Meeting notes Jan 2008

About 6-8 people showed up for the meeting.

Bob G. brought in a laptop that he purchased from the one laptop from child project.

Dave had a problem with a weird application called Gnopernicus or something similar was starting on bootup of his kde desktop.
He said he tried Gnome desktop once and this application began started when he went back to KDE. We made two suggestions, try uninstalling the application or looking at the .xinitrc or .bashrc. The application maybe getting called in one of the environment’s startup files.

There was some talk about favorite plugins. Many mentioned the no-script, which I started using. It seems to prevent scripts from popping up ad’s and marketing data mining bots. So, now stumble upon, del, and no script are my three favorite plugins.

Bob G. mentioned a XML alternative. The alternative he explained called yaml and can be used with Ruby, Python and Perl. It supposedly, is a lot simpler to work with then XML.

There was some talk about X10 device and home automation. Dave D. said he recently purchased a instantion kit that is the new X10 standard. http://www.smarthome.com/2411r.html the new X10 stuff does acknowledgments and is backwards compatible.

The new Harmony Universal remote was talked about. It is a universal remote that works with over 7000 devices including the Tivo and remote controllable lights and blinds. The remote is currently the best universal remote and costs about $249.99 according to Logitec’s website.

I asked about cheap flat screen TV’s. Dave D. said Samsung has 40″ 1080p screens between 1000-$1500. He said the newest lastest technology out is called motion enhancer. This makes movies and tv shows appear supper crisp but almost out of this world compared to the normal format. Someone said with many non-action films it looks as if you can step into the TV.