[SGVLUG] Meeting recap (Was Re: Reminder: SGVLUG Meeting this Thursday -- Amateur High Altitude Ballooning

[Lan Dang]

Hi all,

tl;dr Turnout.  Announcements.  Great talk + the promised HAB-related links.  Video recording setup. Upcoming meetings.


TURNOUT
=======
Thanks for all the RSVPs on Meetup.  We had a pretty good turnout.  It's a good thing we now start the presentations at 8pm, because I knew that some of the people came from far away through horrible traffic to make it to this talk.  For those of you who weren't able to make it, we did record the talk.



ANNOUNCEMENTS
=============

Repair Cafe is this Saturday from 12-3pm at All Saints Church (132 N. Euclid Ave., Pasadena, CA).  Come volunteer to repair stuff or have stuff repaired.  You can also bring or take things from the Really Really Free Market.  I heard that there will be free coffee, so I may be inspired enough to bake something sweet or savory to add to the spread.

http://www.meetup.com/SGVTech/events/216620622/



SCALE is 4 days next year.  It will be Feb 19-22 at the LAX Hilton.  

http://socallinuxexpo.org

The SCALE A/V team is ramping up with preparations and planning.  Please contact me or Michael Starch if you want to be involved in the current prep work or if you want to volunteer at SCALE.  We'll probably post more info to the list when we get more organized.


Steven Doran has expressed interest in running an SGVLUG/SGVHAK booth at SCALE.  The booth is only for the weekend.  Please contact me or Michael Starch if you want to be involved.   It's early enough that we could probably come up with some cool ideas for what to present at the booth, but more than that, we need people to man the booth.  Otherwise, someone is going to end up chained to the booth the whole weekend.  Dave has mentioned working on a Nerf gun turret using computer vision to aim the gun.  And the HAK group may actually finish our air hockey table by the end of the year.  *crosses fingers*



AMATEUR HIGH ALTITUDE BALLOONING TALK
=====================================

Arko gave a really great talk on Amateur High Altitude Ballooning, why you would get started, the problems you might run into, and the great power of collaboration.  He had some really fun stories, as well, of launching balloons, recovering balloons and setting up a simulation of near-space.  It makes you appreciate good engineering and doing things just because you think it's cool.  He brought a recovered balloon and some of the boards he'd made as payloads.  He had plenty of cool photos and graphs and links.

You can find some photos on Meetup:
http://www.meetup.com/SGVTech/photos/25737475/

Here are Arko's promised links:
http://www.meetup.com/SGVTech/events/215497372/


Thanks to Arko for the wonderful presentation and to Braddock for organizing the talk.  Thanks to Michael S. and James for setting up the cameras and the tables.  This was one of our better video recording setups, though the proof will be in the final video.  Availability TBD.  Ask me next week if you want the raw video; both cameras record in AVHCD.



VIDEO RECORDING SETUP
=====================
This is really a note for future reference since I think it worked pretty well.

By moving the tables in front of the screen around, we were able to make room for Arko to the left of the screen.  There was a round table directly in front of the screen where he could put his laptop and his boards and balloons. We had a long enough HDMI cable that he didn't have to be right next to the projector.  We set up Arko with a wireless lavalier microphone; the receiver was hooked up to the camcorder.

The projector was put on one of those white cubes that Burger Continental uses to elevate some of their dishes at buffets.  We had to make a shim for the projector as the picture always looks crooked on the screen; this was done with the use of a folded cloth napkin.

The camcorder was on a tripod in the aisle and aimed on Arko.  We had a small Sony point-and-shoot on a gorilla tripod (thanks Braddock!) next to the projector; this was supposed to capture the screen and extra audio.  The trouble with this type of camera is that it seems to automatically shut off video recording after half an hour or so.  Michael and James monitored the cameras the whole time so they were able to keep things running.   We ran out of battery power towards the end of the Q&A period, which was perhaps a good thing.  I don't believe anything incriminating was recorded ;)


UPCOMING MEETINGS
===============
I believe that the December meeting be Simone Bernacchia talking about AROS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AROS_Research_Operating_System).  In January, we will have Albert Wong from Red Hat talk about Red Hat and OpenShift.  If you have a talk you want to give or a speaker you can recruit, please let us know.


Lan