PLUG's Upcoming Events

Presenters for our Nov 12th meeting

Published: 10 November 2015

Jerry Snitselaar - i3wm: Look Ma, No Mouse:
A tour and demonstration of features for the i3wm tiling window manager.

Jerry Snitselaar is a Member of the Red Hat kernel hardware team. Previously a kernel
maintainer for Oracle Enterprise Linux, and a long time emacs user.

Paul Hahn - Opportunity Hack:
The Annual Opportunity Hackathon is currently in its fourth year worldwide, and in its first year in Arizona. It is also been hosted in Chennai India, San Jose California and Austin Texas.

The purpose of the Opportunity Hackathon is to bring technical members of a community together to solve specific problems facing local Non-Profit Organizations. Opportunity Hack Arizona was sponsored by PayPal, American Express, and Seedspot.

Paul Hahn has been working for PayPal's Site Reliability Engineering department in various capacities for the past 4 years. Paul has spent 15 years in software engineering and an additional 3 years in IT operations and support. In his non-existent spare time he enjoys Jeeping (4x4) and tinkering on stuff. Paul served on the Opportunity Hackathon committee and was also a volunteer at this years Opportunity Hackathon.

Anthony Kosednar will present:
The AZ Cyberwarfare Range (More info to come)

Topic for Oct 8th Space Night

Published: 28 September 2015

Space Night @ PLUG

PLUG is hosting a panel on Free Software, Open Standards and fun anecdotes for space and space travel. The panel will have people who have worked on projects for NASA and JPL.

Bio: Austin is the Science Operations Lead for the Mastcam-Z multispectral camera system on the upcoming Mars 2020 rover mission. He has developed and currently oversees similar operations on both operating Mars rovers, Curiosity and Opportunity. This role consists of interacting with the science team, supervising instrument operations, software development and systems administration. He currently manages about 50 mixed Ubuntu and CentOS machines and maintains a number of software projects, some of which are open source.

Bio: Darrin has been developing software since the 80's, currently for Limelight Networks, and previously in areas ranging from a NASA space mission to finance to 3D modelling. Darrin has been developing for Linux and/or BSD since the 90's, and exclusively since 2008.

This is our main meeting.  This meeting usually takes the form of 1 or usually more presentations.  We try to keep a good balance of novice and advanced subjects so that nobody will be overwhelmed or bored.  Just show up, and we hope you learn something.

We go for food afterwards to BJs at the nearby mall.

See you there...

Presentations for September 10th meeting

Published: 04 September 2015

We have two presentations for September: The fish shell and Git.

Topic: The fish shell
Speaker: I. Preston

Preston will give us an introduction to the fish shell (http://fishshell.com/), "a smart and user-riendly command line shell for OS X, Linux, and the rest of the family", why you’d want to use it over bash or zsh, and some tips and tricks to get the most out of it.

Preston is a software engineer at a Chandler start-up. He's a frequent presenter at http://desertpy.com, the founder of http://www.meetup.com/Language-Roulette, and a connoisseur of interesting and sometimes terrible programming languages.


Topic: Intro to Git
Speaker: Aaron Jones

This will be a basic introduction to Git discussing how to use Git to handle version control, what version control is, and why we should use version control. He will also explain how to use Git in combination with Github.com and demonstrate how we can share files or contribute to projects using Git.

Aaron is a web developer who enjoys using new technologies. He began using Linux while still a kid and is pro- VIM, GIT, CMUS, and NEWSBEUTER. His workflow is command line based and he hope's to help others learn more about computing, linux ,and the tools out there to make them more productive.

Topics for the Aug. 13th meeting

Published: 03 August 2015

We have two presentations for August: Software Defined Radios; Intro to Amazon Web Services.

Topic: Software Defined Radios
Speaker: Schuyler St. Leger

Description: Software Defined Radio (SDR) provides the perfect low-cost method to explore the world of RF (Radio Frequency.) SDR is a flexible radio system that utilizes software instead of specialized hardware to decode radio signals. It can investigate a wide frequency range and decode many different RF protocols. This talk will provide a basic understanding of SDR. It will then discuss some of the available and affordable hardware and software tools for exploring SDR. If time allows a live SDR demo will be included.

Bio: Schuyler St. Leger is a young maker. His passion for technology started at a very early age. His interests include 3D printing, electronics, hardware and software programming, software defined radio (SDR), robotics, computers, and tech innovations. Schuyler regularly speaks and teaches on these subjects. He dabbles in many software and hardware technologies including 3D CAD tools (Autodesk Inventor and 123D, SketchUp, and SolidWorks), LabVIEW, MATLAB, Python, Processing, Scratch, Linux, Arduino, and LEGO Mindstorms. He enjoys designing and making things as well as taking apart nearly everything to understand the details of how they work. He shows his projects at various maker events worldwide. Schuyler is a member a FIRST Robotics Competition team, Team Caution Robotics, and also a member of HeatSync Labs, Phoenix’s hackerspace.
His motto is “Don’t be afraid to break something!”
Schuyler lives in Phoenix, Arizona and is currently in high school at Brightmont Academy.

Topic: Amazon Wed Services (AWS)
Speaker: Tejeev "TJ" Patel

Description: An Introduction to Amazon Web Services (AWS)