meetings

Next Meeting – Tuesday, November 11th, 2025, 6:30pm EDT.

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Keeping Your Android Secure and Snappy: Exploring GrapheneOS and LineageOS

Join Roller Angel for a practical dive into alternative Android operating systems that can breathe new life into your devices and extend their longevity. Roller runs GrapheneOS on a Pixel 8 for hardened privacy and security, and LineageOS on an older Pixel 4 to keep it current and fast long after official updates ended.

This talk will cover what these community-driven Android projects are, how they differ from stock Android, and what’s involved in installing and maintaining them. You’ll learn how to choose the right ROM for your device, what security and performance trade-offs to expect, and how to regain control over your phone’s software updates and privacy.

Whether you’re looking to make your phone run faster, stay supported longer, or simply explore the open-source Android ecosystem, this session will give you the tools and confidence to get started.

Also, we’ll be doing a short presentation on a Unix/Linux topic. This month we’ll be talking about the readline library. It’s not really a command but it’s included in many of the utilities you use.

Next Meeting – Tuesday, October 14th, 2025, 6:30pm EDT.

Mesh VPNs: What are they? What they are not. Commercial offerings and Open source options for running a mesh VPN. High level overview of how they work and why you might use them at home or work.

Join us as Joe Ryan and Justin Triplett tell us all about it.

Also, we’ll be doing a short presentation on a Unix/Linux topic. This month it’ll be the fg and bg job control commands

Next Meeting – Tuesday, August 12th, 2025, 6:30pm EDT.

Sharan gave an excellent talk at the August MUG meeting. Unfortunately we had a bit of a technical issue. He lost power near the end. He’ll come back at a later meeting and finish up the presentation and take questions then.

Here’s his Slide Show

And, here’s the Youtube Video

This month, Sharan Kalwani will be talking about his own direct experiences in High Performance Computing (used to be called Supercomputing in the days of yore).
We produce and consume an awful lot of data (have to keep them CPUs busy!). So over the decades many techniques and implantations grew – which later became the basis for several commercial/enterprise and also foundational tech for cloud based services.
He would like to share the history of high speed file systems and do a quick review of present day storage.

A seasoned scientific, technical and computing professional, Sharan has
spent over 30+ years’ experience in high performance computing,
engineering applications simulation, benchmarking, networking,
operations, technical support and project management.

He is a senior member of IEEE, ACM, SEMCO, ASEI. He has published a book
on the topic: “UNIX and TCP/IP network security”; and is now working on
his second text, about a new computer programming language. He also
serves as one of the writers/editors of the IEEE Southeastern Michigan
Sections monthly newsletter – Wavelengths. He has also served as Vice-
Chair of IEEE Sustech 2023, IEEE Sustech 2022, IEEE SusTech 2021 Global
Conferences and is on the organizing committee for Online Forum for
Climate Change Technologies 2023, 2024 and 2025.
He is the recipient of:
* 2018 IEEE MGA Achievement award and
* 2024 Engineering Society of Detroit (ESD) Anne O. Fletcher Award
for his various contributions towards technical activities.

On X he can be
found @skalwani or on his LinkedIn profile:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/sharankalwani

Also, we’ll be doing a short presentation on a Unix/Linux topic. This month it’ll be the netstat command used for viewing information about network connections, routing tables, interface statistics and more.

Next Meeting – Tuesday, July 8th, 2025, 6:30pm EDT.

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Wolf will explain and live-demo the most impressive and useful features and design of the Helix editor.
Helix is an open source, text/terminal-based modal editor (in the spirit of Vim) you might run locally
or over SSH. In some ways it’s bare-bones. In other ways it is very much “batteries included”.

Some (positive) differences from Vim:

• select first, then act on the selection (sort of like Vim’s VISUAL mode, and exactly how every other editor in the world works).


• Multiple selections.


• Configured with TOML instead of with VimScript.


• Configuration file size differences are drastic.


• LSP aware and tree-sitter built in make syntax-highlighting, language-based text-objects, inline diagnostics, and higher-level operations on language constructs available with no plugins.

Helix has been around for a while, has an active development community, and the whole thing is written in Rust.

Like Vim, Helix isn’t for everyone; but there are some very compelling features. It’s worth trying, and Wolf will show you why.

Wolf has been coding for decades in many languages, at many companies, and on many projects.
He’s an expert in Git, Vim, Python, software design, algorithms, and general coding best-practices.
Some places he’s worked: Netscape/Mozilla, LucasArts, Apple, Trolltech, and Macromedia.
Python is his favorite language, but Rust is catching up fast.
At Mozilla, he was the C++ language lawyer in residence for nearly a decade.
He currently works at Dynamic Map Platform North America building Qt apps in Python that leverage PostgreSQL, Open Street Maps, and their own proprietary map data.
He is a cohost (along with Jim McQuillan) of a wildly popular technology podcast called “Runtime Arguments”, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Also, we’ll be doing a short presentation on a Unix/Linux topic.This month it’ll be the ln command for creating hard and soft links.

Next Meeting – Tuesday, June 10th, 2025, 6:30pm EDT.

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Joe Ryan will demonstrate how to build a home lab for $100. He will present a variety of options, tools,
and software that utilize low-cost hardware or items you may already have on hand. Pros and cons for
each option and why you might want to choose each will be discussed.

Also, we’ll be doing a short presentation on a Unix/Linux topic.This month it’ll be the top and related commands.

Next Meeting – Tuesday, May 13th, 2025, 6:30pm EDT.

This month, Jim McQuillan will be talking about his recent experience in moving from a Data center environment to the Cloud.

Come along for the journey as Jim describes the process including Docker, haproxy, NodeJS, Postgres and many other services.

He’ll answer questions including:

• Right-sizing the computing environment
• Running a database in the cloud
• Handling multiple customers on a single VM
• Choosing a cloud provider
• Cost comparison between the datacenter and the cloud. Spoiler alert! It can actually cost less in the cloud

Also, as we’ve been doing the last several months, we’ll be doing a short presentation on a Unix/Linux topic. This month it’ll be the diff command.

Next Meeting – Tuesday, April 8th, 2025, 6:30pm EST.

Watch the meeting on Youtube

This month, Wolf and Justin are going to be talking about Git. Specifically 10 things you don’t know about Git.

Many of you are already using Git but we’re sure there are some hidden gems within Git that you either haven’t heard of or just don’t understand.

This will be a great time to boost your Git knowledge and get your Git questions answered.

Also, as we’ve been doing the last several months, we’ll be doing a short presentation on a Unix/Linux topic. This month it’ll be the kill command and Unix signals in general.

One more thing… We’ll be doing the elections for the board of directors. If you’d like to come join the board, just let us know by emailing board@mug.org

Next Meeting – Tuesday, March 11th, 2025, 6:30pm EST.

This month, we’re going to do something different and fun.

There’s a programming website called Advent of Code: https://adventofcode.com.

It’s an Advent calendar of 25 small programming puzzles for a variety of skill
sets and levels that can be solved in any programming language you like.

You can see the first puzzle at https://adventofcode.com/2024/day/1.

We’ve rustled up a few volunteers to show us how they solved it in the following languages:

• C++ – Wolf
• Lua – Wolf
• Pandas – Wolf
• Racket – Wolf
• Rust – Wolf
• Perl – Jim McQuillan
• vim9script – Jim McQuillan
• Awk – Jim McQuillan
• SQL – Jim McQuillan
• ZIG – Justin Triplett
• Python – James Peterson
• Swift – Dave Satwicz

We should be able to get through each language in 5-15 minutes. Hopefully that’ll
allow enough time to explain how the solution works.

We’ve created a Github repo so we can collaborate and share: MUG-2025-03-11-Advent-of-Code.

If you’d like to volunteer, clone the repo or join us at the meeting and show us how you’ve solved the puzzle using your favorite language.

Also, as we’ve been doing the last several months, we’ll be doing a short presentation on a Unix/Linux topic. This month it’ll be the cd command and directory navigation.

Virtualization with XCP-ng

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This month, Tom Lawrence will be giving a presentation on XCP-ng, the Opensource virtualization platform.

XCP-ng is a Linux distribution of the Xen Project, with pre-configured Xen Hypervisor and the Xen API project (XAPI) working out-of-the-box. The project was born in 2018, following the fork of Citrix XenServer (which became “Citrix Hypervisor” and now “XenServer” again).

Tom has given several talks for MUG in the past.

From his bio on his LinkedIn profile:

I create tutorials focused on network engineering, security, and IT, drawing from my real-world experience implementing solutions. My goal is to empower people through educational tutorials to configure things securely and effectively.

Technology pushes the boundaries of our vision as we reach toward the future. I love thinking about and discussing ways we can use technology to move us towards more than just a human story.

I’m a Detroit-born technology professional who started my journey with an Atari 2600, a Tandy TRS-80, and a desire to learn how things work. I launched Lawrence Systems in 2003, growing it into a globally-recognized IT consulting and content creation band.

I’m passionate about network engineering, security and Homelab projects, and share what I’ve learned via my YouTube channel and being a part of the IT community.

We’re also going to have a quick talk about Shell history and the fc command.

1-Wire

Need a way to monitor things like temperature, or read the status of switches?
Want to be able to turn things on and off? Then the 1-Wire interface may be
for you! In this presentation, we discuss how to make your computer interface
to the outside world… easily.

Scott Balneaves is a retired systems administrator who continues to tinker with
hardware and software.

We’re also going to have a quick talk about Redirection in the shell.