Rick Moen via luv-talk wrote:
Point 2: Hmm, one silver lining of the slow trend of rolling out online meetings (on Zoom, Jitsi Meet, or others) is that suddenly physicality is less important.
"Suddenly"? I mean, this was a thing during perestroika. http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/academic/communications/logs/report-ussr-gorbatch... AFAICT all that's happened is that neurotypical people -- who benefit from being able to see facial expressions and hear voice inflection -- were forced to try it, and realized it's not so bad. Although THEIR version needs something huge like 128Kbit/s and Expedited Forwarding DSCP :-) PS: obligatory caution that Zoom is not just sousveillance evil, they are also "my first TLS library" level bad at security. (serious mode) https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/04/security_and_pr_1.html (snark mode) https://www.jwz.org/blog/2020/06/zoom-wont-encrypt-calls-so-they-can-sell-yo...
Starting during staff planning and running through the event, I kept a browser tab open to https://www.worldtimebuddy.com/
FYI, this is the lofi Debian-specific world clock I've used since about 2014: alias u_sleeping_bro_p='zdump America/{Los_Angeles,Mexico_City,New_York,Sao_Paulo} Europe/{London,Berlin,Moscow} Asia/Calcutta PRC Japan Australia/{Perth,Melbourne}' $ u_sleeping_bro_p America/Los_Angeles Tue Aug 11 02:02:43 2020 PDT America/Mexico_City Tue Aug 11 04:02:43 2020 CDT America/New_York Tue Aug 11 05:02:43 2020 EDT America/Sao_Paulo Tue Aug 11 06:02:43 2020 -03 Europe/London Tue Aug 11 10:02:43 2020 BST Europe/Berlin Tue Aug 11 11:02:43 2020 CEST Europe/Moscow Tue Aug 11 12:02:43 2020 MSK Asia/Calcutta Tue Aug 11 14:32:43 2020 IST PRC Tue Aug 11 17:02:43 2020 CST Japan Tue Aug 11 18:02:43 2020 JST Australia/Perth Tue Aug 11 17:02:43 2020 AWST Australia/Melbourne Tue Aug 11 19:02:43 2020 AEST I could *just about* do this in my head, except that some polities still haven't repealed the Wartime Emergency Daylight Rationing introduced during the Great War. At least we no longer have to worry about Higgins Time: https://sources.debian.org/src/tzdata/2020a-1/asia/#L3349
The conclusion: How about other LUV people joining me in showing up at select virtual LUG events with little regard to distance or national borders? (I _am_ a longtime LUV person, even if I am Yet Another Bloody Yank.)
Personally I never bothered to go to the LUV meetings before, either :-) I mostly hang out with "emacs pople" or "debian people" or "zfs people", and I only keep LUV around for stuff that *is* geographically specific, e.g. "How do I put money on the EastLink e-tag bipper without executing non-free javascript?"
Point 3: Also, please consider looking into occasional and perhaps regular LUV meetings on Jitsi Meet (like: meet.jit.si/luv) or on Zoom. Then, you (or I) can add them to Michael Paoli's list, and (for better or worse) gain international attendees with peculiar accents.
FWIW I've been using https://meet.ji.si/$(xkcdpass) a few times for customers who won't just let me have SSH access, because their suggestions (Zoom and MS Teams) were Too Hard. It was too heavyweight for 10-year-old chromebook, but apart from that, it Worked Fine. I haven't audited its security model yet, or stood up my own trusted server. Allegedly the latter is straightforward (as in apt-get from Debian's QA'd repos, not as in https://curlpipesh.tumblr.com/).