[kwlug-announce] Meeting Monday: Digital Storytelling, PinePhone (Feb 2021)

[Paul Nijjar]

Welcome to everyone's favourite month. Thank goodness it is only 28
days long. Fortunately we have a couple of sunny presentations to
drive away the February Blahs. 

Reception House is a local refugee settlement agency. They wanted a
way for refugees to share their stories with the broader world, so
Christian Snyder came up with a video production workflow that would
be manageable for less-technical users. The workflow he ended up with
involved several open source tools. Why? How? Christian will spill all
his secrets on Monday.

The PinePhone (https://www.pine64.org/pinephone/) is a
recently-released open hardware phone that runs mainstream Linux. 
Apparently it is kind of a big deal? And selling like hotcakes?
Stephen Paul Weber has one, and this month he will tell us about the
phone and his impressions about it. (Stephen is no stranger to open
hardware: he bought a Novena laptop a few years ago too.)

In terms of other announcements: other than asking for other
presentations (the PinePhone one was a request!) here are two things
that are not directly about FLOSS, but are adjacent to things many
open source advocates care about.

Firstly, the Government of Canada is holding public consultations to
revamp the Privacy Act. They are taking submission papers, and have a
survey you can fill out. The public consultation ends on Feb 14. You
can participate here:
https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/csj-sjc/pa-lprp/opc-cpl.html

Secondly, our friends at Microsoft settled a class action lawsuit
about illegally increasing the prices of their operating systems and
office suites, back when they were a monopolist and not our friends.
If you purchased the office suite or the operating system (or bought a
computer with licences for those things bundled) between 1998 and 2010
then you are probably eligible to participate. For a backgrounder
read:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/canada-class-action-settlement-microsoft-1.5840305 
The class-action website is: https://www.thatsuitemoney.ca/en/home

That's all I have for this month. Our meeting will be held on the
BigBlueButton server generously donated by DataCity:

https://webconference.kwlug.org/room/kwlug

There will be no passcode, because I kept making typos and they did
not add enough security to be worth it. The meeting will start at 7pm,
as usual. 

- Paul
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Blog: http://pnijjar.freeshell.org