tensixtyone

It’s that time of the month again, Liverpool LUG has snuck up again and it’s time for me to post the details.

Liverpool LUG Meeting
4th February 2009 @ 7:00pm
Liverpool Social Centre, 96 Bold St, Liverpool, L1

This month is a little different, thanks to the Liverpool Social Centre we have a meeting space available to use for this and future meetings.

This months talk will be given by Vladimir Jakubovskij and is regarding his recent research paper “Open Source perspective: The current situation with online music piracy and the future of free music distribution”. Vladimir will be discussing the topics in his paper at the talk. The paper will be published under the CC license at a later date.

If Vladimir is unable to give the talk for some reason or another, Then Joanne Roberts will (hopefully) have a quick talk devised on Open Street Map.

This will be our first meeting at the Liverpool Social Centre on Bold Street. Access is currently through the door next to the News From Nowhere bookshop entrance. Ring the doorbell (the small white one to the left of the main buzzer) for admittance. If you have any difficulties finding the event, please call 07530 709 263. I’ll be in Liverpool quite early to make arrangements and organise things.

Afterwards, we’ll head to a local drinking hole for a few off topic drinks and banter.

The Liverpool Social Centre is a non-profit volunteer ran operation who usually charge for their space, but they’ve offered this location on a free basis in return of support for their compute cluster. For the first month it would be good to give a small donation of £5-£10 from the group to cover costs, so if you could bring 50p or so to donate they would appreciate it. For more details about the location check the website.

Hope to see you all there

On an additional note, I’ll be there with my Tikitag reader and related software to show off my pyTikitag stack for reading the tags in Python and also to generally fool around with them.

It’s a rare occurrence that I post about Liverpool LUG and the meetings, as I thought a few people are not signed up to the mailing list it’ll only help to post it elsewhere. So to save rewriting what has already been posted, here is the original notification email.

Liverpool LUG Meeting
7th January 2009 @ 7:00pm
The Bar, 1st Floor, FACT, 88 Wood St, Liverpool, L1 4DQ

It’s coming up to that time of the month again, as it’s so damn close to new year I think we’ll keep it as a social night, unless someone wants to step up and give a talk.

As per usual, we’ll start at FACT and move on to another place if we feel the need to. We’ll be located in the Bar on the 1st Floor outside Gallery 2, keep an eye out for UMPCs, beards, and a plushie Tux. If a talk is on we’ll usually move from the bar to the conference room at about 7:15pm, if you arrive late you can get to the conference room via the lift (head to the 3rd floor) or if the lift is disabled ask a security guard.

Hope to see you all there

http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/1423955
http://identi.ca/livlug
http://twitter.com/livlug
http://jaiku.com/channel/livlug

 If you’re thinking of heading down and not sure of the location then drop me a email, I’ll be getting into Liverpool at about 6:30pm at Liverpool Lime Street.

So, I finally got round to giving a talk at LivLUG, anyone who knows me will know i’m not the best public speaker in the world and I get quite nervous at the thought. It was time to grab the bull by the horns and actually do it!

My first talk was on the usage of the Wiimote within Linux, The Wiimote are very simple Bluetooth devices that can be accessed over the standard APIs with an additional library called CWiid. This allows the device to be used as a input device or as a general I/O device.

It’s quite hard to explain it in just text alone, So i’ve put my presentation on the LivLUG wiki everyone to have a look at. I recommend you grab it and give it a try yourself.

EDIT: Yes, It’s on the wiki now, but heres the direct link.

It’s come to my attention recently that some people don’t understand what “The Hub” project is all about. So let me explain the details of the project.

“The Hub” was originally an idea born out of a talk given at Open Source City. James Wallbank from Access Space gave an insightful talk on the community benefits of a open computer cluster, along with their computer recycling scheme they are able to poliferate computer usage around the local community. As you would expect, with a increase in computer usage and access to a common area a community grew and evolved in the project.

After Open Source City, discussions between the members of The Art Organisation about a similar project being setup in the half empty building they have, Mello Mello. A few interested parties were approached and Vladimir from Liverpool LUG was one of these few. Discussions happened and plans made, but no decisive action was took.

Fast forward a few months, Liverpool LUG was holding its first couple of talks since it’s “rebirth”, stuck for a backup location for when FACT was unavailable the admin team approached The Art Organisation for space in Mello Mello. Greg, who is co-curator of The Art Organisation, talked about the community space project that started months before, and a few members of LivLUGs admin team (myself, Joanne, Graeme and Dan) offered to help out.

The overall plan is to setup four or five PCs in the space, with a common printer, internet connectivity, and a file server. In one of the storage areas we will keep old computer parts in a recycling capacity, but this will not happen until we’ve got the main hub in order. All the PCs will be networked and will be able to share out their media, along with the likes of a “pool” instant messaging system to allow quick transfers between individuals working on the PCs. Exact plans for software and incident tracking haven’t been worked out yet, we think that should be saved to when we have actual hardware on site. The only thing we know at the moment is that all the software will be Open Source.

At the moment we have the space and a load of old computing kit that has been scavenged from somewhere. The area has a lot of “junk”, well, I say “junk” but the items actually belong to a artist who was using the space as storage. We’ve organised the items as much as possible and are trying to organise PCs and desks for the area.

We need help, If you know somewhere we can get some old PCs, some desks, or other useful computing equipment, drop us a line. We’ll be approaching the FreeCycle lists sometime this week so keep your eyes out if your on there.

As part of our location scouting for Liverpool LUG, Jo made a visit to Mello Mello to ask them if we could use some space in their building for hosting the LUG. The result was quite interesting.

Greg from The Art Organisation (current managers of Mello Mello) has asked if we can setup a open source computer cluster that will hopefully be open to the public and artists alike. We jumped at the chance and we’re going to be visiting tomorrow morning to do some initial scouting and investigation. One of the key requirements that Greg had was to make this completely open source and free as in beer, The TAO have little to no money.

I’ll be able to post a few more details and some photos after tomorrow’s visit.

I posted a few days ago about the creation of a adminstration list for all those who are interested in putting a helping hand into the LUG. The idea seems to have gone down well so I’ve took the next step and setup the list on our new hosting server; Ringo.

If your interested in helping out, signup for the mailing list. It’s currently on moderated signup as I want to keep an eye on who signs up, as that way I’ll know who they are and be able to prod them if they go idle. Please remember, the admin list is for LUG administration only, the banter will still remain on the main LUG list.

On a side note, I just want to bring people up to speed with what we’re able to offer as a LUG, we can offer some personal hosting, @livlug.org.uk email address and shell access. If your interested just drop a mail to sysadmin@livlug.org.uk.