okay. Moving right along.
If I can get the mouse to work.
Not topic.
Here you go. We're all over, please.
Cheaper 10 bucks, 18 bucks. Prices keep dropping.
Oh, man. The St. Louis Linux Me. Dash.
Thing we've done with Ed Holland. There's special difficulties.
It was… It was fun.
For… Michelle.
And Phil Bunch.
To work. With… Ed.
Building this presentation.
And like I told him.
Most of it was just kind of… over my head kind of seemed like. But I did pick up a couple of things.
But not that many of them. But it was very fun working with him.
Putting it all together. Um Technically, did you guys… Did you get anything out of it or was it just kind of… Too much or off in the corner or
I think it was fairly detailed.
And the things he talked about seemed familiar and accurate with everything I've done when I've needed to go to that level of detail.
I would add that i would add kind of there were two things. The actual material Yeah, there was a lot of good detail I learned a lot.
And then the other aspect was, I don't think we ever said during the presentation Ed has some visual challenges.
And that's why… Stan and philanth were doing work.
He did mention it at almost the very end, I think.
Yeah. Yeah.
I missed that, Ben. But…
I know he mentioned that he was going to be… collaborating, you were giving him some pointers he was going and listening to something listening and listening to something For a quick reminder and then he would come present the slide.
Having talked with Ed about some assistive technology things. I knew exactly what was happening. It made perfect sense but I think it's very nice how it worked out. I would defer to Ed's opinion on what he wants to advertise or not.
You know, if I wasn't aware of what's going on, I might have thought This is a little weird, but okay, cool. Great details. To me, it really did not matter that he was using assistive technology. It did not detract from the presentation at all.
Yeah.
No, no. Kind of exactly what you're saying. The only thing it did is i i found myself thinking, okay, the fact that we've got sand and fill in obviously having participated in preparing this and occasionally making explicit parts of it or statements of it.
I'm just wondering if other people were like, okay, just a joint presentation between the three of them but I mean, the material was good enough. It was standing on its own i just kind of what you said. I never asked Ed if he wants me to
Tell people that in the presentations. Eyesight problems going on.
Yeah.
Yeah, I always feel it's a good idea if for Head to say that he's blind and not me.
You know, nobody else should point it out. You know.
Agreed.
Okay. I think a good portion of the audience knew he was, though. He was an owner for years.
I knew he had some… or believed he had some visual impairments. I did not know to what degree.
And he and I have actually exchanged a few emails Regarding assistive technology.
And the new SLUG website and some other things. So.
Ladies and gentlemen, it would appear as if Germany just took one jump.
Good conversations.
Okay. Anything else? I mean, the actual detail was just all really good shot there.
And if I remember right, I think I think the guy who now runs the Oh, God.
What's Rust? The Rust programming language, that user group, I think he came to the meeting Because I had sent a note to him.
Saying hey It's a programming language. I mean, basically we're talking about how to program in Bash.
I said, hey, invite your people. Craig?
I absolutely agree. And the concept map to other shells and other programming languages as well.
Might not map to the original born shell very well.
And since I happen to be in communication with Craig, because Craig's presenting this coming month Craig is still listed as the chairman of the St. Louis Polyglot Group.
And so I sent him a message and said, hey. This is effectively a programming talk. We're talking about how to deal with variables.
He said, you're right. So he posted it to the polyglot group and invited them. So I don't know how many of the people who showed up that night you know came from from either of those groups We tried.
Yep.
You know, you can download the attendance database and run it if you've got Libra Office on your Linux box, you know that, don't you?
Okay. And it'll tell you the names of who was there.
Because I do that. The reason I record… Because anonymous cowards, but I can see who the hell they're You can't see that with Zoom.
Traveling on. X.
Give me a minute.
Yeah.
April 22nd. Disappointingly low attendance. Really?
Go ahead. When you're done.
I would just… Just to…
Just… The usual.
Suspects.
Go ahead.
While I've been playing with remind I have looked at our meeting schedules and like there for new Linux, you're saying either five or 12 days after the St. Louis Linux meeting.
I noticed some inconsistencies as far as descriptions of when meetings are across multiple pages.
Yeah, that's true. It's not perfect.
Yeah. But as I was trying to set up reminders for things I had some trouble finding the description. And the best i came up with is that St. Louis Unix users group is like the second.
Or maybe third Wednesday, whatever it was, I can't even think math is hard right now.
Yeah.
And then steercome was like nine days before that And the Linux users group was the following week, just the arrangement of when things were And here you have either five or 12 days, depending on the month what is the criteria? I feel like there's some
Okay, the steering committee meeting works out it's a The Monday… Prior, in the week prior to the general meeting.
Mm-hmm.
Right.
And that usually works out to be nine days. But, you know, if there's a holiday or Lee can't make it or one of the major players can't make it, we kind of bounce it around a little bit.
Right. And nominally what it is.
Okay. Now, and the general meeting, the SLUC general meeting is always the second Wednesday.
And then the St. Louis Linux users group is the Following not the immediate service day after that, but it's a the Thursday of the following week.
Right.
Wow. And I… I always count it as nine days and i think ed uh I've been told it's eight days, whatever. I have to take my shoes off to see how many toes I got, okay?
And, uh, and then… Steve, uh… the new Linux user group is always on the fourth Tuesday.
Okay.
Of the month. Unless sometimes that falls out to be five days later and sometimes it works out to be 12 days later.
So my recommendation would be where you say the fourth
I listed on those… Billboard sheets. I list it both ways.
Okay.
You know?
Just an observation.
Yeah, well, I mean, you know, I didn't used to, you know, but I've tried to make it consistently to say it both ways because you know whatever what catch, you know, and it's wind up having to change the slides before each meeting.
Okay. But anyway, that April 22nd meeting was Very disappointing that was… that attendance.
And then we had this The Slack meeting was on May 1st.
And there were four new attendees, presumed that they came in from vita.com.
However, two didn't stay longer than about 10 minutes and the other two stayed about maybe 20 minutes.
And that was the new names that came in. So, and part of the problem was part of the problem You know, we didn't we didn't really start talking about Linux or, you know, it's the idea is it's supposed to be for configuration problems.
Of course, the new people being shy. They don't ask questions. So if they don't ask questions, we Start talking about God knows what, you know.
And it wasn't until about maybe 20 minutes and maybe 10 minutes after the new guys left and we started really talking about some configuration problems, whatever.
You know, you can't we our problem is we got All these new guys have got an attention span of a net.
If they don't see something they like right away, they're gone, you know, and they never come back.
I can't tell. Nothing we can do about that.
The bigger problem, Stan, is none of them know what an attention span is.
Well, I was, yeah, you're true there. You know, it just… So, I mean, we are not YouTube. We are not YouTube.
And helmet.
You know, and they don't You know, at least they were curious and kind of showed up and maybe the Maybe, you know, one part of their brain will remember something about configuration and software.
Hardware problems. Maybe sometimes they'll come back.
You know um Now, what I've started doing is during that 30 minute introduction lineup time or whatever, I've started displaying the Those billboards that I've got explains everything about the meeting, whatever.
The guys, if they show up early enough, they see all that. If not.
They don't, whatever. But it doesn't detract from the actual meeting time anymore.
That's a lot of material. We try to cover at every meeting and you know it's just You know, if we don't have any new people, you don't need to cover it, right?
Yeah.
But, you know, you got one guy that's nude in the room. We kind of like to pump his brain with this information.
Yeah. Anyway, the meeting got interesting because Norm Miller came in and Phil and I have been trying to help and get SSH configuration going. And we had passed some messages back and forth earlier. And at that point, I stayed out of the conversation because uh
Randy Van Heusen and stephen Baker and Tony Cigna, they really helped Norman in getting into details and And I was surprisingly, especially Stephen Baker, he was able to talk through Without seeing Norm's screen as what the next thing was because he evidently…
This guy, Stephen Baker, he's probably working on a help desk somewhere or has had that experience or Still on that mode.
And brain is agile enough that he remembers all that kind of stuff. And I used to be like that when I did health desk Back in the old days.
Don't do it anymore. Used to be able to talk somebody over the phone how to get through Windows and this, that, and the other and 12 other application programs that we had to support.
I could just talk people through it over the phone without seeing… That was before the days where we actually had things like TeamViewer and remote video uh screens and viewing and that kind of stuff. Rsa or whatever I think VNC before he
Vnc. Yeah.
Yeah.
Before I even knew how to spell it, right? But, you know, very commendable about those three guys where it really went through Quite detail and really helped norm norm's 80-some years old.
I think he said he just had a birthday. He's 85 Five, I think, or 87.
And he likes Linux, but he gets frustrated because, you know.
You know, he backs himself into a corner. And, you know, Phil and I are not always available.
But whatever. Hey.
Has he tried or just… Out there.
Yeah. The regular ship. The regulars are always very helpful. And that was a very, very good session with all that going through.
I wish some of our regulars, other people would show up at a meeting like that. A meeting like that is… is very, you know, free formatted. And that's the kind of meetings that a lot of people You know, you can't advertise
Because you don't know what's going to happen. You know, it's like some of the best, Gary and I have talked about this before. Some of the best meetings we ever had, we had no idea what the hell to talk about that meeting. It's just…
You know, to be determined really was the title of the meeting
Okay.
And I can fully appreciate that you can't predict what's going to happen And that is recorded, correct?
Now… the Slack meetings and the… newcomer beginner meetings, I record them, but I don't post them anywhere I tell the people I record it for my use only.
Now, if somebody was to ask me for a copy, I'd give it to them.
Okay.
Well, I…
All right.
But it's not going to be posted like our general meetings in the St. Louis Linux meetings. It's not going to be And part of the reason for that is the idea that So many of the people coming in, they're afraid if you record that this
You know, all this being recorded, I want to keep my mouth shut.
Yeah, I was going to say, if it was recorded for public consumption.
Yeah, good.
Publishing after the fact, hey, we had this great conversation on SSH.
On Slack, go take a listen to it. Type thing. But I absolutely get and appreciate your concern with not publishing to make people feeling more welcome.
Yeah, it's and i yeah i regret that I don't post some of these. I really do.
But if somebody was to ask for a copy of it.
I would give it to them in a heartbeat, you know?
My use is to give it to somebody else, but it's not going to… You know, I'm not going to post it, you know, because I say right up front, it's in our slides that those particular meetings is not recorded.
But I do say anybody here can be recording. And I've been pointing out But I did a presentation, a base presentation in 2020, October, I think it was.
On how to use simple screen recorder Anybody here can be recording. No, here's your little thing and go here and figure out how to do it, you know?
Yeah.
Oh, by the way, I've been saying this at the beginning, but I went back the other day and looked at that recording and And it was a thing where Ed did something. He said, oh, Ed said, can I go first instead of, you know, for the general thing instead of the base?
And yeah, so… For the last six months, I've been telling people it's at the beginning of that meeting, but it's not. It's somewhere afterwards, you know, after Ed was done.
I'll have to go figure the timestamp out and post that, whatever.
My mistakes never end.
Moving on.
That was all good stuff.
Okay, yeah, let's see. Then we had a… Yeah, SIRCOM meeting, you know, catch the pig, kill the pig, skin the pig, gut the pig, boil the pig, make sausage. Here you go.
Yeah. Yeah. And, oh.
A piggly bugly meeting. I slice up the bacon and try it.
Yeah, yeah. I want to put this… I'll put that right there.
And, you know. Grant, you may realize that any member is welcome here. It's just that we don't post it like we do the other meetings We don't want to drive by… people that really aren't interested just show up.
Right.
You know, so. Kind of hard to describe that, but That's just the way we've been doing it.
And that's usually on the week prior to the main general slug meeting.
And often about nine days prior. And… Whatever. Any comments about that?
Okay. No, I'm good.
Okay.
Great. The May 14th meeting.
Actually, a question to Grant. Do you remember who Craig Buchek is? Is he before your time?
I've heard the name and I know he was around before moved out of the area and is going to be in town.
Okay, you got general drift. Yeah, Craig, I think he's president for a year, wasn't he?
Yeah, I think so. Anyway, yeah, so he's a good guy, good techie.
Yeah, I think so.
Been out in Silicon Valley now for a few years. We shot in LA now how he laid out now how he didn't gather this but he he was thinking, okay, he's coming to St. Louis and mate But he was thinking, oh, okay, well, I'll go and talk at the fluke meeting
I was like, you realize you could do that all along here. I keep asking me if you'd like to talk because it's all in zoom and So there was a sudden aha. That's what you meant. Oh, yeah, that's what I meant.
But anyway, so he was disappointed that we're not going to do it uh What do you call it?
Hybrid. I said, no, we just don't don't have our act together, be hybrid.
So, but we've got the abstract. Stan's already put the abstract out on the web page i've got a half-assed version on part of the calendar and on part of meetup.
Going to go in and fix them on calendar and meet up.
And it's basically about voice. How to how to a voice become commands.
And or have voice go to text.
Okay.
Some.
So that'll be part one on Wednesday night. This is general concepts and then The Thursday log meeting is going to be the programming of that.
True.
So hang on. Backup.
Somehow I got… Oh, shit.
Good.
We do not have a base yet. I'll make a comment about that.
That's not right. That's not right. That's the base. It's available. Do you have a base Okay. I already did put it right in. Confirmed that Craig is going to do controlling computers with voice.
On the 14th. Yeah. And then… I'll And there's the kind of the outlet that As Gary is saying he's planning on doing two sponsored meetings all around revolving around voice to text, voice commands.
There's some apple offerings he's going to talk about, something called tile on which is close.
Platform. Don't know what kind of detail he's going to mention AI usage But, you know, obviously he's going to say something about programming.
The initial presentation will be an introduction and then The second presentation at the St. Louis Linux user group is going to be about actual programming voice.
And presumably be with ai assisting.
Yeah.
And there are those during the regularly scheduled St. Louis Unix users and St. Louis Linux meeting time slots.
Yes.
Right, right. Because that's the… What the hell is it?
That's the 14th, the second Wednesday of the month, 14th. That's the first one. This is that… Controlling computers with voice that might not be the right title. I don't know what the hell he's going to use as a title.
I forget. Anyway.
Yeah. Sorry.
These will only be in Zoom. Unless Steve is saying that there's a party at his house and We can all show up over at Steve's. That way we can have a hybrid hybrid meeting in Steve's basement
Right.
Hello, Steve. Did I scare him off? He went back to sleep.
For it. That's why I'm awake.
I'm sure he did. Okay.
Yeah, exactly.
Let me… Let me jump back.
Any more to say about that? Well, you don't have a base then. Did you get… Talk.
That's what I'm jumping back to. I'm jumping back to base now.
Okay.
So I did talk to Ken Johnson. Because the way he phrased it the other month was that uh for a few months, he wouldn't be available.
To do these tutorials on Wednesday. And so I've talked to him in more detail today and basically his mother-in-law, she's up there 94, I think he said so so basically they're they've got a game night family game night where they log in
Have some fun with his mother-in-law. And so he's just not He may not be available on Wednesday nights for… a year or two years. It wasn't just months, but I think he was afraid that her health was declining but
Seems kind of stable now, but he's not going to be doing Wednesday nights with us so So I may try and find out if any of his proposed tutorials could be stretched and moved into a Thursday night in the future, but that's a different issue.
So right now we are looking for a base for a base for a Wednesday next week.
Anybody have any ideas? How long do you have to have them?
30 minutes. 15, 50, 15 to Anyway, 15 to 20 minutes. Yeah.
Yeah, well, 15 to 20. If you want me to talk about this thing, I might be able to stretch it to 10, but not much longer than that. It's probably good, Bill.
You know, we give breaks for last minute fill ins
Yeah. No, so I think that that would work.
The other thing you might be able to do is if there were follow-up questions Stan, I'm thinking about you.
On GitHub. There could be a lightning round table questions type thing with a timer of hard
For the questions or the answers?
Combined.
Uh…
And I say that tongue in cheek, Stan. I'm not trying to pick up.
I'm i i don't…
I know. Honestly, I'm just so overwhelmed with stuff that I have not been able to go back and look at the stuff I want to look back at. I want to look back at the thing you did on get
And I want to go back to that special session we had with with Sean.
Thinking that I would probably understand it better, but I haven't had the time to do it. I mean, it seemed like anymore. I just barely do what I'm doing here.
I absolutely understand and appreciate. There's a reason I've been reading online comics instead of other educational material that I want to read.
My brain is oozing out of my ears.
Yeah. Oh, gosh. Yeah. I tell you, it's my to-do list is the last time I printed it, it was 11 pages long.
And I got it down to nine pages at one point a couple of years ago. And then I Stop printing it and I'm sure it's growing again.
But the only reason I do a to-do list like that is because I feel if I write it down, it will not get totally forgotten and that That relieves me. But that doesn't mean I get stuff done.
And I will find that I will skip over something just could do something like post a thing about comic book day or something like that.
Because we need to do that. Another thing that kind of I've been noticing is the last three months There has not been a lot of stuff posted on discuss like we used to.
I think. It just… And I've i've… been trying to complain to Phil and Ed that they keep posting stuff to me and even Norm sends stuff to me.
Why not post that on the damn disgust list? You know, I keep trying to tell people I go to sleep sometimes. There's guys out on disgusted. Do not go to sleep.
Mm-hmm.
And I'm not the central authority on any damn thing. Except the new Linux users group where I'm the dictator for life.
Yes, that's true. And I look good too.
But you're a benevolent dictator.
Well, I can see that Lee is already percolating. He's got his fingers on this little device and he's thinking, well, I could do this i could show this So Lee's thinking, but if anybody all of a sudden has a brainstorm of, oh, wait a second i know
I know John Smith at a something that's a good 15 minutes off.
Don't let Lee's preparation stop you because Lee's always who we tag to draft and the last minute to fill this stuff in so So yeah, I think Lee is going to do it for us but if anybody comes up with a
Alternative if anybody can come up with something longer than 10 minutes, go for it.
Yeah.
I don't see a problem with 10 minutes.
Yeah, I keep saying, you know, and I've said this at previous steering committee meetings we We are overbooking, over programming this stuff i mean we get two hour long presentations and presentations and I find people When we get to the end of the talk, I got to go. My wife's got dinner. I got to head off.
So I wouldn't be upset to have slightly shorter presentations. Just do more of them.
Anyway, moving on. The Thursday night, the night after our general meeting. We usually don't have anything planned.
But as I said, Craig was thinking, oh boy, I'm going to go to St. Louis for a month So you're thinking the 22nd. I can get together with the guys.
No, I'm thinking the 15th. 15th is a lot.
No, 20 seconds is the log. Oh, that's right. You push it a week when you uh when you're right back to back. Okay.
Let me see if we can… How many people do you think we're going to have?
Oh, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Are we going to talk about this potential face-to-face thing or not before we talk about it?
Oh, I don't know what I'm talking about.
That's what we're talking about. That's what we're talking about. Like I say, if you want to pencil in the 15th and call Nick and Elena's tomorrow and see if we can get the big room, but I don't want to go in there with five people. Yeah.
All I can say is be honest with them. If I had to guess, I would guess we might get a dozen.
But I can't. It's just a guess at this point. We can start floating this out on discuss it probably is a good idea rather than surprising people just see if we can start a little discussion on discussed and see if people say okay i'm going to come
Yeah, I mentioned it today to Ed and Phil, but they were disappointed since Fills in Arkansas and Ed is up in michigan And… And Ed did say if he won the lottery, he'd be here in a heartbeat.
Road trip. You did tell these guys his anchovies involved.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
There are multiple pizzas and there can be anchovies on some and not on others.
Similarly, there can be pineapple on some and not on others.
So we touched.
Yeah. Okay. I have found in the past I found in the past that Nick and Elena's extra sauce on a pizza just, oh, it's worth whatever they charge for it.
Right up there were the anchovy stands. Okay.
Oh, golly, it's great, Renee. So… Oh, I don't like dead fish.
Hey, Steve, are you still with us?
Oh, Steve.
Wake, Steve. Wakey, wakey. There he is.
Okay. Should we consider an alternative date or alternative location or just start discussing it and maybe that might come up or not, but just… tentatively say 15th.
Yeah, let's just tentatively say the 15th and uh nickel Blazers?
That's good.
Say, Lee, I was taking a phone call.
If anybody else has come to my garage We'll do that but And Steve, the reason why I'm calling you Would you volunteer to post something to discuss and basically say, we're going to try and have a face-to-face in-person meeting, apologies to all you people who don't live in town.
Craig's in town and we want to get the old game together.
Just because it's nice to have other names posted up.
Yeah, I can do that. I assume it doesn't need to be posted tonight.
That would work.
Not necessarily tonight, but yeah, the sooner the better just to give people some time to think and start Start talking. Why don't we say as soon as you're waking up to make sense out of it? Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
Wrongful.
Smart ass. A friend of mine called up and I had to take that one.
Let's see.
Uh-oh.
Yeah.
Let's get a document open here.
I'd go for an email editor.
Well, I just looking for a convenient place to take some notes. That's all.
I mean, it's going to be an email eventually.
Yeah.
Try Emacs.
I started using LibreOffice Writer for a lot of that nowadays.
Nano, nano.
Okay.
Oh, God damn.
I didn't get any almost no sleep last night. Man, my back, I laid down. My back was killing me I haven't had back problems like that in a long time.
Holy, can I spelled my name right?
Ah, yeah.
I'd suggest just starting out with May 15th as a tentative date and, you know.
Initializing you know And then… That would kind of focus people.
Yeah, really. Now, May 15th.
Really?
That's the day after the Wednesday meeting. A general meeting.
I was going to say, is this in addition to our regular monthly meeting or in lieu of
No, no, no, no. In addition to… No presentation.
Is it?
Um…
Just…
I would be inclined to use a term other than meeting, like get together or meet and greet or something Yeah.
Gathering just you know
No, no. You call it anchovy festival.
Oh, God, you drive everybody away.
Have a beer with an anchovy.
Just call it beer and pizza reunion. Whatever.
Beer and pizza, fish optional.
Yeah.
Nick and Elena. Steve, have you ever been to Nick and Elena's?
Where you want to go. You want to go to Nick and…
Yeah.
Me? Yeah, several times, a bunch of times.
Okay, I didn't realize if that was uh if you were going to meetings when we were still meeting her.
Yeah, I was going to meetings, sir.
Okay. And Steve, you can include in the note Or you can do a subsequent follow-up note and say hey if If people have a better idea, if somebody wants to suggest a a different pizza place restaurant if somebody wants to say hey
Rather than Thursday night, let's meet on Monday night or you know i mean we're We're open to suggestions.
Okay, now the 15th is the thursday
Correct. Thursday. The day after the second Wednesday.
Yep.
That's right.
Let me check my calendar. Hang on a minute. Since his last go around with lymphedema, I'm up to my ears in doctor's meetings.
Yeah.
I don't have any. I just have to drive because Anne no longer drives.
Let's see. May 15th.
No, that would work.
Okay, moving on.
Okay. Okay. And that brings us to the May 22nd meeting.
The second. Talk.
To be programming voice since part two of Craig's talk
Yeah. By the way, his bio is very old.
Yeah, I want to remind him if you want to update that.
Gary.
Thank you.
Really nothing to say about the new Linux. Beginner meeting.
Here are the dates for the June and July.
Have you got anything scheduled out that far in advance? Gary?
Still have Brian Bilgery. Teasing us that he is building his own box in the basement and As soon as he gets the hardware built.
Yeah.
He intends to put Linux on it and yes has been a Linux user in the past.
Hasn't really done much with Linux for a couple of years and years He is a BSD fan.
Yeah.
And so we figured okay i should Try Linux again. And I said, hey, here's an idea Take note of your experience.
Somebody who considers himself bsd user And if you're coming back to Linux What are your experiences? Oh, yeah, I forgot you can do this in Linux. Oh, yeah, I forgot I do it this way.
So…
Okay, I've got him on the uh planning schedule is consideration for June 11th.
Main like anything else, you know.
So he's a possibility. Stan, you had mentioned Joe B.
Yeah, I haven't talked to him in a long time, but you're right. I'll rattle his cage.
Joe knows all kinds of stuff. He's just not much into presenting, but I'll see if we can get him to do it.
Soup.
You know, if you can get somebody like that to have another person work with them.
They're less and more likely to participate. I'm going to say.
That's true. Yeah.
It's like, you know. You would never, ever get Phil bunched to percent.
But to participate with somebody else I mean, hands down, you can't work with anybody better.
What about a Q&A? So instead of an actual presentation there's a somebody ostensibly answering questions about a topic And people come and ask questions about it.
Ooh, kind of like a panel thing. Kind of. Yeah.
Yeah, unofficial, but yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, that could be good.
Yeah.
Might also be a way to get people who normally don't present to actually help contribute some original content.
I think Sean has suggested a couple of things like that, and we never really went anything anywhere with it because We don't have enough people showing up at these steering committees to talk about it.
And we don't talk about it those kind of things during our main presentation or the lug meeting.
And maybe we should, you know, and there's a couple other things as an idea that I've had uh As far as we have a call for help, you know, we try to funnel that out maybe Instead of the call for help thing.
Maybe it's always during the Slack meeting and the beginner meeting, I always say, what'd you break this week?
You know, it's kind of an icebreaker. And we could probably do something like that.
That falls under the call for help kind of concept. But I've also been thinking I've been looking at a lot of weird stuff in in uh general control under the System D journaling.
That… I mean… Just… I see some stuff in my systems. I know something is broken.
Just showing something like that might be might generate some might generate some commentary, not exactly a question that maybe kind of like a question and answer thing and just something to prime the pump because uh I broke something a couple of weeks ago, I installed Linux mint uh matte version
On five machines and on two of them. The uh Kaja, the file manager, would not go below The second level. I had a cascading subdirectories. If I tried to go to the third directory, it would do a core dump.
Boom. And, uh.
I kind of back end work around fix it figured out it was the themes and uh icons that selections was causing the problem.
It almost had almost got to the point where I was going to try and build up a a bug report.
Fortunately, I didn't have to do that.
That brings to mind an idea that not quite sure how to go about it.
What is the weirdest error message or most surprising thing, not necessarily trying to one-up each other but just encourage discussion.
Right. I think on the billboard slides, I kind of… Something like that.
On a couple of them.
What do you break this week or what do you see what it was give you gave you unexpected or surprising results or something like that?
Yeah.
I could probably pull that up if I would know what the hell I was doing.
I need to email discuss a question about Linux mint.
And grub
Slack meeting. In the Slack meeting, I see… announcements bye bye calendar mailing list.
Yeah, yeah. And the call for help section on the Slack, I say, what… questions, you know, what did you break or try to do recently? What were you trying to do that gave strange results?
What is a surprising or unusual answer to your problem? So yes, Scott, not Scott, Grant.
That's the kind of thing that I already thought of also.
Cool.
Cool. That's right. And I've been posting This thing, too.
The announcements, blah, blah, blah. Next Slack is usually the first Thursday.
And I start listening to the next three dates for people don't have a calendar.
The slug general meeting on second Wednesday of each month. And then, you know, and then you follow us nine days later.
It's not 90 days, it's eight days. I guess I got it. Or is it eight? I can't never remember.
Whatever. I'll test Bill again. But I mentioned this Microsoft Windows 10 end of life thing and And I've gone into a slide on this buy-by windows book that was written by a guy in uh The Atlanta lug. And I had posted this on the discuss list it's one of the
It's like 200… 12 pages or something like that and it's half of the book is Linux and the other half is if you don't want to do Linux is how to buy a machine that'll run with the Windows 11.
You know, yes. Pretty pretty balanced and fair. And, you know, he's not very soup, you know, it's not really negative toward Microsoft at all Comparatively.
Anyway, and yes, these links right here He even publishes these links inside the documents where you can go get the PDF.
And he only makes like 38 cents on a book that's sold by Amazon.
Something like that. Rattle rattle boom bang.
Okay.
Two other thoughts I have for people i'm going to rattle Susan.
Blanking on her last name. Which one? Used to come to the meetings all the time.
Sure. I'll think of the last name, but S. Susan lives out in Kirkwood.
And done a couple of presentations for us but she she never really became one of our Zoom users.
But one thing i think she was… the job she had at that point was given her and her husband, I think, got rather ill
He passed away, by the way. Do searched, yeah.
Oh, Hearst. Yeah, Hearst, who Hearst. So… But I believe she did a presentation for the CIA log.
Um so uh Yeah, I figured I'd rattle her cage and see if she come do one for us.
Another one, Greg Ray. He's done a couple of presentations for us.
If you don't remember, Greg Gray is a Macintosh heavy. He was running the Macintosh advanced users group And he basically, that's what his consulting company does backwards he would be able to talk to us about the M3 and m4
Cpu chips that apple developed He could talk what i'm thinking of is thinking of encouraging him to talk to us about you know what what are the BSD aspects of mac You know, that we should be as good Unix users, this is how we get into
Play on a Mac. And that feeds right into Brian Belgery's talk about a BSD user coming back into We're going to explore.
I'll see if I can maybe set those up to be back to back.
If I can get Gray to talk about that. Greg Ray.
I'll be moving. I'm looking at the planning schedule the report here right now, and I'll be moving Ken Johnson's two items off into the future somewhere.
And at one point, Lee Lambert had suggested he might do something on bypassing SMTP blocking.
Is that still a possibility, Lee? Have you even forgotten how you did that?
Ah. What was I doing?
Yeah, I can do that. I'm not sure how long it takes me to put it together, though.
Well, if you don't do it for this. Well, do it for next month.
Yeah, and then uh I'll have to put on my to-do list.
Okay. And there's this guy named Grant Taylor. I got him earmarked for a couple of things that he probably forgot he even mentioned.
No, I haven't forgotten. Life has just been… super effing busy.
Yeah, I understand. Because I've got it down here.
I was going to… Corona, you for this port knocking thing.
But I told you, and I still have it in mind, that I've got to do a lot of preliminary work putting that before i even
Even approach you on that because we were at one point we discussed it in something like we were looking at three or four months out and it's still three or four months out, right?
Okay, no problem.
Yeah. I'm inclined to send ask you what you want to know about port knocking on Discuss to spur discussion.
Yeah. No, no problem.
Unless you object.
Anytime we throw it up there on discuss, it's always good.
I had…
At one point. One of the guys The guy Carrie Shug from Chicago had asked a question about Connecting remotely. And there was a whole bevy of discussions that was done over a two or three month period and i I had thought that that in itself would be a
Make an ongoing series of… you know kind of entry level base kind of things how to do that I'm considering the stuff that was… written up on discuss If somebody would put that effort into doing an actual presentation But nothing ever came of it.
So many ideas just so many ideas You know?
Not too many chiefs and no Indians.
Well, they're Indians. They're just all off doing things.
There you go.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Oh, God.
Anyway.
Over at the sausage making party. Well, this is the sausage making party.
Let me get out of this, go back to where it ought to be.
Okay, anyway.
Anyway, uh… At this point, we ought to talk about some of the old business, maybe, yes Server admin.
You're homing.
We do.
Any comments about stuff that Mike Knight had been doing? I mean, half the time half the time I don't read it because it's It's just too complex for me.
Good week.
Well, one comment on server admin I got tired of everybody bitching about all of Space Gary's email was taken up, so I threw it away.
Good.
I'll buy a fucking disk drive.
To another partition.
I was there actually bitching or was it just questions and lack of understanding?
Oh.
Well, Mike was bitching pretty strongly.
Okay.
And I was bitching too. Kind of backhandedly bitching to directly to Gary that when was the last time you read your email on on Bach, right?
Yeah. Yeah.
Hello?
Well, that's good.
Anything to talk about the next Bach upgrade? Go into Windows. I think Debian 13 is about ready to come out this month.
I think if it hadn't already
I threw a comment up on sysadmin today. I spotted uh migration tool to move One second. Here's a reply from Mike.
Now, before we go any further, we have to get… The mailman situation resolved.
So do we have original mailbox files for archives or do we only have HTML rendering of Some of them.
There appear to be inbox files there although i have I'm not sure how to validate them now.
Anything else I should put here?
Oh.
Regarding the SLU website. Lee, did you want to keep using dev or do you want to do stuff on Bach 2.
Here it goes back to.
Remember you stood up another VM named dev when we were. Yes.
Oh, shit, I did.
I think I have the answer of no, we're going to use Bach 2.
What?
You stood it up to see if the version of Node.js in the Debian repos was good enough.
Oh, I do. Okay. Got Bach, Bach 2, dev.
And an extra Bach backup.
Yeah. My opinion is we probably don't want that dev.
I think Bach 2 functioning as dev is sufficient.
What were we using Dove for?
Oh, okay. I got it.
It was to see if the newer version of Debian had a new enough version of Node.js Yeah. And we found that it did not and we had to do fresh installs in a separate directory and those fresh installs went surprisingly well.
Your taxi my recollection, my friend. But I seem to vaguely remember that.
Oh, yeah, I remember now because that's when I got screwed up and after clone and Bach.
I restarted the backup instead of the original. Mike was bitching at me.
Yeah.
Probably ought to clear clear some of this stuff. But I'll shut it down.
Yeah.
And… Just leave it here for now. We can always fire it up would need it.
Pro tip, shut it down. Append, delete me.
And today's date or the date you shut it down. So when it's left there for six months and you go back, what is this oh It's named delete me and dated six months ago. I think it's safe to delete it.
Nice touch. Nice touch.
If I can find the underscore.
So I've got… outlines in my head of the process for standing up the pipeline for the new website, hosting it ourselves.
Life has just prevented me from having the cycles. To make any progress.
I'm thinking if I could, I'm actually making a little bit of headway cleaning up shit around here maybe we could uh order some pizza in and have a working party one of these weekends.
Okay.
Clear off some table space, I could probably get four or five people with space to play down here
Yep.
My God, I didn't even make a run of Nicola's and pick it up.
Wait a minute, would you call that a LAN party?
Damn it.
I don't mind fish on a pizza every now and then.
Bought an anchovy party.
The fish mine Oh, you got to see a picture of my favorite Nick and Elena salad.
It's the small salad, which is about an eight inch plate where the whole salad is covered with anchovies Yeah, but I think 18 will fit on the plate.
That's a lot of anchovies.
All right, so what else we got? Next.
Let's see, uploading presentations.
Oh. I've been keeping up.
Using old techniques.
Haven't. Gone.
Back to Trying.
To… go to new… process.
Yeah, 13 gigabytes. All right.
Made xfs so we can grow it if we have to.
Oh, and also…
Have been Elating.
Excess. Zoom storage.
Is to stop Zoom from nagging us.
Yeah.
So how much history do we have out on Zoom itself?
You've got enough space for a month's worth of recordings.
Okay.
I think the more amazing thing that we kind of I don't know if I should say did unintentionally without a lot of fanfare is the fact that Stan's been putting so much of the stuff out on YouTube.
We're going to be we're going to be a YouTube channel.
We haven't added anything since like November of last year. Yes.
Yeah, Sean was kind of uh Okay.
He was doing that. I had put a lot of stuff earlier, but then when he started his process, he was doing all of it.
And that was that special training session we did He was trying to teach me and anybody else that was interested in how to do it.
And that's why we made the dev. Cool.
Okay.
Should I write something about that here?
John's tutorial was good The process is so simple.
For somebody with his skills Not as simple for others.
However you want to say it.
I would also throw out there Sean's process is assuming there is infrastructure infrastructure scaffolding in place to support it And we do not have that in place yet.
Now, call it a pipeline, Stan? Sean, yeah.
Pipeline requires Infrastructure.
Scaffolding is a good term for it.
That we don't have tested yet. Built and tested.
I have unit tested components of it. But I have not assembled end to end yet.
Sure.
How's that?
Okay. Website meetup maintenance.
Gary?
This website meetup sucks. Check in.
Is Electrolux, a Hoover, a ShopVac, or an industrial driveway cleaner sucks.
I'd say only shop vac level. It's just little things. You're a watcher. I got two and a half inch holes on my shop vac ah But, you know, maybe I really should.
Read the uh read the their web pages about how to be an administrator and meet up but There's just little things that they change that just piss us off because they'll It's like they decrease the amount of content you can put in the description of a meeting.
Or all of a sudden they made it so when you copy something that has a a URL link in it.
It no longer just shows the no longer the lick or the the pseudonym for the link no it it shows you a copy of the entire long lake.
And uh Yeah, it just pisses me off when they make changes like that.
Anyway, that's my gripe.
Okay.
Oh, we're going to remove this internet presence, other social media thing? I think we were, right?
I have still not seen anybody else in the SLUG IRC channel.
Well, I hadn't been for 20 years, Phil. Mm-hmm.
Yeah, I never liked using it, so I never bothered.
I guess the only other person I've ever heard try and play with it is James Conway.
Whoa.
Yeah.
Haven't heard him talk about it recently.
How about Slack? Slack is K isput.
Oh, wow. They're… tool doesn't run on Linux anymore.
Oh shoot their app. What good is it? Damn right now.
What are you talking about?
Gary's asking about Slack. I had to throw it away because… The app won't run on Linux anymore And you can't use it in the browser because once you log in, it says, oh, now you have to use the app.
Here's Liz.
Lee, I've done a lot of thinking about social media, be it Fediverse, Slack.
Discord, what have you. I think they're good for near real-time communications.
But once something has been around for more than a few days or a few weeks, scrolling back to find it is nigh impossible.
In my opinion. So I think mailing lists are a whole lot better for historical.
Purposes.
Yeah, and the difference being the difference Twitter, Fediverse, Discord, and all those tools are built by the social media generation And they don't care about history.
You know they're all they want is media gratification.
Speaking of which, since IRC channels are created on the fly how come we still have one if nobody's using it?
Because I have signed into it because we have referenced it on our website someplace.
What are we talking about?
Okay. No, I'm saying if nobody's in there for two or three years, how come… How does it stay alive?
As soon as I logged or I joined it, it instantiated it.
Oh, so basically you joined it to create it. Okay, I got it.
Not on purpose. It was a side effect. Right.
Thanks.
Yeah. Well, if you join a channel and it doesn't exist, then the server automatically creates it for you.
Yeah. Yeah, okay.
Yeah.
So we can… How do we disable this IRC thing?
Sign out of it and we remove a link or anything on our website talking about it.
Quick use.
Oh, okay. So I'm going to… Um…
What about the new site, Stan?
I don't think it's on there.
Okay. I mean, we just might want to confirm that.
Um.
Similarly, I haven't seen anybody use discord other than Lee and I.
I have a Discard account, but I don't
Auto. Well, I like Discord a hell of a lot better than Slack because at least you can have subchannels.
I didn't know we had a Discord channel. I mean, I don't like the damn stuff it just You know, it's…
Yeah. But… Whatever. It's just too much.
Do manipulation lights, moving knobs and stuff for me.
This dinosaur likes email.
Uh, any…
The pterodactyl said to the T-Rex. Then there was this asteroid that came crashing through.
Oh, actually, would it… in Noah's Ark left the dock, these two dinosaurs are standing there saying Oh, that was today.
Hmm.
Okay. Anything special to say about the announced mailing list?
I'm not subscribed to it, so I don't know.
So.
Okay. Okay. You're not missing anything. Generally, I only use it for announce meetings. Boop, that's it.
And every once in a while, Gary will post something up there that looks really ugly. And I never read what he posts.
Because it looks so ugly.
Back at you.
No real comment here.
Anything you say about your camera, hardware, microphones, projectors, I've got… our main projectors yet Okay, so I get run over by a truck, you know where it is.
No.
If we determine that the external USB drive is gone?
Not really. It could be lost in Don's house.
And there was that other guy who was going to do some work for us. We saw him before the age of COVID.
And he was asking, he was going to take the disc and i don't know if he has it or Don has it or I don't remember the guy's name, so I have to go back and look.
I think back then Don was going to try and contact him and i never Never got an answer.
Well, if you don't light a fire under dawn every week, he forgets what he did the month before.
That's true. The period is a lot shorter in that stand.
I was being generous. I mean, I didn't want to count by the hours.
Oh, darn.
I'm certainly going to complain about anybody being forgetful.
Yeah. Well, it's not that he's forgetful. He gets distracted by squirrel.
It doesn't take hardly anything to describe it. Yeah.
Ooh, shiny new object. Yeah, I got some of that.
Whatever.
So Gary, are you going to try and talk Dawn again about that?
Okay.
Yeah, that'll probably last one.
I'll be back in a couple minutes, gentlemen.
Thanks for the warning.
At least we know he didn't put it in your box of slew documents because it was missing long before you found the box.
Still be surprised. I look in there and I find Jimmy Hoffa.
That would be rather nasty by now.
Yeah, really. In addition, which, if it ever got out You need to have a bunch of people chasing you.
Hey, I figure if I keep it for a few centuries, I mean, just look how much money you can get for an Egyptian mummy these days, you know?
No.
I don't think he'd last that long. Unless you know somebody that'll mumify them.
All right, I'm getting punchy, guys. Yeah. What's next on the list?
Attendance Database.
A good thing.
Ah.
Okay. Last month, there was a comment about I asked how many years worth of data do we need to keep in there and two or three years is fine but so… Paul, it really doesn't matter and i haven't taking an effort to go and delete every old data.
Planning schedule. Yeah.
You mean on a planning schedule or somewhere else, Dan? You're in the In a minute.
Okay.
Planning, yes. In the planning schedule. Yeah. Planning schedule report database. Any comments about this?
Planning schedule.
I think it's good to have all of them in the planning schedule.
That's a simple place to search for previous topics.
Good. Yeah, I was talking to the previous thing I was talking about the attendance as actual people showing up at the meetings.
Oh, okay. Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah, three years is fine there. For the planning schedule that's a good place to keep everything I've gone back and looked at something I did 10 years ago more than once. Mm-hmm.
For historical purposes.
Were there any pre-recorded or any topics before recordings that were very popular that might be worth doing a redux as something recorded.
Half of them. I think all are really basic stuff And the for base you go in and look at the planning schedule thing at the at the high end of it, the data is 2037 or whatever the heck it is.
Lists a whole bunch of real basic stuff, you know. Some of the stuff we've done before and there's things in there that you know it You know, the idea would be interesting to somebody that's new to Linux or Unix. It wouldn't hurt to
Do half of them over again. But that's just my opinion.
That's a good opinion.
Not enough time to do anything about handouts. Although they're getting kind of… fuzzy and old.
Box is still there. No one's stolen it yet. Have you seen it this year?
Organizational papers. You still got the box, Gary?
Let's see. I remember going downstairs and saying, you know.
I can't think it was named now the dead guy anyway Trying to make a joke. My brain is gone.
Box is still there. Sponsorships.
We are not good at getting sponsors.
Hey, if we had a couple of people like Steve, we wouldn't need them because we'd have our expenses covered for the year. Yeah.
That's true.
What was that smart ass comment?
Not you. It's different, Steve.
Here for Steve, Steve Gomez. He kicked in a couple hundred bucks for the last Three years, I think.
Oh, I don't think I know him.
Very nice. Steve G.
Yeah.
Any new business? I'd say no.
Do we have any new business we need to talk about?
Okay.
Recurring requirements.
A month away we are. The month of May.
Okay, let's Encrypt. There's an automatic renewal
Sold stuff was buddy. And us.
Was reviewed.
Follow-ups on the election that was all done But yeah, this account due.
Oh, speaking of which Stan, have we updated the website with the current Lord.
Um… The list of ordinate members has been updated, but the narrative I have on each page about the the election process and all that needs to be redone.
No, no, because when I do the annual report, I need to see the officers in case they've changed
Oh. I'm pretty sure it has been. I'll double check it tomorrow or tonight, whatever, when I
Okay. Yeah, we got a month, but
Yeah. You go to that one page, right? Okay. I'll make my shift.
Right.
I'll make myself a little yellow sticky thing. Make sure.
The Missouri Annual Report is due every other year now. Good question. I don't remember what I did last time.
I know what you have there so it's 2024 when you did
What annual report is that?
For the corporation.
Oh, okay. I just filed one for my LLC.
What do you mean? Llcs are permanent. You don't have to file anything regularly
Yeah, there was one filing that we needed to do.
Oh, you're talking about the boi stuff It turns out he didn't have to do it.
Yeah. Really?
Yeah. But they didn't tell us you didn't have to do it until after the deadline for doing it.
Oh, well, I did it.
Typical. Looking at that.
Thank you.
Sorry. Looking at the context on the SLUG website, board of directors James Conroy Lee Lamer, Sean Tweehaus, Grant Taylor, Steve Stegman.
I think it's right.
And I did do two years last year, so it's not doodle 26, so.
I want to have to change it. We won't have to change it till 26.
Next year.
Somebody had complained that we weren't putting an individual's addresses in there.
What addresses? Ain't no way, Jose.
Home addresses. Really? And that's the change is the last time I looked at it.
What do you mean?
Used to be you had to put the name of the Individual.
No, you put an address in there and the address you use is P.O. Box 41302.
Okay, that's… That's what I understand that.
Somebody was complaining that it needed to be individual addresses instead of the post office box.
Our general box. Okay.
Ain't going to happen. Sorry.
Hey, you're the guy doing the work. If you say it ain't going to happen, it ain't going to happen.
I don't give them my address to anybody.
Yeah.
You gave it to me.
Well, it's not for somebody i don't… It didn't go to anybody I cared about not having it.
Fair enough.
Did anybody? Yeah. Okay.
Besides, how… Besides, how many driver's license have you seen with a post office box on them?
I've never paid attention. I don't know.
Yeah. That's enough of that. We want to recognize any useful efforts. Anybody do anything worthwhile this month?
Last month, month before?
Oh, I drive my wife to the… hospital every other day. Is that worthwhile?
Well, keeps you out of trouble.
Happy wife, happy life.
Yeah.
Through Gary's email away. So we got seven more 7.2 more gig on Bakna.
That was taking up 7.2 gig of space on Vach.
Just grinding it in. 7.2 gigabyte worth of time.
Gb, capital GB. Capital G, capital B. Yeah, there you go.
Do we need to do any blue sky recording?
I think so.
I'd say no.
All right, we got anything else? We want to do a bookend.
Do a bookend. You'll lisp.
I just posted something to announce
About a face-to-face meeting on may 15th.
Okay, good.
Am I going to approve it?
I don't know.
Sure, go ahead. I'll read it to see if he is, he did his spell checking.
I got to remember how to prove it first.
Oh, welcome.
God damn it.
Oh, man.
No moderator request.
Don't they log under moderator requests, Dan?
I thought so. I don't know. Here, let me Give me a second.
I didn't see anything come in.
You send it to announce, Steve?
I haven't seen anything come out. And now let's discuss our system.
Yeah.
You're spelling that? Dave, you're muted.
Did you send it, Steve?
Dave is muted.
Oh, sorry about that.
Yeah, it just came in four or five minutes ago.
I don't see it.
It's not in the hit list history. Who'd you send it to?
Uh… announce at slug.org.
We didn't go anywhere. We never got it.
Hmm.
A-n-n-o-u-n-c-e at slug.org.
Let me check the scent one.
Yeah.
Does it have that? It doesn't have that many in the list.
No, it just came out. I just sent it like five minutes ago.
We haven't gotten it. I didn't get it.
Yeah, I'm looking at Gmail. It says it sent it.
What's the address for announce? Is it announced at slug.org?
Yeah. How do you spell an ounce?
Yeah.
Hmm. A-n-n-o-u-n-c-e.
I think that's how it's spelled.
A-n-n-o-u-n-c-e. At slug.org.
Oops. Oh, God. No, that's not what I want.
Send a copy to Lee. Just to test the meal, the Gmail.
Or to me or discuss or any damn thing. Going to discuss.
I'll forward it to Lee.
I'll just send it to discuss. I mean, we can wait till we finalize everything before we… formalize it and announce it.
Okay, I'll forward it to discuss.
Yes.
Yeah.
Did Gary fall asleep?
Then he fell on his floor, fell on the floor cold cocked himself.
Hmm.
No, I think he fell into the crapper. Into the crapper?
Phil, where? Oh.
Having a problem with core dump.
Yeah. Well, I can… considering his diet, I don't see, not surprised.
What kind of diets are you on?
Oh, you did it?
God damn it. Sorry, folks.
I got your in-person meeting. Yeah, the direct one, not from the
Yeah, I sent it to… Announce.
Oh, well. Make what you want out of it and send it to an ounce or wherever you want to post it.
Well, then it's coming from me, not you. That's the point.
Was old enough to have tested us.
This is a victory for the voters. What?
I still don't see anything to discuss.
Well, that one went south. Lee, why don't you send it? You got a copy of it.
And the point was for you to send it.
I went ahead and send it anyway.
All right.
I think it was more posting from an unusual suspect.
That's it. Yes.
Yeah, maybe your fancy firewall took it out.
No, it never hit Bach. Is a problem.
Because it's not in the archives, so mailman never got it.
Hmm.
Huh. Did I send it to the wrong address?
I don't know, but I said to discuss and it came right back.
Went right to discuss.
Let's see. Administrative.
What do we got here?
This is…
Announce.
I'd say we end the recording.
Lee, I saw a car the other day. Well, it was a truck, actually, a little bitty pickup truck.
It's called a slate is the name of the company you know as in And they sell one called a blank slate which It is really minimalist it's designed You can get it with like dog dish hubcaps are no hubcaps and uh
They come in gray paint
Is it paint or just primer?
Hey, I saw it too somewhere. Forget where it was.
Paint, but they're designed to be wrapped with vinyl And then you can buy You can probably option it up to $50,000. They've got so many different things. It's designed to be personalizable.
Is that a word? But it looked really interesting.
Yeah.
Yep.
Did we adjourn the meeting? Well, we did and shut the recording off.
Yes.
I said, should we return the meeting? And I was saying yes.
I move it. We move.
He came back. He was gurgling a little bit. I told him you fell in.
Okay.
Doing laps. I was doing laps.
You fall in, Gary?
I moved. We join the meeting. Okay.
All the favorite things are you'll sign. Reponents know.
I…
Okay, this was the steering committee meeting for SLUG, the St. Louis Linux Unix users group For May, the 5th 2025. Thank you all for coming.
The