[SGVLUG] Meeting Recap: Thu 5/8

[Lan Dang]

Hi all,

tl;dr More chaotic than usual, but still fun. Ended up in BC front room, which has its perks.  Maybe we should think of meeting there again.  Lots of new people.  Cool projects shared.  Reminder that SGVLUG/SGVHAK BBQ is Saturday, May 17th.  There will be more emails and a post to the SGVLUG website.

Today, I observed a functional anarchy at work.  We had no speakers, so it was open mic night.  We found out that our usual room had been booked, due to a mixup regarding dates.   And we had technical difficulties with the display.  But it all worked out pretty well in the end.

The mixup regarding dates had to do with May 8th not looking like the 2nd Thursday of the month.  I admit that I ran "cal 05 2014"  and counted Thursdays to be sure.   Thank goodness for recurring events that understand "2nd Thursday".


We had exclusive use of the front room, where we used to meet for dinner.  It's a lot more spacious than I remembered, and we were able to spread out.  I saw new faces, some of who had come from Meetup, and then there was the Caltech student who had just come to Burger Continental seeking dinner and found us instead.  We got another influx of young people, so I'm guessing we generated a little word-of-mouth by being in the front room of Burger Continental.

Since we couldn't use a projector, we tried to use the big TV on the wall.  We borrowed John S.'s VGA cable, but could not connect.  We had similar difficulties last month, so I think there is either something wrong with the cable, or it hates our computers.  Anyway, we decided not to worry about it, and just had dinner and chatted.  It was quite fun.  I went over to talk to the new
 people.

Around 8pm, we had mostly finished dinner, so we tried to get the TV working yet again.  Rami had a portable HDMI cable, which was really too short to reach down to the table.  We had to get something fairly large to prop up a laptop high enough to use the HDMI cable.  Rami used his backpack.  We got a busboy tray for James, and still had to stack another laptop and book.

Scoops didn't need a display to show off his project, which was the solar rig he built to power Repair Cafe at the Pasadena Earth and Arts Festival at Memorial Park.  We learned a little more about the parts and how they connected together, and a bit about the costs involved.  Scoops had done quite a bit of research, including coming to the LUG meetings where Unleash Kids talked about setting up solar power to charge the OneLaptopPerChild laptops in a remote school in Haiti.

Rami came with a slick presentation on his library e-audiobook to podcast workflow.   It turns out that OverDrive, a company that handles ebook and e-audiobook lending for many library systems, has gone to
 DRM-free mp3 and EPUB format.   Rami shows how to connect to them on a Linux system and his small program and script to package the audiobook mp3 files as a podcast, so he can easily access them from his mobile devices using a podcast app.   It was pretty neat.  I am not a big fan of audio books, but I do own a small collection (on CD, no less)  by authors who have really good readers.  I think this might be a good way to digitize my audiobook library and get it on various devices.

James presented his vision system/simulator for the SGVHAK air hockey robot project.  He showed off the air hockey simulation program, which is written in Python and uses the PyMunk 2D physics library.  He also showed OpenCV using both a PS3 Eye camera where the processing was done on the computer, and the Pixy camera, where the processing was done on the camera.  

We broke up the meeting a little after 9pm, after telling the new people where to find our websites and the Meetup group and upcoming meetings.  I reminded everyone about the SGVHAK/SGVLUG BBQ coming up on May 17th.   I'll post more info by tomorrow night along with the Google form to RSVP.

Final thoughts: The staff at Burger Continental continues to be very accommodating of us, even when we are messing around with their television.  I liked the Burger Continental front room because we actually got walk-in traffic to a LUG meeting---just someone who had stopped by for other reasons and decided to stay for the meeting.  It feels a bit more roomy, and I think it brought everyone closer to the presenter.  Having the tv mounted on the wall made it easier for everyone to see.   It might not be the best room when it starts getting hot, since there is no A/C.

Depending on what happens in June, we should just let Cheryl know which room to setup.


Lan
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