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<p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">Hi all, <br>
</font></p>
<p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">I spent the
majority of my time at the August NBLUG meeting this week
focused on 2 topics, both led by Kyle, whom I met for the first
time:</font></p>
<p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">1. Purism (<a
moz-do-not-send="true" href="https://puri.sm/"
class="moz-txt-link-freetext">https://puri.sm/</a>) is the
company the Kyle works for and they are an open source software
and hardware company that focuses on making products for
security and privacy oriented customers. The lengths that Kyle
described that Purism goes to both to seek out security and
privacy options that do not exist anywhere else as well as to
support the existing open source technology community were
pretty impressive to me. If you, or anyone you know, is an
investigative journalist doing politically or economically
threatening work, I would highly suggest checking out Purism's
products. Another niche that Kyle mentioned was significant
among Purism's customer base is the exes of people that have
significant technology skills and have experienced forms of
digital domestic stalking and harassment or are concerned about
the possibility of it. I do remember Edward Snowden describing
the common practice of 'loveint' that took place at the NSA.
With the Supreme Court's recent Dobbs ruling on abortion, there
could be more opportunities for privacy and security technology
concerns to become more relevant for many American women living
in states where abortion is now illegal and their travel could
be tracked. While I'm sure the legal situation will continue to
evolve, I was surprised when I recently read about a pregnant
woman in Texas appealing her carpool lane violation ticket by
saying that there were 2 people in her vehicle (<a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jul/09/texas-woman-ticket-abortion-roe-v-wade"
class="moz-txt-link-freetext">https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jul/09/texas-woman-ticket-abortion-roe-v-wade</a>).
Maybe parents who are expecting a child will be eligible for the
federal Child Tax Credit soon too...?<br>
</font></p>
<p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">There are
other companies in the open source hardware space, including
System 76 (<a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://system76.com/" class="moz-txt-link-freetext">https://system76.com/</a>),
Fairphone (<a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://www.fairphone.com/en/"
class="moz-txt-link-freetext">https://www.fairphone.com/en/</a>),
Turris routers and network devices (<a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://www.turris.com/en/"
class="moz-txt-link-freetext">https://www.turris.com/en/</a>),
and several others. I have thought about upgrading my laptop
recently as it seems to be working harder than it used to. I
bought my Dell E7440 laptop (<a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://www.dell.com/support/home/en-us/product-support/product/latitude-e7440-ultrabook/overview"
class="moz-txt-link-freetext">https://www.dell.com/support/home/en-us/product-support/product/latitude-e7440-ultrabook/overview</a>)
used on eBay in 2015 for about $460 and it has served me pretty
well ever since. I dual booted Linux Mint and Windows 7 for the
first year or so and then switched exclusively to Linux Mint. I
assume that a new laptop would bring increased battery life,
better performance, better energy efficiency, etc. but I don't
use my personal computer for anything too intense or strenuous,
so it works well enough for me, hasn't broken, and it is pretty
cheap to run. As far as my phone, I bought the OnePlus 6T I own
in December 2018 for about $600 from the T-Mobile store in Santa
Rosa. In May 2022, I installed LineageOS and no longer have the
Google Play Store (although I have not deleted my Google account
yet). Unfortunately, the modest social work that I do doesn't
seem to have drawn enough attention from threatened corporate or
government interests, so Purism's products seem a like a bit of
security and privacy overkill for my situation. Still, when I do
buy new technology products, I will definitely consider Purism's
options. Purism struck me as the Sonic of hardware. Thanks Kyle
for your work!<br>
</font></p>
<p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">As far as
service, I split my household's Sonic fiber bill with my 3
roommates and I pay $15 a month to T-Mobile for unlimited talk
and text + 2 GB of data monthly. I'm pretty minimalist when it
comes to usage. I share this as I have not met most of the
approximately 236 people on the NBLUG talk list, so there may be
plenty of other people in various technology hardware situations
that I am not in. <br>
</font></p>
<p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">2. Mechanical
and electro-mechanical adding machines: the precursors to modern
calculators and computers. Kyle has been collecting such devices
for about 3 years now and like many collectors was very
interested to share his knowledge and passion on the subject.
There was a pretty lively discussion with lots of memories
shared among the 7 people that showed up on Tuesday night. I was
born in 1984, so I just tried to soak it up and ask questions. <br>
</font></p>
<p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">Hopefully
everyone had a good month and that all the Santa Rosa NBLUG
residents were not too disrupted by the major Comcast outage
this week - <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/news/service-outages-reported-by-xfinity-verizon-customers-in-santa-rosa/"
class="moz-txt-link-freetext">https://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/news/service-outages-reported-by-xfinity-verizon-customers-in-santa-rosa/</a>
There were several (6-8) posts on NextDoor Santa Rosa about the
Comcast/Xfinity outage and I saw the mayor of Santa Rosa post
about it on FaceBook (<a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://www.facebook.com/ChrisRogersCA/posts/pfbid02RRT898Qpmn7EQcnifW3K6GFewYmcYbehaJ386KekLdNYA4ovEn4aWdcnMSDKgmWQl"
class="moz-txt-link-freetext">https://www.facebook.com/ChrisRogersCA/posts/pfbid02RRT898Qpmn7EQcnifW3K6GFewYmcYbehaJ386KekLdNYA4ovEn4aWdcnMSDKgmWQl</a>).
Although I didn't realize it at the time, I was somewhat glad
for the conversation we had at the July NBLUG meeting on
Comcast's service as I was surprised that several NBLUG people
used Comcast for reasons I had not thought of (Comcast offers a
fixed IP address option, while Sonic does not). <br>
</font></p>
<p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">Congratulations
to Matt on the new job, I hope it goes well! Thanks to Derek for
helping me a bit with my LineageOS questions. <br>
</font></p>
<p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">Over and out,
<br>
</font></p>
<p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">Brad<br>
</font></p>
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