Past Meetings

We are continuing the dinner meetup tradition at J&B Family Restaurant in downtown Kitchener, starting at 7pm. Note that this restaurant meeting is on a Wednesday.

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

The restaurant is located at 79 Victoria St N in Kitchener, near the corner of Victoria and Duke Here is a map. 

There is parking in front of the restaurant. The nearest City parking lot is at Hall Lane.

Normally you can probably just show up, but J&B is a small place. If you plan to attend please make sure to RSVP to dinner@kwlug.org, so the organizers can make an accurate reservation. If you know what you plan to order from the menu, please include your order as well so the restaurant staff can prepare food in advance.

Jason Paul will show us how he set up a travel router on a Raspberry Pi, using the RaspAP router distribution. He will discuss the project's features, its installation and configuration, and how to enable additional functionality.

Mikalai Birukou will tell us about the latest updates to PrivacySafe.

Note: This restaurant meetup was originally scheduled for May 19, but monarchists in the group reminded us that this was Victoria Day. We have thus rescheduled the meetup to Wednesday, May 21. The restaurant is the same. 

We are continuing the dinner meetup tradition at Crabby Joe's in downtown Kitchener, starting at 7pm. 

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 

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. 

We are continuing the dinner meetup tradition at J&B Family Restaurant in downtown Kitchener, starting at 7pm. Note that this restaurant meeting is on a Wednesday.

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

The restaurant is located at 79 Victoria St N in Kitchener, near the corner of Victoria and Duke Here is a map. 

There is parking in front of the restaurant. The nearest City parking lot is at Hall Lane.

Normally you can probably just show up, but J&B is a small place. If you plan to attend please make sure to RSVP to dinner@kwlug.org, so the organizers can make an accurate reservation. If you know what you plan to order from the menu, please include your order as well so the restaurant staff can prepare food in advance.

Tim Laurence will demonstrate how to customize a device with ESPHome . He will walk us through a series of examples using a simple smart plug bought online.

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.

We are continuing the dinner meetup tradition at J&B Family Restaurant in downtown Kitchener, starting at 7pm. Note that this restaurant meeting is on a Wednesday.

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

The restaurant is located at 79 Victoria St N in Kitchener, near the corner of Victoria and Duke Here is a map. 

There is parking in front of the restaurant. The nearest City parking lot is at Hall Lane.

Normally you can probably just show up, but J&B is a small place. If you plan to attend please make sure to RSVP to dinner@kwlug.org, so the organizers can make an accurate reservation. If you know what you plan to order from the menu, please include your order as well so the restaurant staff can prepare food in advance.

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. 

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 

Khalid Baheyeldin will follow up on his November 2024 presentation on internal climate monitoring with a presentation on using Home Assistant to monitor weather conditions outside his house, such as lightning strikes and thunderstorm distances. He will discuss Home Assistant integration with rtl_433 to decode radio transmissions,  with devices such as La Crosse and AcuRite weather stations, and with WeeWX for statistics. 

Spencer Hughes will discuss remastering Live CD distributions. He writes:

I will be discussing creating a project I wrote for creating custom Debian and RHEL-based Live CDs and going over some of the potential uses for customized live CDs.

We are continuing the dinner meetup tradition at J&B Family Restaurant in downtown Kitchener, starting at 7pm. Note that this restaurant meeting is on a Wednesday.

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

The restaurant is located at 79 Victoria St N in Kitchener, near the corner of Victoria and Duke Here is a map. 

There is parking in front of the restaurant. The nearest City parking lot is at Hall Lane.

Normally you can probably just show up, but this is our first time at J&B and they are a small place. If you plan to attend please make sure to RSVP to dinner@kwlug.org, so the organizers can make an accurate reservation. If you know what you plan to order from the menu, please include your order as well so the restaurant staff can prepare food in advance.

Thomas Busch will show us how to set up a local DNS server. He writes: 

Learn how to build and manage a reliable local DNS infrastructure using synchronized AdGuard Home instances. This session will cover practical deployment methods, configuration examples, and best practices for maintaining a private, secure DNS environment.

A number of KWLUG members will show off some cool tools:

• Jeff Smith will demonstrate mkvmerge and mkvextract . 
• Shravan Dwarka will demonstrate some bash scripting.
• Tim Laurence will demonstrate nmap. 
• Andrew Cant will demonstrate using Lua in Neovim. 

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.

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 

Lori Paniak will discuss the WatGPU project, which clusters GPUs together for research computation purposes.

Sam Zhang will discuss Open WebUI, a user-friendly AI interface, focusing on using the API for online use, and its unique functionalities.

We are continuing the dinner meetup tradition at Ethel's Lounge in Uptown Waterloo, starting at 7pm. Note that this restaurant meeting is on a Wednesday.

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

The restaurant is located at 114 King Street North in Waterloo, at the corner of King and Young St East. Here is a map. 

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

Mikalai Birukou will give us an update on his platform PrivacySafe.

Khalid Baheyeldin will discuss how he uses Home Assistant to monitor the climate inside his home, including humidity, radon VOC, and CO2. The talk will also include details on how Home Assistant integrates with Mosquitto for MQTT, long-term data storage using InfluxDB, and data visualization with Grafana. 

We are continuing the dinner meetup tradition at Kentucky BBQ in uptown Waterloo, starting at 7pm. Note that this restaurant meeting is on a Monday.

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

The restaurant is located at 103 King Street North in Waterloo, at the corner of King and Young St East. Here is a map. 

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

Colin_ will discuss the virtualization platform Proxmox. He writes:

In this demonstration, I'll show how to set up a Proxmox cluster with High Availability using a stack of older Mac Minis, a Raspberry Pi, and a network switch. The presentation will highlight Proxmox's simplicity and reliability in a simulated home network environment, providing insights into its practical applications and benefits.

Spencer Hughes will talk about infrastructure as code tools. He will give us a high-level discussion on the benefits of using infrastructure as code tools and principles, as well as potential opportunities for implementing infrastructure as code in the home lab.

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 Wednesday.

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. 

You can park in the restaurant parking lot -- staff will give you a voucher for parking. Otherwise, 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 

Update: Here is a picture of the festivities.

Sam Zhang will follow up his July presentation on download managers with a discussion about video downloading tools. He will cover the death of youtube-dl, the rise of yt-dlp, as well as commandline usage and configuration for these tools.

Gordon Dey will tell us about his journey of getting a transceiver working with the MQTT publish/subscribe server Mosquitto.