We are continuing the dinner meetup tradition at Crabby Joe's in downtown Kitchener, starting at 7pm. Note that this restaurant meeting is on a Monday. (Also note that this meeting was originally scheduled for Feb 17, but that is Family Day.)

This is a supplementary informal meeting; we will still hold hybrid meetings for technical topics.

The restaurant is located at 70 King St E in Kitchener, at the corner of King and Frederick St. Here is a map. 

Parking is free in the Crabby Joe's parking lot with purchase. The waitstaff will scan your ticket when you leave, which will permit you to leave the parking lot for free. In addition, parking at City of Kitchener parking lots is free after 5pm. The nearest City parking lots are at 40 Ontario St S, or 5 Charles St E.

You can probably just show up, but the organizers would find it helpful if you RSVPed to dinner@kwlug.org 

Jason Paul will explain how to set up BigBlueButton hosted on Amazon Web Services, and the GitOps/DevOps principles used to deploy and maintaining the installation.

Mikalai Birukou will demonstrate his workflow for editing BigBlueButton presentations into video files that can be shared. 

Tim Laurence will tell us how he uses ESPHome to control a smart plug directly, without an additional management layer.

Alesh Slovak will give us an update on his Linux distro ChimeraOS (formerly GamerOS), which aims to turn any PC into a gaming console. It has support for Steam, Epic Games Store, GOG, and dozens of console platforms.

Thomas Busch will demonstrate the web interface of AdGuard Home, and how he uses it to manage his DNS setup. 

J. Lucas Donkers will demonstrate how he built a laptop using a custom case, a Raspberry Pi, a built-in open source oscilloscope, and a Waveshare LCD display. 

Marc Peppin will discuss a number of network and monitoring tools. 

Khalid Baheyeldin will continue his series of talks about Home Assistant by telling us about AppDaemon, an execution environment that interfaces with Home Assistant for writing custom apps in Python. He will demonstrate a simple app, and then show some more involved ones, including an app for emailing weather updates, and an app to replace his humidifier's humidistat.
 

Khalid Baheyeldin will demonstrate some additional ways he uses Home Assistant. He will explain voice to text functionality, email and voice alerts for such events as extreme temperatures/humidity and door openings. He will also demonstrate a custom-made garage sensor that informs him about a light that is left on unintentionally, and the surprising reason why he had to swap out the ambient light component in the sensor after several years.