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MUUG Monthly Meetings for 2025-26


Please note our brand new meeting location: Winnipeg Senior Citizens Radio Club, 598 St. Mary's Road, 2nd Floor

WSC is located at 598 St. Mary's Road, 2nd Floor, a block South from the St. Mary's / St. Anne's fork, on the West side beside the Miller's Meats. It's in the old fire hall, so you really can't miss it! Look for the red doors.

There is no elevator, so attendees will have to be able to climb a flight of stairs. Apologies to anyone requiring accessibility.

There are a limited number of parking spaces for WSC around the building. If you arrive early you'll probably snag one. If not, there is parking available on the nearby streets, such as Mager Dr, or the streets off of St. Mary's such as Blenheim or Clonard Ave. Be careful not to park in nearby private parking lots unless otherwise indicated.

MUUG meetings also take place online (typically using BigBlueButton) for those who can't be there in person. Meeting link will be provided on the home page, prior to meeting start time.

September 2, 2025: Kopia

Alberto Abrao presented and demoed Kopia, a "Fast and Secure Open-Source Backup Software" solution. Kopia provides GUI and CLI on multiple platforms (Windows, macOS, and - of course - Linux), to make encrypted, compressed and dedup'ed backups to the cloud storage of your choice.

October 7, 2025: RTFM: ncdu

Brad Vokey presented and demoed ncdu (NCurses Disk Usage), a powerful, interactive, and fast disk usage analyzer for Unix/Linux systems. It provides a text-based user interface (TUI) based on the ncurses library, offering a more user-friendly and visual way to explore disk space consumption compared to the traditional du command.

Brad's presentation covered the man page, various command-line options, including the very useful -e option (to load file meta-data such as file modification time), and various key commands within the TUI (such as "d" to delete selected files or directories).

November 4, 2025: RTFM: /bin Diving, Deutero-leanin'

We kept it simple and interactive this month: a double /bin dive. Trevor Cordes walked us through the fun. We started with a deep dive into mkisofs (and its fork, genisoimage), used to generate ISO-format file system images, which can be burned to CD's. A secondary lean-in to the /bin pulled out ngettext, which got us tangled into the weeds of locales and message databases for multi-language support. An online attendee also recommended the sponge command, which soaks up its input then squeezes it out to a file, similar to tee, but without standard output, and (most importantly), with a delayed write (allowing overwrites of a file read earlier in the pipeline).

For those new to the idea, /bin diving is a segment where we select a command at random on the spot and everyone gets to work out what it does and what it's good for. Collaboration and improv at its finest. It always ends up being interesting and you're guaranteed to learn something new!

And for those puzzled by the topic title, it's a paraphrased reference to a 1979 song by The Pretenders, which included the line "Bein' driving, Detroit-leanin'." (And "deutero" is a greek prefix meaning secondary, as in a secondary or repeat lean into the bin.)

AGM

Plus, this month's meeting was the MUUG annual general meeting, which included the election of the MUUG board of directors for the 2025-2026 year (by acclamation).

December 2, 2025: Round-Table, Show & Tell, and Pot Luck

As 2025 drew to a close, MUUG continued the now 14-year-old traditon of turning the December meeting into more of an informal, social event. Kevin Abedi had graciously arranged to let us use Skullspace, at 374 Donald St., as our venue again. We had our usual round-table session, as well as a few show-&-tell items presented.

January 6, 2026: Linux File System Encryption

With increased threats to information security, and increased demands for compliance with privacy laws, data encryption is becoming an important requirement. But deciding between available solutions can be complicated. Multiple options are of course available for Linux, but which one is best may depend on your use case.

In this presentation, Gilbert Detillieux will describe 3 different options: LUKS works at the raw disk/partition level, and may be best for removable media, laptops, and systems where full disk encryption is needed. At the file-system level, eCryptfs and Fscrypt allow for encryption on a file or directory basis, with support for multiple users and keys. Each solution has its limitations and advantages.

Please note the change in meeting date for this month, and for the rest of the current year. We are now meeting on the first Tuesday of each month.

Where to find the Meeting:

Winnipeg Senior Citizens Radio Club, 598 St. Mary's Road, 2nd Floor

WSC is located at 598 St. Mary's Road, 2nd Floor, a block South from the St. Mary's / St. Anne's fork, on the West side beside the Miller's Meats. It's in the old fire hall, so you really can't miss it! Look for the red doors.

There is no elevator, so attendees will have to be able to climb a flight of stairs. Apologies to anyone requiring accessibility.

There are a limited number of parking spaces for WSC around the building. If you arrive early you'll probably snag one. If not, there is parking available on the nearby streets, such as Mager Dr, or the streets off of St. Mary's such as Blenheim or Clonard Ave. Be careful not to park in nearby private parking lots unless otherwise indicated.

For those unable or preferring not to attend in person, the meeting will also be available online, using BBB as usual. Stay tuned to our muug.ca home page for the official URL, which will be made available about a half hour before the meeting starts. (Reload the page if you don't see the link, or if there are issues with connecting.)

For those having video performance issues, Alberto posted some useful tips on hardware acceleration settings to the roundtable mailing list.

Help promote this month's meeting, by putting this poster up on your workplace bulletin board, or linking to it on social media.

February 3, 2026: TBA

March 3, 2026: TBA

April 7, 2026: TBA

May 5, 2026: TBA

June 2, 2026: TBA

July 2026: MUUG 2026 BBQ

August 2026: No meeting this month

Please note our brand new meeting location: Winnipeg Senior Citizens Radio Club, 598 St. Mary's Road, 2nd Floor

WSC is located at 598 St. Mary's Road, 2nd Floor, a block South from the St. Mary's / St. Anne's fork, on the West side beside the Miller's Meats. It's in the old fire hall, so you really can't miss it! Look for the red doors.

There is no elevator, so attendees will have to be able to climb a flight of stairs. Apologies to anyone requiring accessibility.

There are a limited number of parking spaces for WSC around the building. If you arrive early you'll probably snag one. If not, there is parking available on the nearby streets, such as Mager Dr, or the streets off of St. Mary's such as Blenheim or Clonard Ave. Be careful not to park in nearby private parking lots unless otherwise indicated.

MUUG meetings also take place online (typically using BigBlueButton) for those who can't be there in person. Meeting link will be provided on the home page, prior to meeting start time.

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