The Discussion:
The entire meeting consisted of a lively, informative, off-the-cuff discussion about what we are doing and programs we use.
We started talking about complete backup, recovery and rescue software. Borgbackup can be used with Relax and Recover for a compete solution. This makes recurring backups of all (selected) files and prunes them based on a chosen policy. These archives can be searched and various versions of a file can be compared. In addition, all archives can be encrypted which allows them to be safely copied to offsite storage. These features are available in cli and gui environments.
We then dove into the ease and elegance of using Time Machine with a gui setting. Although it doesn’t manage system recovery or safe offsite storage, it is very functional and easy to use.
Spin-offs then ensued, including upscayl which uses ai on a local host to sharpen, enlarge and refresh images. Unfortunately it doesn’t work with video files. And we digressed into various options for ai multimedia generation and improvement. We also talked about the newest version of ollama which supports the newest version of llama, llama3.2-vision. To create a completely private ai environment of completely opensource software, just install ollama, llama3.2 (and perhaps other LLMs), and open-webui.
From there we jumped into various games, including game engines and multiplayer games. Unfortunately I misplaced my notes about the details. Keith and Richard had some good suggestion about software they have used.
We took on a serious note about email messages warning about compromised accounts. Just because a message contains personal info as “proof” that an account was compromised does not prove that the message is not a scam. To be on the safe side, always verify the domain of the sender before reading anything within a suspicious message. Click bait can be dangerous!
As time drifted on, we stumbled upon a whiteboard and amused ourselves doodling with the gadgets.
When asked about a topic for next time, there was interest in using ai to improve images. Carl agreed to put on a little demo of to use upscayl and what kind of results to expect.