MoCoLUG October Meeting (and August Summary)

No, you didn’t miss September, nor the August recap: I did. All the rooms are booked on the available Saturdays in September, so we’ll do a slight shift by a couple of weeks to October 10. We’ll be back in the Brigadier General Charles E. McGee Library (ie, the Silver Spring Library), in Small Room 2, from noon to 2pm. It’s right next to the library entrance on the 3rd floor.

At our August meeting, the attendees were me (Mike), Hugh, Vivian, John, Chris, and Max. Vivian gave us a quick demo of Matrix, which looks very much like Discord (but FLOSS and federated). We spent most of the rest of the time trying to figure out what does and doesn’t work for speech-to-text and text-to-speech. The good news is, this gives us a project to work on. The bad news is, that’s because everything we were able to find is, to be kind, not great. Chris is going to look into Mozilla’s TTS, and possibly other text-to-speech options.

John was still waiting for his new System76 laptop, the specs of which made the rest of us jealous. If you’re in the market for something more mainstream, the Thinkpad X1 Yoga has good Linux compatibility and seems to be decent quality, and other Thinkpads seem to be similar.

For those looking for to de-Google their email, migadu.com was recommended (I think by Vivian). The basic plan is $19/year, and they don’t seem to be sticklers for the message and storage limits, as long as you’re not being unreasonable about your usage.