From paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca Sat Jan 5 00:41:47 2013 From: paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca (Paul Nijjar) Date: Sat, 5 Jan 2013 00:41:47 -0500 Subject: [kwlug-announce] Meeting Monday: SelSourced Software, Raspberry Pi Message-ID: <20130105054147.GD31152@pirg.uwaterloo.ca> Oh January! You promise a fresh start, a clean slate, an opportunity to reflect on the mistakes of years past and make some new ones. Here in the plush offices of KWLUG World Headquarters, we are not immune to January's call. Our focus groups and market research have revealed a problem newer and less experienced meeting attendees run into: people attend one or two meetings, find that the technical content of presentations are way above their heads, and feel intimidated about attending future meetings. Appealing to newer and less experienced Linux users is definitely part of KWLUG's corporate vision, so beginning this year we are attempting to offer a wider variety of presentations, and to clearly label those presentations we expect will be more beginner-friendly (which is not to say they will be expert-unfriendly, or that highly-technical topics are disappearing from the meeting schedule entirely). This month marks our first attempt at this experiment. David Lloyd Carr will kick things off by talking about "SelfSourced software" -- computer programs you write to "scratch your own itch". The idea of a beginner-friendly presentation on the topic of computer program might sound pretty crazy, but David promises to keep the content accessible to a general audience. Our second presentation of the evening will feature a topic super-hot amongs the makers and nerd set: the Raspberry Pi, a low-cost, tiny, general purpose computer on a circuit board. John Eddie Kerr bought one of these devices recently, and he will relate his adventures in exploring its functionality. Any discussion of the Raspberry Pi carries the risk of launching itself into the ubertechnical stratosphere, but maybe it helps that John is a librarian and not an engineer? As usual, our meetings will start at 7pm (but we start setting up the room around 6:30pm, and always appreciate additional help.) We are always looking for presentation offers, so if you have a topic you would like to present then please get in touch by emailing me offlist. It would definitely be nice to slot in some more beginner-friendly presentations, but presentations on more technical topics are also welcome. Our meeting will be held at the usual place: St John's Kitchen 97 Victoria Street North (at the corner of Weber and Victoria) Kitchener There are maps and photos of the site at http://kwlug.org . You can park your car in the Worth a Second Look parking lot, or -- if your New Year's Resolution is to jeopardize your life on icy January roads -- chain your bicycle along the side of the building. - Paul -- "Robocalls: The Story So Far" - Wed Jan 16, 7pm, Duke of Wellington Pub, 33 Erb St W, Waterloo, http://www.fairvote.ca/en/WaterlooRegion From paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca Sat Feb 2 00:26:07 2013 From: paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca (Paul Nijjar) Date: Sat, 2 Feb 2013 00:26:07 -0500 Subject: [kwlug-announce] Meeting Monday: A grassRoots History of Hi-Tech in Kitchener Waterloo Message-ID: <20130202052607.GS3494@pirg.uwaterloo.ca> For years the rest of Canada has predicted the demise of Research and Motion, and has speculated on what life would be like without RIM propping up our economy. Would Kitchener-Waterloo become a ghost town, populated by tumbleweeds, decaying storefronts, and a modicum of human inhabitants bearing shotguns as they rock rocking chairs on their front porches? (You may unleash your snarky downtown Kitchener jokes now.) Or would our little towns scrape by without the company? With the launch of Blackberry 10, Research In Motion is no more, and we all get to see what life is like in a post-RIM Waterloo Region. (Is it too much to hope for fewer crude jokes about the nature of employment at the company?) Certainly, RIM's conclusion does not really match the defeatist predictions; the company was renamed, not dissolved. But people still conjure up all kinds of dystopias about a post-Blackberry world. Are these fears founded? Is Waterloo Region a one-trick pony? Kevin Stumpf does not think so. According to him, Waterloo Region has been a thriving high-tech region since the 1920s. In this month's KWLUG meeting, he will present "A grassRoots history of the early hi-tech community in KW". The presentation documents many high-tech companies in the region which have come and gone, and attempts to answer the question of why high-tech companies flourish in the region. Although this presentation is not particularly Linux-centric (we poached Kevin as a guest speaker after he presented at the KW Amateur Radio Club meeting last September), it is timely and beginner-friendly. On the topic of change, the makers at Kwartzlab also went through a transition while nobody was looking: they moved from their old Duke Street location to a new home at 33 Kent Street. On Feb 16, they will be holding a grand opening party so you can check out their new digs: http://www.kwartzlab.ca/2013/01/grand-opening-open-house-and-party/ For those of you with a hankering to learn programming, the friendly people at WatPy are holding a "Learn to Code With Python" weekend at the Communitech Hub. The event will be happening Feb 22 and 23rd. You can register and read more on the WatPy website: http://watpy.ca/learn/2013/feb/learn-to-code/ And that's all she wrote. The meeting will be held at our usual location: St John's Kitchen 97 Victoria Street N (at the corner of Victoria and Weber) Kitchener You can park your Bennett Buggies in the Worth a Second Look parking lot, or practice a little insane *ex industria prosperitas* by cycling to the February meeting and parking your safety bicycle along the side of the building. - Paul -- http://pnijjar.freeshell.org From paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca Sat Mar 2 22:03:01 2013 From: paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca (Paul Nijjar) Date: Sat, 2 Mar 2013 22:03:01 -0500 Subject: [kwlug-announce] Meeting Monday: Porting bootloaders, Linux for the In-Laws Message-ID: <20130303030301.GR21442@pirg.uwaterloo.ca> For nearly fifteen years now we have been hearing all about how this year was going to be the year of the Linux Desktop: how Linux was going to be so ubiquitous and user-friendly that even your parents would be able to use it. Whether we are there yet or not, Gordon Dey has not waited for the Linux Desktop to become trendy. He has set up both his in-laws and his church on wholly Linux environments, and in his presentation he will share the challenges and successes of his endeavours. This presentation will likely be beginner-friendly. Regardless of the Linux Desktop, the year of the Linux Embedded Computer has been with us for a while now. Two months ago we heard a successful presentation about the Raspberry Pi, but that is hardly the end of the story. This month Fadil Berisha will discuss a different embedded system: the iMX233-OLinuXino. In particular, Fadil has ported the Barebox bootloader to this system, and he will discuss this porting experience, with aim of tutoring others in porting bootloaders to other boards. This presentation will likely be less beginner-friendly, but may be of great interest to those fans of system-board computing. In other events, Albert O'Connor is organizing an Ontario-wide Open Data conference on Saturday, May 11. They are accepting speakers until March 4, so if you have a talk of interest to the open data community, submit it soon. You can also register for the conference: early bird registration is $25. See http://go-opendata.ca/ for more information. We are once again on the lookout for presentations. If you have a topic that might be of interest to Linux and free software enthusiasts, please send me an email. We have spots available as early as the May presentation. (And if you have previously offered a presentation that I spaced out on, please prod me.) Speaking of prodding, here is our meeting location: St John's Kitchen 97 Victoria Street North (at the corner of Victoria and Weber) Kitchener There are maps and photos of the location on our website, http://kwlug.org . There is car parking available in the Worth A Second Look parking lot. -- http://pnijjar.freeshell.org From paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca Sat Apr 6 02:47:55 2013 From: paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca (Paul Nijjar) Date: Sat, 6 Apr 2013 02:47:55 -0400 Subject: [kwlug-announce] Meeting Monday: LDAP Message-ID: <20130406064755.GA26941@pirg.uwaterloo.ca> Have you seen the light? I hope so. Spring is finally here, which means that sometimes you can see sunshine at 4pm. Many people's moods have lightened after a long dark winter. So maybe it is appropriate that April's KWLUG presentation will feature a light-hearted take on a lightweight subject: the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol, or LDAP. LDAP provides mechanisms for querying and managing directory informations, often about user and network information. Rumour has it that LDAP is lightweight in the same way that SNMP is simple, but Tim Laurence will happily shed light on the topic. In his presentation, he will cover basic concepts, how to set up and use a simple LDAP server to store addresses and user accounts, and how to create highly available LDAP clusters. As you might have guessed, this topic is likely not to be beginner-friendly except to those beginners enthusiastic about LDAP clusters. But it is likely to be a good presentation; in the past Tim has graced us with presentations that have been very well-received. In other news, longtime KWLUG member John Eddie Kerr contributed a Linux tutorial as part of the "How-to Videos for 100 Linux Tutorials" campaign, and he got a nice write up for doing so: http://www.linux.com/news/featured-blogs/200-libby-clark/712255-law-librarian-creates-how-to-videos-for-100-linux-tutorials-campaign In other events, the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) is offering a couple of talks relevant to techies this month. On April 16, Steve Crocker from ICANN will be talking about "the Multi-Stakeholder Model of Internet Governance", and on Wednesday April 17 there will be a breakfast event on "Privacy, Access and Corporate Control: The Battle for Canada's Internet" featuring Glenn McKnight and Evan Leibovitch, whom some people might recognize as one of the founders of CLUE, the Canadian Association for Open Source. You can find out more about these events at the following sites: http://www.cigionline.org/events/when-less-more-past-and-future-of-multi-stakeholder-model-of-internet-governance http://www.cigionline.org/events/cigi-and-communitech-breakfast-privacy-access-and-corporate-control-battle-canada%E2%80%99s-internet In other user groups, Andrew Cant would like you all to know that there is a (relatively) new Ruby on Rails meetup in town: http://www.meetup.com/kw-ruby-on-rails/ . Their next meetup is Tuesday, April 16. Another group of interest might be the folks at Hackademy, who are attempting to help communities become digitally literate and fluent in programming. They care currently looking for people to help them teach courses, and it looks like all of their recommended subjects feature FLOSS software or hardware. If you are interested in becoming an instructor or a student, they have surveys for you to fill out at http://hackademy.ca That's all I got, except for the wheres and whens. We will meet at the usual location: St John's Kitchen 97 Victoria Street North (at the corner of Victoria and Weber) Kitchener There are maps and photos of the location at http://kwlug.org/locations . There is some car parking in the Worth A Second Look parking lot, and lots of bicycle parking along the side of the building. The meeting begins at 7pm, and doors open at 6:30pm or so. Volunteers to help set up the meeting space are always welcome. - Paul -- http://pnijjar.freeshell.org From paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca Fri May 3 19:24:33 2013 From: paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca (Paul Nijjar) Date: Fri, 3 May 2013 19:24:33 -0400 Subject: [kwlug-announce] Meeting Monday: Ripping CDs (and bonus Wheezy Party?) Message-ID: <20130503232433.GX1318@pirg.uwaterloo.ca> I tried ripping a CD once. Everybody was talking about ripping their CD collections, and I wanted to be trendy. It did not turn out well. The resulting CD fragments wouldn't lie flat in the tray of my CD player any more, and the music sounded terrible -- much worse than before I had tried ripping it. Worse, I couldn't undo the damage. Not even duct tape helped. I resigned myself to being uncool, and dismissed ripping CDs as yet another trend I would never understand, like distressed jeans or body scarification. Apparently I am in the minority. People continue to rip their CD collections, and supposedly some people have moved on to ripping DVDs and other media. They claim that this has many advantages: better searching, easy playlists, the ability to play audio from many different devices, and reduced shelfspace. I remain dubious, but if anybody can convince me it would be this month's presenters. Richard Weait and Colin K (aka Mysterious Colin) will demonstrate some techniques they use to rip their audio. Richard has cobbled together old hardware into a monstrosity that can rip through CD collections quickly and efficiently. He will demonstrate the hardware and software he put together for this task. (Incidentally, if you have never seen Richard present you really want to do so. Over the years KWLUG has been blessed with many excellent presenters, and Richard is definitely one of them.) None of that should detract from the second presentation in our double feature. Colin has demonstrated his audio-visual chops by recording and livestreaming KWLUG presentations for us. (See, for example, http://www.twitch.tv/chamunks/videos .) He is interested in lossless, high-fidelity ripping, and to accomplish this he uses a piece of software called Morituri, which you can read about at http://freecode.com/projects/morituri . In other news, the nice people at the Debian project will be releasing the latest version of their distribution (codenamed "Wheezy", which is not intended to be a comment on the distribution's cardiovascular health) on May 5. The kwlug-disc mailing list has been abuzz with chatter about holding some kind of release party after the main meeting. Details are still a little sketchy, but if you are in a celebratory mood feel free to show up with party hats and/or goodies to share. KWLUG member Chris Irwin recently got a new toy: a colour-calibration device called ColorHUG (http://hughski.com/). This device does not give you a hug, but rather engages in some color profiling, and generates an ICC profile for your monitor. In the spirit of conspicuous consumption, Chris is bringing his new toy to the KWLUG meeting, and is offering to profile people's monitors on a first come, first served basis. The meeting will be held at the usual location: St John's Kitchen 97 Victoria Street North (at the corner of Victoria and Weber) Kitchener There are maps and photos of the location on our website: http://kwlug.org/node/709 . If you have a motor vehicle you can park it in the Worth A Second Look parking lot. If you have a bike or a pogo stick you can chain it to the side of the building. The meeting starts at 7pm. Doors open at 6:30pm or so, and we dearly appreciate those who show up early to help with setup. - Paul -- http://pnijjar.freeshell.org From paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca Sat Jun 1 02:39:33 2013 From: paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca (Paul Nijjar) Date: Sat, 1 Jun 2013 02:39:33 -0400 Subject: [kwlug-announce] Meeting Monday: Bitcoin, Ripple Message-ID: <20130601063933.GT11736@pirg.uwaterloo.ca> Is there anything in this world more wonderful than money? It certainly is my favourite thing. It is so useful! You can exchange it for valuable goods and services such as good health, friendship, happiness and love. But money is kind of inconvenient. It makes your wallet bulge with heavy coins and bills. Keeping it under your mattress makes your bed lumpy and uncomfortable. You can use debit or credit cards, but then your purchases can be easily correlated and tracked, and then people find out about your embarrassing purchases (all those donuts! all that pizza!) and you have to wallow in shame. Wouldn't it be better to have some form of exchange that was lighter than coinage but more private than credit cards? This month, Stephen Paul Weber will tell us about two such initiatives. The first is Bitcoin, a peer-to-peer currency that is based around an open source cryptographic protocol. The second initiative is Ripple, a trading protocol that allows you to conduct transactions across many currencies, without depending on a central authority for the transactions. Stephen will explain how these systems work and what makes them interesting/useful. In other news, the Makers have been up to their shenanigans again, and have made a Waterloo Mini Maker Faire, to be held on Saturday June 15 at Kitchener City Hall. For more details see http://makerfairewaterloo.com This month's meeting will be held at the usual location: St John's Kitchen 97 Victoria Street North (at Victoria and Weber) Kitchener There are maps and photos at http://kwlug.org/node/709. Doors open around 6:30pm (and setup helpers are super-welcome), and the meeting starts at 7pm. - Paul -- http://pnijjar.freeshell.org I'm speaking at http://ignitewaterloo.ca : June 13