November 2022 - Talk - lists.gtalug.org

[GTALUG-Announce] Membership Dues
by Warren McPherson 13 Nov '23

13 Nov '23

With the agm coming up, now is a great time to renew membership and make a small twenty dollar contribution to the organization. For those looking forward to the chance to wind their way through the Interac E-Transfer process again here is my summary of how it works. (Actually I forget each time so the novelty never wears off -- luckily it is easy.) Log in to your bank and look for "Interac e-Transfers" you may need to go to the "Transfers" page and then you will see this option. Select "email method" and use the email address: membership(a)gtalug.org Putting your name in the message can be helpful as the notification I get can sometimes be a touch obtuse. Thank you to those who have already contributed! (I know who you are. Ha ha) Thank you, Warren --- GTALUG Announce mailing list announce(a)gtalug.org https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/announce

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At the GTALUG AGM: How we handle Internet services
by Evan Leibovitch 14 Dec '22

14 Dec '22

[Apologies if you received this message more than once] Hello everyone, By now you may have read or heard elsewhere about the announcement of the Annual General Meeting (AGM) for the Greater Toronto Linux User Group (GTALUG), to be held virtually <https://blue.lpi.org/b/eva-zjc-gjy-kgl> on Tuesday December 13. Along with other AGM business, we will be discussing how GTALUG goes forward with our online services. TL;DR: A number of the people who used to set up and run our online services (mainly the website and mailing lists) have left the GTALUG Board, and those who remain have neither the time to fix nor familiarity with the tools currently running these services. As Google has provided to GTALUG its nonprofit services which include full access to commercial Google Workplace (formerly G Suite), the Board has been investigating migrating some of our online services there. While to some such a move would be controversial, the status quo is unsustainable. So either we need new people to step forward to operate what exists, or we need to move to a service -- provided free of charge -- that can dramatically simplify operations. The Board wants to have an open discussion on the issue before deciding, and the issue will be raised at the AGM. We look forward to hearing your views. While responses to this email will certainly be read, the full discussion will take place at the AGM. Evan Leibovitch, Toronto Canada @evanleibovitch / @el56

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Re: [GTALUG] At the GTALUG AGM: How we handle Internet services
by Evan Leibovitch 01 Dec '22

01 Dec '22

On Wed, Nov 30, 2022 at 5:03 AM ac via talk <talk(a)gtalug.org> wrote: > to admin a vps or two with apache/nginx and mailman with a few thousand? > subscribers is, imnsho, not a major thing and in terms of vps costs is > maybe like 10 bucks a month (for two vps) if even two is really needed > The issue is not the server or its cost, but the care and feeding of web services: - Email (multiple lists) - Aliases - Forms and surveys (*) - Website - Shareable calendar (*) The ones marked with (*) We would LIKE to do but don't yet have the tools and/or time and/or smarts to do. I have been on the mailing list for ten? years now and I do not remember > any month where gtalug had any volume that exceeds what a five bucks per > month vps can carry and a properly configured mailman (which is very > mature and can be battle hardened) We've had some very smart people running mailman and it still doesn't work to anyone's satisfaction. Or maybe it's our SMTP server, I don't know which one it is. The existing people on the Board have just become exhausted and the volunteers with the tech skills and keys to everything aren't always reachable. As volunteers I don't expect immediate tech support, but it just makes the process of constant firefighting more than we are prepared to bear. cannot take more than an hour or two per month to admin. I can only tell you that this is nowhere near the effort required, which is an insane amount of effort required for a small group like ours. > > Anything we host ourselves bears both admin resources and financial > > hosting cost. Right now we're using mailman and frankly, I see the > > bounce messages and it's almost impossible to keep track of. > > (Hint: I tried mailing this Sunday night but that bounced). I really > > don't like mailman anymore. There are better ways to filter spam. > > > if your own email to mailman is bouncing, this is probably not what you > think it is :) > It probably isn't. But I'm tired of running after other people to diagnose. > That said, I'm in no position to guarantee anything. > > > and this sentence is the crux of it. personally I do not trust google. > I can't guarantee that I'll be alive tomorrow, either. There is no reason to believe that Google for Nonprofits is going away any time this decade, and if there is I'd love to hear it. If they tried it, the outcry from the charitable world would be deafening. There are many reasons and ways to mistrust Google; this isn't one of them. it would be far easier to pay 10 bucks and get three sysadmins to each donate > an hour a month (and their scripts :) ) > That's the whole point of this conversation. We're already paying a nominal hosting fee and have volunteer sysadmins and things are still constantly borked. IT IS NOT EASIER, let alone FAR easier, our real-world experience to date bears that out. so, if you decide to continue having an emailing list and self hosted services > I would gladly donate some of my time (at least four hours a month [...] If all we had to do is threaten to move services to Google in order to get more people to volunteer, we could have done that ages ago. We're well past that. Your four hours a month are still very much valued, but we need that energy for more things than just keeping things running -- especially when we have an offer, at no cost, of commercial-grade online services. providing that there is at least one (or two) other high/senior skill > dev/sys/ops also? > See? Every volunteer effort comes with strings and limitations. So does mine. So does that for everyone else on the Board. A group this small should not need to be spending so much of its behind-the-scenes energy just herding cats. There's too much else to do that isn't being done just so we can keep the virtual lights on. - Evan

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Forced off DSL by Bell
by Michael Galea 28 Nov '22

28 Nov '22

Hi, Bell notified me that they will soon be shutting down my copper telephone service, no options. My DSL to TekSavvy will go with it. Joy. I run my own NAT/mail/vpn server firewall and I want to keep it. Apparently, others have been able connect to Bell by turning on PPPoE pass through on the Bell (HH4000) modem. Has anyone on the list gone this route? Is Bell still dreadful, even on fibre? Am I crazy to look at Rogers? PS: I pay ~$40/Mo for landline, which looks to increase to $52 after the change! Robbers! -- Michael Galea

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Laptop made by Intel ?
by William Park 25 Nov '22

25 Nov '22

I just noticed "INTEL NUC M15 EVO Platform Consumer Notebook" on sale at Canada Computers. I know about NUC box, but didn't know Intel made a laptop also. Anyone heard anything bad about them?

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Volunteer for GTALUG!
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 18 Nov '22

18 Nov '22

[This is not an official announcement, just a personal request.] GTALUG could use more people on the Board of Directors. The Board is what organizes GTALUG. How to get on the board: The normal way of getting on the board is to stand for election at the Annual General Meeting. That meeting will be part of our normal December meeting. The formal annoucement should say how to put your name forward. What does a board member do? - formally: part of the governance of GTALUG - take part in monthly board meetings - members do most of the behind-the-scenes organization (organize speakers, meeting venues, web site, banking, book-keeping, outreach, and anything else that comes up) What do I do? I'm not on the board but I'm part of the "Operations Team" maintaining the web site. The board welcomes me to board meetings. If you too would like to help but don't feel up to being a director: - don't worry -- it's not that hard. But you do have to attempt to do what you promise. - voluteer to the board and they'll surely find something that you could contribute. Of course other roles are important too: - dues-paying members - meeting attendees - mailing-list participants.

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Hacklab - Junk Independence Day - Nov. 27th.
by Scott Sullivan 16 Nov '22

16 Nov '22

Knowing the popularity of these events with this crowd. November 27th 2PM – 7PM https://hacklab.to/archives/junk-independence-day/ -- Scott Sullivan

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Tonight's meeting announcement?
by Stewart Russell 15 Nov '22

15 Nov '22

Did it go out? As far as I understand, Colin McGregor will be introducing Linux on Boats.

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CZUR scanners under Linux
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 15 Nov '22

15 Nov '22

We bought a CZUR ET24 Pro. Quite a bit more expensive than other models. It claimed that it would support Linux. <https://shop.czur.com/products/etscanner> I installed the supplied-to-me RPM using "rpm --force". It seems to work. (I only scanned the junk on the desktop where the scanning mat will go.) | From: Kevin Cozens via talk <talk(a)gtalug.org> | If it helps I found a page from two years ago where some asked about using a | CZUR scanner. That page said they had installed and ran the Windows software | using Wine but the driver was still an issue. Right. If it worked, that might be the best way. Apparently the scan under MacOS (and probably under Windows) has better OCR than under Linux. Grr. At least if Stephen Wilkinson's review on the product page is correct. | That page pointed to a web page | from four years earlier that said it is a UVC device. We have earlier CZUR scanners which are UVC at a lower resolution than the proprietary scanning software sees. | The scanner has no support in XSane? Not that I've seen. | Is there any support for it in VueScan? I don't know VueScan. | From: Lennart Sorensen via talk <talk(a)gtalug.org> | Subject: Re: [GTALUG] Borked Python setup, please help | I see people claiming many CZUR scaners are just UVC devices, and that | there exists programs that can capture from that, like guvcview and a | few others. It strangely does sound like it is actually more of a video | camera than a scanner. They are visible as UVC, but I think that the full resolution isn't what a UVC driver sees. I have not tested this particular model. The other thing is that CZUR has put a lot of effort into optimizing the scanning process. Perhaps some of that also exists in mobile phone camera scanner apps. - puts red reference lines (from LEDs) on the page to figure out and correct for page curvature - (optionally) combines scanning and OCR - a workflow to speed up multipage scanning - little tools to put on your finger to hold down page edges. The software edits these out of the picture. - quite good resolution for the task - various lights to try to avoid glare. | Maybe your model is something else? This model claimed Linux support. We had an earlier one that we liked but we didn't like having to boot Windows and later having to ship the result to the Linux machine. Every step in the workflow is a tax. We'll see if the Linux software is good enough. Eventually.

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Linux on Chromebook
by Michael Galea 14 Nov '22

14 Nov '22

I am hoping to tap the wisdom of the list. I'm going traveling and I don't want to lug around my 5.2 pound T420. Not on this trip. If I buy a cheap refurb Chromebook from Best Buy or Canada Computers: - Will I have luck wiping ChromeOS and installing Debian? Can I still encrypt the disk? - If instead I just run Linux on Chromebook, can I run a wireguard VPN? - Can anyone recommend a minimum spec level for the machine? -- Thanks, Michael Galea

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