Hi digital freedom advocates,
Last month we had our annual elections for Free Software Melbourne ... and lookout Stallman, I've got my eye on your job now that I've conquered the top job at FSM, hahaha. Big thanks go out to our outgoing members Ben S. and Scott. It was a fantastic year and we'll be missing Scotts overflowing enthusiasm and Bens inspirational dedication.
I also wanted to make a list of software discussed at our show-and-tell session last month, so without further ado, in order of appearance:
Starting us off was our newly elected secretary Damien demonstrating an Ardour plugin he's written for boosting quieter sounds in an audio recording without making louder noises clip... "peak limiter" I think it was called, I couldn't find that exact plugin, but here's a link to Damians Zam-plugins instead
Our other new committee member, my new second in command if you will, Michael showed us how to (questionably) improve the quality of our sleep using RedShift (formerly Flux) and gave us all a live demo of it in action... sweet!
I presented PanDoc which was a bit of a cop out as I've been implicitly advertising it all year in the Gnews... never the less, I'll be using it again later tonight :)
Adam Bolte our very own System Saviour showed us how to savour the special moments we have with our systems and do screen capture like a boss with Shutter... I never knew you could be so specific, you can just capture a specific menu!
Alex discussed his woes with text editors, and the elixir that is the Atom text editor (which was covered in Aprils Gnews, yay)
He also espoused the virtues of Docker Proxy and advised us that he's contributed to a fork that effectively performes a man-in-the-middle attack on your docker containers so that it can transparently proxy ssl connections... nice
Les gave us a small social hack the US government uses to get around copyright issues (but you'll have to listen yourself to find out that one). He also discussed using git to host configuration files for EMACS and other programs, then cloning his environment onto a new system... handy! I'm still looking for a link to Les's personal configuration, but I'll update everyone when I find it :p
I forget when in the proceedings exactly, but speaking of git, Tatiana also suggested using the GitHub Git Client if you ever have the dreaded experience of being stuck on a locked down Windows machine... It can install into userspace and brings all (well, not exactly "all") the command line goodies you've come to love on Linux.
Gabriel intrigued us all by mentioning (and thankfully spelling) FWKnop, which makes a computer look like all its ports are closed until a cryptographically encrypted packet is sent at which point the ports on the computer are opened only to that address... Super armor for your servers! ... Looks like it's not open source (yet), so I'll just post to a post a link to the man page :\
Our outgoing treasurer Scott discussed his theoretical dream application for his journey around Australia. An interactive map which will answer the question "so, where 'ev ya been?"... I'm assuming for those times when he's had a bit much to drink to answer the question himself :)
Finally our outgoing president Ben S. showed us a handy tool which always draws compliments, ScreenRuler. I'm sure we've all drawn tick marks along our monitors at some stage :p and now we can be spared doing so in the future. This handy ruler has metric/imperial like you'd expect, but also boasts percentage, px and picas... every web developers dream!
With that we headed down the street for what could be Melbournes best Laksa at a little place down Erol st. Can't wait to do it all again this month.
~~ Ben M.