Hello Freedom Lovers, Earlier this month we had our "Free Software Show and Tell" session at FSM. As usual there was a bunch of really great software on show and just I wanted to put together a post wrapping up some of the highlights for "Best FOSS Software of 2016" First off the blocks we had L.D.A.P. http://www.openldap.org/ or the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol which had helped a business integrate new (or was it old) hardware into an existing infrastructure with a mixture of Windows and Linux software I mentioned that HtTrack https://www.httrack.com/ was my best hope for empowering government with a tool for web scraping on account of it having an Android client and the departmental restrictions on software is less strict for the time being Ben S. talked about Riot https://riot.im/ which is a team based communications platform built on Matrix https://matrix.org/. Apart from all the usual benefits of a team communications platform, Riot has the added benefit of allowing connections to an old school IRC chat but with all the added benefits of persistence we have come to expect with IRC bouncers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BNC_%28software%29 and modern web apps Ben S. also mentioned an often missed benefit of OwnCloud/NextCloud https://nextcloud.com/ which is the ability to use it as a data store for large email attachments. Just install the ThunderBird add-on https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/owncloud-for-filelink/ and the next time you try to email a large file Thunderbird/NextCloud will offer you the opportunity to upload the file to NextDrive and include a link in the message Michael showed us a website he's been passionately working on over the past weeks: Boycot Amazon https://boycottamazonaustralia.com/, take a look if you want to support local businesses and tell this conglomorate "Not here!". You could even support local growers http://www.ceresfairfood.org.au/ by buying local too Damien https://github.com/zamaudio?tab=repositories demoed a new tool he's been working on to create a very specific kind of binary image. He's been developing and utilising this tool to create binary images based on templates specifying which bits should be set. The software is still in development but Damien is planning on releasing it once it's up to snuff and will be of use to others Paul also noted that SQLAlchemy http://www.sqlalchemy.org/ had been of great use to himself and someone mentioned a friendly tutorial http://pythoncentral.io/introductory-tutorial-python-sqlalchemy/ that was available. I'll have to take the readme at it's word when it says that it's "suite of well known persistence patterns, designed for efficient and high-performing database access, adapted into a simple and Pythonic domain language". Which I think is the long way of saying "It makes databases behave like Python" and in Pauls case this translates to shareable and reproducible results in scientific research You can also check out the Gnews presentation http://freesoftware.org.au/static/media/uploads/gnews/gnews-2016-11-17.html to look closer at any of the issues we discussed at the meetup or SIGN the PETITIONS! Hope I haven't missed anyone out almost as much as I hope to see you all in a couple of weeks for our December Holiday Dinner