Shropshire LUG goes Telford Hackaday

From our reporter on the spot, John Alexander, along with other SLUG members took part in the first Telford Hackaday.

Strike While The “Soldering” Iron is hot they say.

An entourage of 8 members arrived with machines and various half projects and being organised at short notice we were intending this to be more of a “show and tell” rather than full workshop.

John A actually demonstrated the equipment required to deliver true 1080p from ANY capable PC to any Full HD TV using a VGA-HDMI converter allowing us to watch rather too many simultaneous  episodes of HAK5 http://revision3.com/hak5

John Darley, showed off his handy work with a part built  “Cup Cake CNC” From Makerbot Industries http://www.makerbot.com.
An excellent piece of kit which actually extrudes molten plastic onto a table to create 3D objects including rather cleverly,  parts for further Makerbots.

Fortunately we do not need to fear Robot domination as of yet since John as yet to finish the extruder head and commence the building his New Model Army!

Here’s an example of what Robots eat!

Others spent time fiddling with a mobile satellite dish attempting to get a DVB-S PCI card to fire up (better luck next time Jim!!)

Chris Cutler and son Rob were busy assembling a WIFI listening device.

Nothing worse than an emergency with your Plumbing Mr Darley to the rescue.
I’m sure this wasn’t what he expected from the term Water sports!

Well earned Cup of Coffee!

Later John A (Always one for his toys) demonstrated the USB powered MIMO 7″ LCD monitor he got from Scan Computers and how  to get it working under Linux using libDLO.

http://libdlo.freedesktop.org/wiki/FrontPage

Jim been rather “camera shy” after the Satellite debarcle

John D in a “knot” with Fedora 10

Over all a great time was had. Thanks again to all those who turned up at such short notice especially the new guys who didn’t know what to expect from the SLUGs!!

Both the main SLUG meetings and the Hackdays rely on you to make them successful. Interested leave a comment  or turn up to our regular SLUG meetings last Tuesday of the month at the Station Inn Horsehay

2010 January meeting report.

A surprisingly healthy turnout for the January SLUG meeting despite the cold.

Half the members consuming an equally healthy Steak Dinner and Pud.
(Remember to bring an empty stomach with you to meetings as Tuesday is steak night with free pud …Excellent value !)

Many Demos and much talking :

Demos
=====
VGA and HDMI converters and Upscalers showing how to get a full 1080p on your TV from ANY computer Linux/Windows or MAC. Ideal for media presentations or conferences.

Sumvision Media player (Cyclone MKV) and how to get to the Busybox prompt and access the embedded Linux system

Digimode Radio again Thanks Dave for a good chat

Various small Linux machines (Acer/Asus Beasts) and iPhones in Evidence

Talking Points
==============
Telford Hackerspace feasibility
Visit to Birmingham Hackerspace
http://www..fizzpop.org.uk/

I see the Brummie LUG want to go there or at least have a talk about it :
http://birmingham.lug.org.uk/meetings/

WSPR (more Radio Stuff )
http://wsprnet.org/drupal/

Plus many other bits including a big Hi to the “Newbury Massive” Lee C,John A !!

Remember that SLUG relies on your participation. If you are reading this and don’t remember it then you weren’t there and missed out, get your self down to the Station Inn on the Last Tuesday of every month (including the cold ones!!).

FEBRUARY Meeting
================
23rd of Feb 19:30 onwards …Come earlier and get your Cow Dinner ordered!
Location: Station Inn
http://maps.google.co.uk/maps/place?oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&q=station+inn+horsehay&fb=1&gl=uk&hq=station+inn&hnear=horsehay&cid=9443180385690869677

Topic (provisional)

John Alexander depending on commitments will be discussing his trip to the
FOSDEM conference in Brussels
http://www.fosdem.org/2010/

AFU Knoppix V6 Released

I’m pleased to see the AFU Knoppix has been released – initially with a broken kernal in the EN version, which wouldn’t boot.  As promised they fixed it and its a neat distro for radio hams with plenty of software pre-installed, which saves time and cursing (when you get stuck in a library loop – wont work – no lib – cant install lib wrong ver.  previous one doesnt work,  previous ver wont work with newer other libs….. etc) .

It’s a live distro as per Knoppix and look on the German only page (Google translate is useful here) at http://www.afu-knoppix.de/

Look at the bottom of the 14/5/9 posting for a link to the EN ver.  I’ve got it and enjoyed using it – not a fan of KDE though, AFU is sorted mostly – though some multi-language applicaitons appear – worth a try.

Dave H G0CER

Meeting report February 2009

A practical evening – albeit low on attendance. Dave H (moi, the author of this)  brought along his ham radio kit and  Acer Aspire One running Ubuntu UNR – and demonstrated it running a few different applications (QSSTV, GMFSK, FLDIGI and MixW running in wine) – the radio had a simple aerial but still managed to receive ham radio stations from all over Europeon 7MHz – not surprising at 8pm but with al all the electrical noise about it was a bit of surprise.  I was unable to transmit back due to the awfulness of the aerial (high SWR) , but it was demo only.

Dave operating the Acer Ubuntu netbook with his FT817 radio at lug meeting

John A brought along a selection of access points that can be hacked for various uses and are cheap to buy.  He also had his laptop with some videos of vblogs listed below – YMMV but worth a nose through them.

http://revision3.com/

http://revision3.com/systm/

http://revision3.com/hak5/

http://revision3.com/tekzilla/

http://www.bsodtv.org/

http://www.schneier.com/

Dave

Last minute Linux toys for Christmas?

Unsure what to get the geek in your life for Christmas? Ive just been looking for a suitable netbook for my parents to take on their travels. Item of choice at present looks to be the AspireOne from Acer, which on the face of it seems ideal. 8.5 inch screen, slightly larger keyboard than the EeePC – a reasonably intuitive GUI that does a good job of making windows users feel less terrified. The underlying distro seems to based on fedora. The platform itself while easy enough for non-geeky users is fairly easy to customise, making it a good choice for those of us who cant resist fiddling. The best bit – Dixons seem to be selling these for about £170 right now. (most of the highstreet stores are a similar price). Have you been good this year? will Father Christmas be leaving you one? Leave a few hints around the house

OLPC G1G1 comes to the EU!

A recent announcement on the OLPC news site confirms that finally those of us in Europe will be able to take part in the popular Give One Get One scheme where the price you pay for one allows for a second laptop to be given free to a needy child elsewhere.

Details are still a little sketchy, but it seems that 17th Nov is the launch day for the scheme.

Full details at : http://www.olpcnews.com/

Thanks to ntoll for the tip-off

Life Hacker reviews USB booting distros

The popular LifeHacker website has recently run a small, but useful review of USB booting linux distros – http://lifehacker.com/5069054/battle-of-the-thumb-drive-linux-systems Personally I always keep a copy of DSL on a usb key with me – its helped me on numerous occasions (Most recently to get access back on a windows 2K server which had be “re-passworded”!)

contributions wanted…

One of the better features of our old site was that various group members contributed to the running of the site. This new site also offers us this facility. If group members feel they would like to contribute to the site with a page on a specific topic, give chrisw or daveh a shout and we will set you up.

Ubuntu on underwater UAV

The popular hackaday website today posted a link to a writeup of the recent underwater UAV competition entry from Cambridge University, featured on the mini-ITX website. Scroll down a bit, you will notice rather than a lightweight embedded platform its actually using Ubuntu 8.04 on a picoITX. Possibly overkill in terms of CPU usage, but an interesting direction to head in.

updates…

As you will have noticed, the site has been updated. There is now an RSS feed of Linux based news from elsewhere in the community. Other pages are now being populated. Its hoped that we will be able to keep the site updated with blog-style news and info several times a week.

Check back frequently for the latest changes.