[NBLUG/talk] September NBLUG recap

[Brad Morrison]

Hi all,

NBLUG had quite the unusual monthly meeting in September. First, the 
shopping center that houses both the Flagship Taproom and Spring Thai 
restaurants where we have been meeting at the outdoor tables had been 
without power for over a week. We heard that it was due to some 
electrical component failing/breaking during the heat wave the week 
before our meeting and the supply chain disruptions were blamed for the 
delay in availability of the part that needed to be replaced. Then as we 
are trying to figure out where to sit and eat, the 4.4 magnitude 
earthquake centered in Northeast Santa Rosa 
(https://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/news/magnitude-4-4-earthquake-rattles-north-bay/) 
hit at about the same time that all of our Wireless Emergency Alerts 
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Emergency_Alerts) went off. We 
eventually wandered over to Down to Earth Cafe 
(https://www.dtecafe.com/) and got back on topic.

Allan started us off with his interest in the security vulnerabilities 
of the Windows login process and something about memory swaps that I 
could barely follow. Thankfully, there were far more educated people 
than I there that were able to help Allan flesh out his ideas, issues, 
and questions, which will hopefully lead to a better DefCon talk 
(https://defcon.org/), when that time comes...

We covered various internet access options with the pros and cons of the 
various participants experiences with Sonic, Comcast, Starlink, and a 
little about mobile service providers too. I did not realize how far 
Starlink (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink) had come along in its 
service offerings and Allan had recently signed up for their service and 
was pleased compared to his previous provider, Comcast (I think?). Sonic 
continues to build out its fiber network in Santa Rosa and my house in 
the SRJC neighborhood got hooked up in August 
(https://www.sonic.com/availability).

I tried to bring up the topic of my variable width Thunderbird bug 
report (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1773184), but I was 
flabbergasted that I seemed to be the only one there that used 
Thunderbird. Derek uses Claws (https://www.claws-mail.org/), Tom talked 
about FastMail (https://www.fastmail.com/), and I can't remember what 
other email clients people mentioned. Both Derek and Tom agreed that K-9 
(https://k9mail.app/) is pretty clunky when I started complaining that 
some of my messages don't display correctly and asking why that was...

As far as an indoor meeting location, the people that we have contacted 
at Sonic have continued to be nonresponsive and at this point, it has 
been so many months and there have been so many attempts made, the 
feeling like there is a reason behind the lack of communication and not 
just them forgetting us seems more plausible. I suggested we ask DeepNet 
(https://deepnet.com/), a computer consulting business based in Santa 
Rosa, on Cleveland Ave just North of Coddingtown, because I had seen an 
article in the PD about them being a B-Corp and thought they might be 
interested in hosting us. We may also just end up at Round Table Pizza 
come winter.

Happy Tuesday!

Brad
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