Present something you care about

HLB Talks

At our in person meetings, we ask one or two people to give a presentation. There’s no pressure to be the expert — just bring something you’re passionate about.

What a good talk feels like

These presentations are really about inspiring one another. There’s no pressure to be the expert on the subject, just passionate about it.

The list below comes from brainstorming on what we’ve noticed our members are interested in. Please speak up if you’d like to tell us what you know about these or any other topics.

You might even present something that many of us are already familiar with. You’ll almost certainly show us something the rest of us haven’t seen or thought about before.

Topic starters
  • Embedded environmental sensor networks
    • Multi-site sensors (temperature, humidity, soil, etc.)
    • Dashboards, alerts, phone notifications
    • Real-world IoT architecture
  • Energy monitoring and home power analytics
    • Smart meters, load tracking, optimisation
    • Revisiting popular homelab energy setups
  • Research showcase / member project updates
    • Community members presenting current technical work
  • Build a self-hosted Stratum 1 NTP server for under $50
    • GPS timing basics
    • Precision timekeeping demystified
  • Remote home access and secure networking
    • WireGuard
    • Tailscale
    • ZeroTier
    • Cloudflare ZTNA / WARP
  • Practical AI services for homelab users
    • Hosted AI APIs
    • OpenRouter / Cloudflare AI / similar tools
    • Privacy concerns with cloud AI
    • Local vs hosted AI workflows
  • VPS hosting in practice
    • Deploying public services
    • Security, backups, updates, DNS, SSL
    • Real-world operational lessons
  • Self-hosted photo management with AI
    • Immich and alternatives
    • Face recognition, search, backups, ownership of data
  • Secure drive disposal and easy security wins
    • Wiping disks before resale
    • Basic homelab security improvements
  • Advanced DNS for self-hosters
    • Technitium DNS
    • Beyond Pi-hole / AdGuard Home
    • Authoritative DNS, clustering, NAT64, IPv6 use cases
  • Linux on Apple hardware
    • MacBook Air with Sway / Firefox
    • Tuning Linux on ARM laptops
  • IPv6 practical guide
    • Real-world deployment
    • Homelab use cases
    • Reference material / best practices
  • Running your own mail and mailing list servers
    • Self-hosted email in 2026
    • Domains, deliverability, spam controls
    • IPv6 opportunities
  • Community meetup formats and growth ideas
    • In-person vs Jitsi
    • Venue rotation north/south
    • Increasing attendance
  • Guest speaker sessions
    • External presenters from other communities
    • Melbourne tech speakers
    • Meshtastic
    • Amateur radio groups
  • History and future of local Linux/user groups
    • HUMBUG past, present and future
  • Repair culture and hardware reuse
    • Repair Café
    • Community repair events
    • Sustainability through fixing hardware
  • Running your own Bitcoin node
    • Sovereign infrastructure
    • Technical operation of nodes
    • Bitcoin networking and protocol topics
  • Polling and community topic planning
    • How to choose future talks
    • Informal vs formal feedback systems