Emacs Conference 2020 Writeup

This years Emacs Conference [1] took place on the weekend of 28th and 29th November. This is the online conference aimed at users of the stalwart text editor which is described as “An extensible, customizable, free/libre text editor” [2]

Emacsconf this year had users from all different backgrounds, who use Emacs for a range of applications from basic text editing, writing documents in LaTeX, HTML or Markdown. Emacs is also popular with programmers and developers working on their latest project(s), but can also handle reading / writing email, chat, debugging software, and also has a built in calender and organiser to help you keep track of what you are doing. All this from a single interface.

Emacs is free software, and released under the GNU license, so has the usual 4 freedoms of use, study, share and modify. The more accurate name is therefore GNU / Emacs.

Talks this year were presented with Big Blue button [5] and live streamed with gstreamer [4] and other tools. This combination worked really well.

Talks were either longer with time for questions and answers or shorter lightning talks on quick subjects. Attendees could add their questions to a collaborative text pad, that everyone had access to. There was a big social presence using IRC (chat) [3] which was active during the conference.

Topics included development updates, a new users viewpoint, writing novels, Music and quite a few on Org Mode which is used for creating task lists and much more. Emacs, has a steep learning curve, but is very powerful and flexible to use. I am still learning the basics.

All talks are available to view here

1. https://emacsconf.org/
2. https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/
3. https://webchat.freenode.net/ #emacsconf
4. https://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/
5. https://bigbluebutton.org/

#conference,#emacs,#editor,#2020,#review,#writeup,#fsf, #freedom,#FreeSoftware,#irc,#BigBlueButton,#gnu, #FreeDesktop,#gstreamer,#live,#virtual,#freenode

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South Devon Tech Jam – January 2020 Write Up

South Devon Tech Jam – January 2020 Write Up

Today we had a busy jam, with a good few activities going on. I arrived about 9:30 am to start setting up.

Main work area, with Pi's, Minecraft server etc

Lots of stickers and other free stuff.

We now have a RetroPie set up, with games. Here I have a Pacman game ready to go.

Paul B spent most of the jam helping Lucy with refurbishing a BBC Micro computer. This seemed to go really well.

We also had a visit from Adam Shoreland from the Wikimedia foundation. Adam spent time explaining what he is doing Adam also explained to two of our younger attendees about Wikidata and how to edit this via the Wikidata website. Adam also explained how to use Wikidata:SPARQL query service

Related to this

• Creative Commons
• Creative Commons search
• Freenode IRC

We also had a visit from Gordon Henderson come along and demonstrate a mechanical calculator, as well as a few other people who were working on their own projects etc.

We also noted down some of the network port numbers so that I can ask if more ports can be either enabled or confirmed if they are connected. This will make it easier to connect to the wider internet if required.

In all a good event and looking forward to next month. The next jam will be on Saturday 8th February 2020

• South Devon Tech Jam Website

#South, #Devon, #TechJam, #January, #2020, #writeup

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