Past Meetings

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. 

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, and that it is being held at the same location as last month's restaurant meetup.

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 

Michael Free will discuss how he put together a digital signage player using common Linux utilities and bash scripts. He will discuss using Debian preseeding for automatic installation, packaging deb files, using Cockpit to manage digital signs, and Ansible for automation.

Mikalai Birukou will tell us about how to automate things using macros in LibreOffice. He writes:

The world is run on spreadsheets. We'll dissect the awesomeness of spreadsheets, making a macro or two in LibreOffice. LibreOffice has a trick for automation, which we'll use for live coding and checking our instructions to the office. Bring a laptop with LibreOffice on it for this hands on session. Macros will be in Basic, and live commands in Python -- you'll have a refresher on the way.                                
                                                                             
I used as a reference a book by Andrew Pitonyak.

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 

Livia Lima will discuss her educational project Linux Upskill Challenge. She writes:

Linux Upskill Challenge is a month-long course for those who want to learn more about how to operate a Linux server, such as Linux users who aspire to get Linux-related jobs in industry, and Windows server admins who want to expand their knowledge to be able to work with Linux servers. However, many others have happily used the course simply to improve their Linux command  line skills or to learn Linux for the first time - and that's just fine too!  
                                                                             
The course always starts on the first Monday of the month. The material is delivered in 20 bite-sized lessons, one each workday, posted on Reddit, Lemmy and Discord, where other students share experiences and help each other.

Sam Zhang will discuss some download tools he uses for Linux, including wget, curl and aria2.

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, and that it is being held at the same location as last month's restaurant meetup.

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 

Hubert Chathi is a developer for Matrix, a real-time communications protocol that supports end-to-end encrypted decentralized communication. Hubert last told us about Matrix in 2019, and now he will tell about what is new and exciting in the Matrix world.

Cam Davidson-Pilon is the co-founder and CEO of Pioreactor, a local startup that creates low-cost and accessible bioreactors for culturing cells in 20mL vials. He will tell us about how the Pioreactor works from both a biological and hardware perspective, how his company uses Linux and Raspberry Pi devices, and how they design software tools for controlling multiple Pioreactors simultaneously.

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. 

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 run through a five minute "Introduction to Linux" talk he is preparing. There will be plenty of time for feedback and discussion afterwards.

Anton Avramov and project founder Ophir Lojkine will discuss SQLPage, a web templating engine that allows you to safely define webpages using only SQL queries. Ophir will give us a prerecorded introduction to the software, and then Anton will go through some demonstrations and take questions.

Update: Ophir's introductory presentation can be viewed on Youtube: https://youtu.be/9NJgH_-zXjY

We are continuing the dinner meetup tradition at The Duke of Wellington Pub in 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 pub is located at 100 King St S, in Uptown Waterloo. Here is a map. There is parking at Waterloo Town Square or at the Uptown Waterloo Parkade, and easy mass transit access on the ION.

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

Ian Goldberg will discuss running exit nodes for Tor, the Onion Router, in a talk titled "Supporting Privacy and Freedom of Expression Worldwide (and Helping Your Research, Too!)". He writes:

People around the world live in jurisdictions where their Internet communications are monitored or censored.  Privacy enhancing technologies (PETs) are commonly used to enable free and open access to the Internet and online communications.  One popular such PET is Tor, used by millions of people every day.  The Tor Project, in cooperation with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is actively campaigning for universities to provide some of the infrastructure for the Tor network. (https://toruniversity.eff.org/)  At the University of Waterloo, we have been running a Tor exit relay for over a decade.  In this talk, we will discuss the benefits of running Tor relays at universities, as well as the challenges.

Tim Laurence will share some of his home automation secrets. He writes:

Tim is lazy. Be more like Tim by automating your home. Tim will present on some of the sensors and automations that support creating to make life a bit nicer around the house.

We are continuing the dinner meetup tradition at McCabe's Irish Pub and Grill in Waterloo, starting at 7pm. Note that this is the Waterloo location of McCabe's; the Kitchener location is out of business and apparently KWLUG members really want Irish pub food? This restaurant meetup is on a Monday.

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

The address is 44 King Street North, in Uptown Waterloo across the street from Waterloo Town Square. Here is a map. You can park at Waterloo Town Square or use paid parking in the giant parking garage next to the restaurant.

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

Colin_, John Steel, and Jason Paul will discuss the pros and cons of network-attached storage solutions TrueNAS as compared to the (non-FLOSS) Unraid.

We are continuing the dinner meetup tradition at McCabe's Irish Pub and Grill in Waterloo, starting at 7pm. Note that this is the Waterloo location of McCabe's; the Kitchener location is out of business and apparently KWLUG members really want Irish pub food? This restaurant meetup is on a Monday.

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

The address is 44 King Street North, in Uptown Waterloo across the street from Waterloo Town Square. Here is a map. You can park at Waterloo Town Square or use paid parking in the giant parking garage next to the restaurant.

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

John Driezen will demonstrate how he uses gLabels to design printouts for peel-off sticker sheets.

Ole Tange (Author of GNU Parallel) will join us from the Philippines. Bring your ideas for using GNU Parallel, and Ole will sprinkle some parallel command magic on them, breaking it down in detail. He writes:

Need some inspiration? Dive into the parallel universe by: 

• Binging on this YouTube playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL284C9FF2488BC6D1 
• Taking a leisurely scroll through parallel wonderland: https://www.gnu.org/software/parallel/parallel_examples.html
• Giving your brain a quick workout with the 1-page cheat sheet: https://www.gnu.org/software/parallel/parallel_cheat.pdf 
• Take a look at the many options and how they're all connected, like a parallel family tree: https://www.gnu.org/software/parallel/parallel_options_map.pdf

We are continuing the dinner meetup tradition at The Coop Wicked Chicken in Kitchener, starting at 7pm. Note that this dinner is on a Wednesday. Future restaurant meetups will alternate between Mondays and Wednesdays.

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

The address is 1 Queen St N, at the corner of King and Queen streets.

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

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.