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 From paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca Sat Jul 6 14:37:37 2013 From: paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca (Paul Nijjar) Date: Sat, 6 Jul 2013 14:37:37 -0400 Subject: [kwlug-announce] Meeting Monday: TOR Message-ID: <20130706183737.GB602@pirg.uwaterloo.ca> Surprise! Another government surveillance revelation has hit the news. We have further confirmation that the companies to which we entrust our email and social networks are perfectly willing to let the US government snoop as well. Or maybe this is no surprise, because privacy is -- if not dead -- in hospice care and we should all rejoice. Only those who are doing something wrong have anything to hide, right? Not everybody has gotten the memo. There are still those who believe in privacy online, and some of those people are working to build internet infrastructure that is secure by default. One such project is TOR, aka "The Onion Router". This project attempts to anonymize network communications, so that servers are unable to identify the identities of clients that access them. In this month's KWLUG presentation, Steve Palmateer will tell us about the TOR project, focusing on the technical aspects of the project, and demonstrating how to set up a TOR relay from start to finish. Our usual MC Andrew will be away on Monday, so we are looking for somebody to make KWLUG announcements and introduce the speaker at the beginning of our meeting. If you would be willing to do this please let me know. We are always on the lookout for presentations. In particular, we could use some beginner-friendly tutorials and presentations to alternate with the more technical ones. There are currently slots open for August, November, December and next year. If you are interested you can contact me or -- better yet -- make your pitch on the kwlug-disc list. And that's all I got, except for the meeting logistics. This meeting will be held at the usual location: St John's Kitchen 97 Victoria Street North (at the corner of Weber and Victoria) Kitchener The meeting starts at 7pm. Doors open at around 6:30pm, and setup helpers are greatly appreciated. You can park your motorcar in the Worth a Second Look parking lot, and park your safety bicycle along the side of the building. - Paul -- http://pnijjar.freeshell.org From paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca Fri Aug 9 21:48:51 2013 From: paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca (Paul Nijjar) Date: Fri, 9 Aug 2013 21:48:51 -0400 Subject: [kwlug-announce] Meeting Monday: Mind Mapping, Virtualization Message-ID: <20130810014850.GC3687@nb-laryngitis> This month's presentations will be beginner-friendly. It's August, and the living is languid. Many user groups (but not us!) have taken the summer off. The festivals are making their circuits; people are taking their vacations, and those of us at work are not getting much done. (oops. Did I just incriminate myself?) People are relaxing and laying back. Meanwhile, Raul Suarez has a lot on his mind. He likes to lighten his summer load by mapping and organizing his thoughts, and he uses mind mapping software to do so. In this presentation he will use FreeMind (and possibly other tools) so that you can free your mind too. During the hot summer months, Jim Kelsh likes to chill, but it is difficult to keep your cool sitting in a roomful of computers blowing hot air. Jim has consolidated his operating systems: first converting his Windows 7 laptop installation into a virtual hard disk, and then running that virtualized installation on Ubuntu. He will take us through those steps in his talk. It feels way too early to start organizing fall events, but September is approaching quickly, and with it comes Software Freedom Day, which is officially being held on September 21 and perhaps unofficially on September 28. KWLUG has helped organize Software Freedom Day events for the past several years, and it would be nice to do so again -- but in order to make it happen, we need volunteers. There is work to be done in organizing the day (talks, installfests, and maybe other events like BBQs), doing publicity to reach out to people who may not know much about Free Software, offering talks and presentations, and lots more. Can you help out? If so, please contact sfd at theworkingcentre.org . ... and that's it for this month's lackadaisical installment of "Remind everybody of the KWLUG meeting this month." We will hold this meeting at our usual location: St John's Kitchen 97 Victoria Street North (corner of Victoria and Weber) Kitchener The meeting starts at 7pm. The doors open at around 6:30pm. Setup volunteers are always welcome. There is motorized vehicle parking in the thrift store parking lot, and non-motorized vehicle parking along the building. - Paul -- http://pnijjar.freeshell.org From paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca Fri Sep 6 23:12:59 2013 From: paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca (Paul Nijjar) Date: Fri, 6 Sep 2013 23:12:59 -0400 Subject: [kwlug-announce] Meeting Monday: ZFS, btrfs Message-ID: <20130907031259.GA3696@nb-laryngitis> For some reason, those of us in the Free Software world love to become partisan about software alternatives. GNOME vs KDE, vi vs emacs, BSD vs Linux, Drupal vs Wordpress... the list goes on and on. We pick our sides and fight off challengers, even though we are all working towards the same ends and should really be allies. Can't we all just get along? If we're going to be partisan, why not be partisan over rational things, such as sports teams? Another pair of contenders has entered the fray, vying for the title of "most awesome next generation fileysystem". The venerable ext2/ext3/ext4 series of filesystems on Linux have fended off many (sometimes technologically-superior) challengers, and remains the default filesystem on many Linux distributions to this day. But filesystems have progressed a lot since ext2 was developed, and its days as the system default are likely numbered. In the one corner is ZFS, the file system originally developed for Solaris by Sun Microsystems (back when there was a Sun Microsystems). ZFS is more prominent in the BSD world, but it has been ported to Linux as an unofficial kernel module, and some people use it in the wild. Lori Paniak is one of those people, and he will share some of the ZFS story with us, focussing on the interesting tale of how the porting was implemented. In the other corner is btrfs (pronounced "Butter-FS"), a next generation filesystem native to the Linux kernel. Although btrfs is still under development it is already supported on several distros, including some enterprise ones. First-time KWLUG presenter Gary Cameron will discuss what btrfs has to offer. These presentations will begin at 7pm. In other news, Software Freedom Day is a go for this year! We will hold our celebrations a week later than everybody else -- on Saturday, September 28, from 10am-4pm, at Kwartzlab (33 Kent St, at the corner of Kent and Charles). You are all invited, and people you know who might not be as familiar with the Free Software movement and why it matters are doubly invited. Two themes have emerged from this year's SFD organizing. The first is multimedia: a number of presentations will deal with creating (Blender) and organizing (XBMC, MediaGoblin) multimedia files. The second theme is GNU: this year marks the 30th anniversary of the operating system userland that most of us use every day. It is easy to ignore the GNU in GNU/Linux, so during this Software Freedom Day celebrations we will give GNU its due. For more information about Software Freedom Day please visit http://www.theworkingcentre.org/sfd . To help out, contact sfd at theworkingcentre.org Here are a couple of KWLUG logistic notes. Firstly: if you have free-software-related events you would like to see in this meeting announcement, please forward them to me or broadcast your request to the kwlug-disc list. Secondly: we are looking for some KWLUG presentations for November and December. If you would be interested in sharing your enthusiasm about some free-software-related topic, please get in touch. Enthusiasm about beginner-friendly topics (ie those topics you struggled with as a new user) would be particularly welcome. And that's it, except for the location of this month's meeting: St John's Kitchen 97 Victoria Street North (corner of Victoria and Weber) Kitchener The meeting starts at 7pm. Doors open around 6:30pm, and we are super-grateful for help in getting the presentation space set up. There is some gratis parking in the Worth a Second Look parking lot, and lots of gratis bike parking along the side of the building. You can find maps and pictures of the meeting location: http://kwlug.org/node/709 - Paul -- http://pnijjar.freeshell.org From paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca Fri Oct 4 23:51:07 2013 From: paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca (Paul Nijjar) Date: Fri, 4 Oct 2013 23:51:07 -0400 Subject: [kwlug-announce] Meeting Monday: Scratch Message-ID: <20131005035107.GC3655@nb-laryngitis> This month's presentation is intended to be beginner-friendly. Would you like to learn programming, but worry about starting from scratch? Perhaps you know a young person who would like to program, but whose typing skills are not yet up to scratch? Is the desire to create easy, interactive animations an itch you would like to scratch? Or perhaps you have been possessed by Old Scratch? If so (or even if not) then you might be interested in this month's KWLUG presentation. Raul Suarez will introduce us to Scratch, a graphical, introductory programming language designed for children, but usable by anybody. Scratch makes it easy to incorporate animations, graphics and sound into projects. The language allows programmers to piece together program flow constructs (if statements, loops...) by piecing together graphical units. Raul will show us the programming environment, and scratch beneath the surface to demonstrate some interesting programs. He invites our younger KWLUG members (seven years older and up) to attend, with appropriate adult supervision. In other news, the planning bureaucracy at KWLUG world headquarters is getting anxious, because they still have empty slots for meetings that are quickly approaching. There are still presentation slots available for November (a 40-minute half slot) and December (a full slot, or two half slots). Do you have a topic you would like to share with the KWLUG community? Would you like to help some faceless bureaucrats sleep easier at night? Then get in touch and make a presentation pitch! In other other news, the Computer Science Club at the University of Waterloo is putting on a neat series of talks related to privacy and computer security. The first one is scheduled for October 8, and is entitled "Why Should You Care About Security and Privacy". For more information, check out the CSC events listings: http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/events/ This month's meeting will be held at the usual location: St John's Kitchen 97 Victoria Street North (Corner of Victoria and Weber) Kitchener The meeting starts at 7pm. The doors open at 6:30pm or so, and setup helpers are super-welcome. As with all KWLUG meetings, the attendance is gratis and won't cost you any scratch. There is motorcar parking in the thrift store parking lot (on the opposite side from the entrance), and safety bicycle parking along the side of the building. There are maps and photos of the location here: http://kwlug.org/node/709 - Paul -- My Ignite Waterloo 12 video: http://youtu.be/vRfzDPKI9U0 Blog followup: http://pnijjar.freeshell.org/2013/ignite-followup/ Next Ignite is Oct 22: http://ignitewaterloo.ca From paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca Sat Nov 2 02:59:32 2013 From: paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca (Paul Nijjar) Date: Sat, 2 Nov 2013 02:59:32 -0400 Subject: [kwlug-announce] Meeting Monday: XBMC; Why You Should Care About Security and Privacy Message-ID: <20131102065932.GC3651@nb-laryngitis> This month's presentations are largely beginner-friendly. Privacy is dead. You have nothing to hide if you have done nothing wrong. Surely there is no cause to be clandestine about attending this month's KWLUG meeting, right? How could learning about XBMC and/or the need for privacy possibly be added to the dossier about you that is stored on the hard drives of assorted three letter agencies around the world? This meeting might be worth the risk, in any case. We have two very different presentations lined up this month. To make you anxious, Sarah Harvey will talk to us about why we should care about security and privacy. This is a version of the talk she presented for the Computer Science Club at the University of Waterloo, and the scuttlebutt is that it was well received. Once you are good and paranoid about the state of digital surveillance, it's time to kick back and relax as Charles McColm talks to us about the XBMC media server. He will show us about how he set up XBMC in his home, and how he set up streaming audio and video to assorted devices in his home. Charles recently published a book on this topic (available at http://www.packtpub.com/build-entertainment-system-with-XBMC/book ), so he is quite familiar with the topic. In addition to the presentations, Bob Jonkman will be holding an informal keysigning party. Bob has posted some instructions to the kwlug-disc list here: http://kwlug.org/pipermail/kwlug-disc_kwlug.org/2013-November/011140.html In other news: the local Hackademy group is putting on a large number of courses: introductory workshops on Wordpress, PHP, HTML, and SQL databases. The courses do cost money, but scholarships may be available. See http://hackademy.ca/events for more information. (The first course is on Nov 3, so you will want to act fast if you want to get into the intro to HTML and CSS course.) The Computer Science Club series of lectures concludes this month with a seminar on Public Key Cryptography, which might be useful if you did not understand anything I wrote about Bob Jonkman's keysigning party. That will be held on Nov 5: http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/events/MC_3001_%28Comfy%29-2013-11-05-6:00PM There is a LOT of other neat stuff happening this month, but much of it is not directly related to free software. There's the NIGHTSHIFT festival happening Saturday evening (http://nightshift.alternativesjournal.ca/) which is featuring quite a few makery things, a neat "Repair Cafe" happening on November 9 (https://www.facebook.com/events/214649022043297/) which is an opportunity for people to fix stuff and get stuff fixed, and a lot more. You can find a bunch of interesting events on the WatCamp calendar: http://watcamp.com/calendar And that is it, except for tracking you and reporting your whereabouts to various surveillance agencies. (I did include a Facebook link; does that satisfy that requirement?) Oh, and I forgot to tell you where to go on Monday: St John's Kitchen 97 Victoria Street North Kitchener (Corner of Victoria and Weber) The meeting starts at 7pm. Set up starts around 6:30pm, and setup helpers are greatly appreciated. You can park your privacy cars in the thrift store parking lot, and your security bicycles along the side of the building. Maps and photos of the location are available here: http://kwlug.org/node/709 - Paul -- Paul Nijjar - http://pnijjar.freeshell.org Does Canadian Blood Services Have an Image Problem? http://youtu.be/vRfzDPKI9U0 From paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca Sat Nov 30 07:37:11 2013 From: paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca (Paul Nijjar) Date: Sat, 30 Nov 2013 07:37:11 -0500 Subject: [kwlug-announce] Meeting Monday: Encrypting email with GPG and Thunderbird Message-ID: <20131130123711.GB6791@nb-laryngitis> I know, I know: sending an email is just like sending a postcard. Like postcards, emails describe happy times and quick notes intended to provoke envy. Like postcards, emails contain joyful pictures of cultural fnord landmarks. Like postcards, emails should always be signed. Since I did not sign this meeting announcement, how do you know that I wrote it? Can you actually be sure that I am sitting on a sunny Nova Scotian beach sipping fruity beverages? Maybe this is all a sham. Maybe some nefarious organization intercepted this meeting announcement and inserted unwholesome messages? It's enough to provoke existential angst. Fortunately, this month Bob Jonkman will demonstrate ways to prove that we actually exist. In particular, he will fnord show us the hows and whys of encrypting emails with GPG and the Enigmail plugin for Thunderbird. He will reveal the secrets of why to encrypt email, how cryptography works, and how he manages to communicate with Alice. If you are already a keysigning wizard then Bob would like you to participate in the formal keysigning party he is running for the evening. If you are a keysigning newbie who can struggle through the keysigning instructions, then Bob would also like you to participate in the party. He has put together a Party Protocol document here: http://sobac.com/wiki/index.php/Formal_Keysigning I don't know why you should believe me when I write this, but in other news there are a couple of opportunities to learn scripting and programming this month: - On Dec 4, Stephen Paul Weber is running a shell-scripting class targetted at "absolute beginners". Admission is free (with donations to Kwartzlab appreciated) and open to the public, but you might want to contact Stephen to make sure there is a spot for you. You can find more details here: http://kwartzlab.ca/pipermail/discuss_kwartzlab.ca/2013-November/001941.html - On Dec 7, the Hackademy people are running an "Introduction to Python Programming" course, which is notable because frequent KWLUG presenter Raul Suarez (and onetime presenter Kareem Shehata) will be leading the course. As with other Hackademy courses, this class costs money, but if the cost is an issue there are scholarships available. Visit http://hackademy.ca for more info. (Conflict of interest disclaimer: I may also be offering a course through Hackademy at some point.) As always, people on the KWLUG discussion list (http://kwlug.org/mailman/listinfo/kwlug-disc_kwlug.org) are around to engage in arbitrary FLOSS related (and scripting-related) discussion, and there fnord are more tech events than you would believe listed on the Watcamp events calendar: http://watcamp.com/calendar Believe it or not, that's it except for the logistics of the meeting. As usual, it will be held at: St John's Kitchen 97 Victoria Street North (corner of Victoria and Weber) Kitchener Doors open around 6:30pm, and setup helpers are greatly appreciated. The meeting starts at 7pm. You can park your T-bird somewhere in the midst of the Weber St construction rubble (try the thrift store parking lot), and there is bike parking along the side of the building. Find more location information at http://kwlug.org/node/709 Wish you were here! - Paul -- http://pnijjar.freeshell.org