- Surrey LUG Pub Meet 20th June 2013 - The White House, Guildford(Pub Meet)(1 day)
- Surrey LUG Summer Barbeque 13th July 2013(Bring-A-Box Meeting)(24 days)
- Bring-A-Box 10th August 2013(Bring-A-Box Meeting)(52 days)
Surrey LUG Planet
The following are the blogs added by our members. If you have a blog that would be of interest to other Surrey LUG members, please add it below.
On our little Ubuntu Podcast we like to interview people. We’ve interviewed over 100 people in the last 5½ years and are always looking for more people to talk to about the interesting stuff they’re doing. If you’re working on something that our ~6000 listeners might want to hear then please do get in touch via any of the methods listed on our podcast site.
We don’t limit ourselves to Ubuntu subject matter only. In the past we’ve interviewed people from ZorinOS, Crunchbang, Fedora, Centos and KDE. We also talk to people who aren’t necessarily part of the “Free Software Community” (whatever...
YouTube recently suggested this video to me, being several years old you may have seen it, but if you haven’t then I also recommend watching it. It is an interesting talk on the idea of a genius programmer, and will probably ring true for most programmers out there.
I found quite a few similarities in it with agile development techniques, and most of it applies to both open source projects and inside most commercial and corporate development teams. I really found a lot of the ideas and advice agreeing with agile ideas and generally sound like good ideas.
Having bought an inflatable Avon Redcrest dinghy on eBay, I found that the pump no longer had a clip holding the two halves together. I knew that the older models used to have a piece of leather attached to one half with holes that clipped over screws on the other half, but on this pump only the screws remained.
Newer pumps instead came with a plastic clip that attached to the pump hose and clamped the two halves together and I felt that it would be quite simple to replicate and so it proved. This was a simple design exercise and worked perfectly first time. I have since re-sold the dinghy and hope that the pump clip is still serving its new owner.
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Towards the end of last year we changed broadband to Virgin and it worked out the same price we were paying before to get TV included. This presented a small problem, as the new Virgin Tivo box didn’t fit in the cabinet under the TV as there was a media pc in a full-sized desktop case taking up too much room. I thought about what to do, and considered buying a smaller case (as the computer in it is pretty small), but actually decided that it would be interesting to build a case.
The requirements were pretty simple. It had to house a mini-ITX motherboard, two hard drives, with space to expand for four or six if I ever require it (though powering them may be another matter), and be reasonably accessible. I had decided that the computer didn’t need to be visible from...
Having migrated servers, my irssi tab-complete spell-check facility had broken; so I decided to document the process of getting it working.
Firstly install the required packages:
$ sudo apt-get install aspell-en libaspell-dev aspell libtext-aspell-perlSecondly, create your user’s script folder, if not already present:
$ mkdir -p ~/.irssi/scripts/autorunNow, download the aspell script:
$ cd ~/.irssi/scripts $ wget http://scripts.irssi.org/scripts/aspell_complete.pl $ cd autorun $ ln -s ../aspell_complete.plLastly, either restart IRSSI, or, in type:
/script load ~/.irssi/scripts/autorun/aspell_complete.plFinally got around to putting curtains up in our guest room and the curtain rings had been lost. They did eventually turn up, but these printed rings worked perfectly until we did. Yes they’re not pretty, but you really could not tell unless you got close.
My Westerly sailing boat has a rectangular-shaped shorepower socket and the faceplate was broken in half. Given its very exposed position in the cockpit, this is only to be expected, but purchasing a replacement proved very difficult. Fortunately the broken half had been kept by the previous owner, which enabled me to design an exact replica. And the beauty is that it will certainly be broken again, so I have printed a spare.
My mother-in-law’s curtains were pulled down by a Great Dane, breaking many of the curtain hooks. They seemed to be an unusual design and she asked if I might be able to print them on my RepRap.
This was very satisfying design, which did not take long, posed no particular challenges and printed very quickly. If only all jobs were like that.

