[kwlug-announce] Meeting Monday: Zubick Scrap App in Python, LanCache (April 2023)

[Paul Nijjar]

The theme of this month's KWLUG meeting is: hobbies by people named John.

John Driezen has a hobby that makes him some money. He collects scrap
metal and sells it to scrapyards. The prices for this scrap metal can
be volatile, so John wanted to track trends. John learned enough
Python to create a program that could track and graph scrap prices 
at one scrapyard. John will tell us a little bit about the scrap metal
world, a little bit about the different components he used to put
together his program, and some challenges and future work. Although
John had programmed before he had not used Python, so this
presentation is also an interesting look at getting up to speed in a
new environment.

John Steel has a hobby that involves playing video games with his
friends. Although he no doubt plays online John also has LAN parties,
where everybody gets together with their rigs. John will tell us about
LanCache, a proxy that can be helpful so that everybody in your party
can quickly and locally download binaries from one machine on the
network. (Of course, an easy-to-use caching proxy has non-gaming uses,
such as distributing package updates.) John will use a fancy OBS setup
to show us what LanCache is and show us some live demos.

In restaurant meetup news our social organizer Andrew has scheduled
the next informal KWLUG dinner meetup. It will be held on Tuesday,
April 11 starting at 7pm. Once again it will be at McCabe's Kitchener.
If you are interested in attending RSVP to dinner at kwlug.org . There
are more details on the KWLUG website: https://kwlug.org/node/1324

In unfortunate and possibly off-topic news, you may have heard that
the Internet Archive lost one phase of a court case, in which it was
being sued by book publishers: https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/24/23655804/internet-archive-hatchette-publisher-ebook-library-lawsuit
Putting aside the merits of the case, this may have impacts on KWLUG
vidcasts and podcasts, since we host both of these on archive.org, and
in the worst case the Internet Archive will pay such punitive fines
that it will shut down. If we are lucky we will find other places to
host the video and audio recordings, but for those of us who depend
upon the Wayback Machine this feels like a big blow.

As for our meeting, we are still virtual for now. Please join us at
https://webconference.kwlug.org/room/kwlug at 7pm for some friendly
free software nerdery.

- Paul
-- 
Events: https://feeds.off-topic.kwlug.org 
Housing: https://unionsd.coop
Blog: http://pnijjar.freeshell.org