Past Meetings

This meeting will be held virtually.

John Driezen will discuss a Python application he wrote to track scrap metal prices. He will show us some programs that led him to the final version of the app, and show his motivations for developing the app. (Note: John was originally scheduled to give this talk last April, but he had to cancel. So we have rescheduled him now.)

Eugen Konkov will demonstrate Devel::DebugHooks, a Perl debugger he developed. He will show us how to stop "print debugging" and instead trace variables, find out where data is loaded, measure execution time in repeatable ways, without having to restart your applications. 

We are continuing the post-pandemic dinner meetup tradition. This month people will meet at TWH Social in Kitchener, starting at 7pm. 

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

The address is 1 King Street West Kitchener, at the corner of King and Queen St.

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: 5 Charles St. East at Ontario and 19 Queen St North at Duke.

Update: The meeting is confirmed as being online. 

Kevin Stumpf will share his "anecdotal history of the early technological community in KW from 1920 to 1990". Revisiting an excellent talk he gave a decade ago, he will discuss some of the early companies that put Kitchener-Waterloo on the map, as well as some of the technical innovations in the area. 

Bob B will show us Umbrel, an OS for easily running a server in your home. Umbrel can then host applications like NextCloud and Bitcoin nodes.

We are continuing the post-pandemic dinner meetup tradition at McCabe's Irish Pub and Grill in Kitchener, starting at 7pm. Note that this dinner is on a Tuesday.

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

The address is 352 King Street West, Kitchener, ON, near King and Francis 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 lot is at 28 Water Street South.

Update, April 3: Unfortunately, John Driezen suffered an internet outage and won't be presenting today. We will reschedule his presentation. John Steel will still be presenting LanCache.

John Driezen will discuss a Python application he wrote to track scrap metal prices. He will show us some programs that led him to the final version of the app, and show his motivations for developing the app.

John Steel will tell us about LanCache, a proxy server that makes it easy to distribute binaries for your LAN parties. 

We are continuing the post-pandemic dinner meetup tradition at McCabe's Irish Pub and Grill in Kitchener, starting at 7pm. This is a supplementary informal meeting; we will still hold virtual meetings for technical topics.

The address is 352 King Street West, Kitchener, ON, near King and Francis 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 lot is at 28 Water Street South.

Jason Paul will give us a tour of his homelab setup.

Mikalai Birukou will give us an update on PrivacySafe. He writes:

PrivacySafe is a client system that uses 3NWeb protocols. We'll demo hopefully production version, which you'll be able to use right away, addressing every privacy concern that you may have by doing things the right way (tm) 😁.      

This meeting has been re-posted and linked elsewhere:

• Linkedin

Mentions on the web:

• KWLUG Presentation – March 2023 – Homelab Tour by Jason Paul

The December meetup went well, so some KWLUG members have organized another dinner at McCabe's Irish Pub and Grill in Kitchener, starting at 7pm. This is a supplementary informal meeting; we will still hold virtual meetings for technical topics.

The address is 352 King Street West, Kitchener, ON, near King and Francis 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 lot is at 28 Water Street South.

Important Update: We recently underwent a somewhat involuntary server upgrade for our BigBlueButton instance. For now the meeting link for Monday's meeting remains https://webconference.kwlug.org/room/kwlug . However, there is some chance that things will blow up with the upgraded platform, in which case we will make other plans and publish them here. If you cannot get into the meeting on Monday via the usual link then please check this page. 

Bob B will discuss the FreeBSD-based firewall distribution pfSense.

Nathan G will tell us about Plan 9 from Bell Labs, the innovative (and now open source) operating system originally developed in the late 1980s. 

The December meetup went well, so some KWLUG members have organized another dinner at McCabe's Irish Pub and Grill in Kitchener, starting at 7pm. This is a supplementary informal meeting; we will still hold virtual meetings for technical topics.

The address is 352 King Street West, Kitchener, ON, near King and Francis 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 lot is at 28 Water Street South.

Ian Kelly of PeaceWorks will tell us about the CiviCRM project and their work with it.

CiviCRM(wikipedia) is a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system designed especially for non-profit and civil society groups. Built in PHP and licensed AGPLv3 it integrates with a wide variety of other CMSes.

Several KWLUG members will share quick (10 minute) introductions about how they got into Linux and free software. (Thanks to KWJavaScript for the topic inspiration.)

This meeting has been re-posted and linked elsewhere:

• Linkedin
• Twitter hashtag #kwlug202301

Some KWLUG members are enthusiastic about getting together in person, and so have organized a dinner meeting at McCabe's Irish Pub and Grill in Kitchener, starting at 7pm. This is a supplementary informal meeting; we will still hold virtual meetings for technical topics.

The address is 352 King Street West, Kitchener, ON, near King and Francis 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 lot is at 28 Water Street South.

Fernando Duran will show off his new service SadServers.

SadServers provides you with interesting Linux admin and SRE(Site Reliability Engineering) problems to solve in the browser. It can be just a fun Capture the Flag challenge, or help practice your skills before an interview.

Sean D will demonstrate how he set up Visual Studio Code Server on a virtual machine, so he has an accessible environment for learning Python (or other languages) from anywhere.

This meeting has been re-posted and linked here:

• Linkedin event
• Twitter hashtag #kwlug202212

David Trueman is a founder and current president of cycling advocacy group CycleWR. With design firm Zeitspace, he helped build https://www.cyclingguide.app/ , which is powered by OpenStreetMap. The app will be open source. With developers from Zeitspace, they will discuss the basis using OpenStreetMap data, how that data is mapped into traffic stress levels and how those stress levels are used in the routing algorithm to find suitable routes.

John Steel will explain how autocompletion works in the Bash shell.

This meeting has been re-posted and linked here:

• Linkedin event
• Twitter hashtag #kwlug202211

Karla Falk will give an overview of the Open Food Network. OFN is a non-profit, building open source tools (licensed AGPLv3) to help farmers sell the food they grow more easily.                                               
                                                                              
OFN is being used by a number of local producers, so you might have already seen their portal!                                                            
                                                                              
The project is always looking for help, so Karla will also talk about how individual developers can start contributing.

Paul Nijjar will discuss https://waterlooregionvotes.org , an information portal for the Waterloo Region municipal election. Why does it exist? What problems does it solve? What technologies drive it? What were some of the challenges and successes in the project?

Doug Moen will introduce his new project Baz. Baz is new open source project with the goal of publishing desktop apps to every desktop in the world as easily as we access webapps. Installing software should be as easy as downloading a package from a website, with the resulting program registered with the OS's package management system. Bazaar will be an associated, decentralized app store embedded in the world wide web. 

Doug will introduce his plans for the project, and solicit helpers to help him make it a reality.

Andrew Cant will tell us about his journeys in updating Ruby libraries. He writes:

It is time for Andrew Cant to update his slightly neglected Ruby gems. What choices will he need to make? Who knows!

Some of the details will be Ruby specific, but should also apply to maintaining any open source repository. Andrew will try to give you ideas for updating your own libraries.

Lori Paniak will discuss the firewall configuration tool Shorewall. Bob B will discuss the graphical firewall tool FirewallBuilder, aka FWBuilder.

Jason Eckert will share his experiences running Asahi Linux on his Silicon M1 Apple Mac Mini.

Ron Barnes will demonstrate how to create dynamic graphs using the D3.js library.

Ken Taylor will tell us about how an assisted living community he is associated with uses open source software, and he will solicit help for development residence management tools using home automation software such as OpenHAB or Domoticz.

Mikalai Birukou will give us some updates on his project 3NWeb.

Note: Jason will present Ahasi Linux in July.

Bob B will tell us about Pass, the standard UNIX password manager.

John Steel will tell us about the Helm packaging format Helm Charts. (Helm describes itself as the package manager for Kubernetes)