Past Meetings

Update 2: Unfortunately, Mikalai had a last-minute emergency and could not present his online voting presentation this month.

Update: the meeting url will be https://webconference.kwlug.org/room/kwlug . There will be no passcode.

Alesh Slovak will introduce GamerOS, a Linux distro that provides an "out of the box couch gaming experience." Find out what GamerOS is, what makes it unique, and why Alesh committed the mortal sin of creating his own Linux distribution.

Mikalai Birukou will talk about some workshopping he has done around online voting. He writes:

Tech can change distribution of power. Online voting is usually developed onlyas a convenience for voters, but we can do more. I will present a design that shifts power to voters by letting every voter to count votes. My device counts votes, your device counts votes, and we the people come to consensus. 

Update 3: Unfortunately Colin had a family emergency and was not able to present WireGuard. We will attempt to reschedule this topic.

Update: The URL for this month's meeting is https://webconference.kwlug.org/room/kwlug . The access code is 507191 . Update 2: we have disabled the access code.

Colin Knapp will demonstrate how he installs the fast, small, and modern VPN WireGuard on his devices.

Mikalai Birukou will tell us about his YAW-Hooks project, which creates transient credentials for use in scripts. He writes:

There are times when you want a process on one machine to do something on another.

The simplest and POLA (Principle of Least Authority) compliant approach would be to define a script/command, give it a url that may even lock arguments (POLA) passed to script/command, and generate credentials applicable only this url (POLA). Use creds to do precise curl-ing.                                     
                                                                              
Repo is at https://github.com/3nsoft/yaw-hooks .

Update: This meeting will be held via our BigBlueButton instance. URL: https://webconference.kwlug.org/room/kwlug . Access code: 019336 . If you need telephone access contact us before the meeting.

Michael Hitchens will demonstrate video collection and editing using FLOSS tools. He will gather video using OBS, and edit it with Kdenlive.

Andrew Cant will discuss MusicBrainz, the open source encyclopedia of music.

Update: This meeting will be held online. The URL is https://webconference.kwlug.org/room/kwlug . Update 2: There is no code for this meeting. If you need to connect to the meeting by phone please contact us in advance.

Colin Knapp will tell us about OhMyForm, a Google Forms open source alternative that he has adopted from the ashes of the TypeForm project. He will demonstrate the project and his involvement with it, and recruit some additional contributors to it.

Paul Nijjar will discuss the setup and care of the open-source web conferencing software BigBlueButton, including caveats and gotchas.

Update: This meeting will be held online. The meeting URL is https://webconference.kwlug.org/b/pau-2ap-jzy . (Sorry for the ugliness.) The access code is 932324 . Please use your name or a handle we recognise so that we don't accuse you of being a Zoombomber. (Also, don't be a Zoombomber.)

Update 2: Lori has posted the following dnsmasq resources:

• https://www.iana.org/assignments/bootp-dhcp-parameters/bootp-dhcp-parameters.xhtml
• http://www.thekelleys.org.uk/dnsmasq/docs/dnsmasq-man.html
• His sample dnsmasq.conf

Tim Laurence will tell us about KW Commits, an initiative to increase the visibility of people who contribute to open source software locally.

Lori Paniak will tell us about Dnsmasq, a program that provides network infrastructure for small networks: DNS, DHCP, network booting, and more...

Update 3: As previously announced, the meeting will be held online at https://meetings.theworkingcentre.org/room/kwlug . The access code is 254896 . Please use your real name, or use a handle we would recognise from other interactions. Everybody will be able to join in listen mode, and we will unlock people we know to be able to use the microphone (but please mute yourself unless you are actively participating in the discussion).

Update 2: We will be holding this meeting online: https://meetings.theworkingcentre.org/room/kwlug . You will need an access code to get into the meeting. We will post that code here by Thursday April 2 at 8pm, and also announce the access code in the monthly meeting announcement. For more information about the online platform we are using, see the meeting location link.

COVID-19 Update:We will not hold this meeting in-person (partially because of public health guidelines, partially because TriOS is closed). We will try to make a virtualized online meeting happen; otherwise we will cancel. We will have an update on this page by Friday, April 3 at 8pm.

John Eddie Kerr will deliver his long-anticipated presentation on LaTeX at his law library. He writes:

Not just for math and science, LaTeX has found its way into the law library I manage. I will demonstrate some of the documents I create in the library. I will also show what Gaelic and LaTeX have in common.

This will be a beginner-friendly presentation.

Jeff Smith will explain how he uses clusterssh to manage lots of Linux machines at once.

Each year, the Free Software Foundation holds a conference in Boston. This year, some people in Kitchener-Waterloo are organizing a satellite event to be held at the Delta Hotel in Waterloo. They write:

We're excited to be hosting our own version of LibrePlanet, an annual conference hosted by the Free Software Foundation in Boston for free software enthusiasts and anyone who cares about the intersection of technology and social justice. LibrePlanet brings together software developers, law and policy experts, activists, students, and computer users to learn skills, celebrate free software accomplishments, and face challenges to software freedom. Newcomers are always welcome, and LibrePlanet 2020 will feature programming for all ages and experience levels. The theme for LibrePlanet 2020 is "Free the Future".

For the first time ever, all the great presentations of LibrePlanet are coming to Canada! Bringing in the main talks via live stream, with space for local hallway track and more, LibrePlanet Canada Satellite Edition is your chance to meet with like-minded participants and take in the event from Canada. For those in Southern Ontario who find travel to Boston just beyond their price range, or those in Canada or anywhere else who have difficulties with travel to the USA, this is the version of LibrePlanet for you.

Tickets have a suggested price ranging from $50 (for students/low-waged) to $250 (for those being sponsored by their companies). Pricing is flexible in that you can pay less (or more!) for tickets depending on your financial circumstances.

Learn more about the conference and register at https://2020.libreplanet.ca/

R. Brent Clements will give a beginner-friendly tutorial on Audacity.

Mikalai Birukou will tell us about the third leg of his journey in building out web infrastructure at scale. He writes:

I have talked about Docker and LXC out of my own experience. Now I've been Salt-ing the whole infrastructure ( https://docs.saltstack.com/en/latest/ ).

I'd love to share my own finite experience, findings, choices (not ideal, of course). I'd love to hear your comments, your perspective and your "war stories".

As usual, I'll talk from a perspective of doing it from ground up, the simple way possible (forever novice).

 

Tim Laurence will discuss his adventures with USB over IP.

In the second half of the talk we will have a roundtable-type Q&A. Bring your questions! Bring your answers!

John Steel will give a beginner-friendly introduction to SSL certificates and Public Key Infrastructure (PKI).

Stephen Paul Weber will tell us about Dhall, a non-Turing-complete, non-repetitive configuration language intended to replace YAML and/or JSON.

(The Dhall logo is CC-BY 4.0 from the Dhall website.)

Update: Stephen's slides are here: https://singpolyma.net/presentations/2020/006/dhall/

Nathan Fish will tell us about systemd.

Chris Blasko will give an overview of computer vision, with an emphasis on object recognition.

Paul Nijjar will give a conceptual, high-level overview of how to use git, with the end goal of making a pull request on a Gitlab/Github project. This presentation will be beginner-friendly.

Hubert Chathi is a developer for Matrix, a real-time communications protocol.that supports end-to-end encrypted decentralized communication. Hubert will tell us about the project and some of its features.

Update: Hubert has posted his slides to his website: https://www.uhoreg.ca/documents/kwlug-2019-matrix/__/matrix

Sandeep Johri will tell us about how he uses Syncthing to keep his files safe.

Gheorghe Curelet-Balan will tell us about blockchains. He writes:

This talk will introduce the fundamental concepts & features of a blockchain (permanent distributed ledger, transaction & block building, block mining, proof of work, incentives, governance, etc.) in the context of bitcoin's step by step operation.

Sandeep Johri will tell us how he set up and secured his home network. His hope is that the audience can help him identify issues and vulnerabilities. This presentation will be beginner-friendly.

Mikalai Birukou will tell us about PrivacySafe, a product he is developing to provide "simple private and secure servers for your home".

Unfortunately, Joan will be unable to present for us in September. Stay tuned for a replacement presentation.

Andrew Cant will describe the tools and workflow behind WRDashboard, an information aggregator for Waterloo Region.

Jason Eckert has been using Vim for decades. He will give us a beginner-friendly tutorial of the text editor.

Update: Jason has provided his slides, linked below.

Mikalai Birukou will tell us about Docker Swarm, a native clustering system for Docker.

Paul Nijjar has an old and slow computer, so lives his life in a terminal window as much as possible. He will describe some of the end-user applications he uses in this interface, including: web surfing, playing multimedia files, reading news, notetaking, and more. This presentation is beginner-friendly.

Update 2: Mikalai has provided his slides and his sample Dockerfile configs. See the attachments below.

Update: Paul's notes are here: https://kwlug.org/node/1174

and some sample config files for the utilities he uses are here:

https://kwlug.org/sites/default/files/2019-07/2019-07-08-terminal-life-examples.tgz

Update: Due to an urgent family situation, John Kerr won't be able to present his LaTeX at the Law Library talk this month. The GDB presentation is still on, and we will have a roundtable discussion to close out the meeting.

Sergio Durigan Junior will give us an overview of GDB, the GNU Debugger. He will illustrate some basic usage and show us some exciting advanced features.

Update: The sources for Sergio's slides are here: https://git.sergiodj.net/talks/gdb-intro-kwlug.git/ . A PDF copy of the result is linked below.

We will have a roundtable discussion focused on commandline utilities such as wget, curl, and other commands you might find in shell scripts. (Update: this did not happen.)

(The GNU Archer Fish logo is licensed CC-BY-SA 3.0 by Jamie Guinan and Andreas Arnez)

Nathan Fish will tell us about the Interplanetary File System, a peer-to-peer distributed protocol that could replace HTTP and make the Web decentralized again.

Doug Moen will revisit Curv, the functional 3D modelling language he developed to create art using mathematics.

Bob B will give us an introduction to OpenVAS, the Open Vulnerability Access Scanner, including how he used Proxmox to set up his demo lab.

Victor Kofia will discuss NixOS and the Nix package manager. Nix takes a declarative approach to systems configurations, and all upgrades/rollbacks are atomic. It bills itself as "the purely functional Linux distribution."

Update: Bob took a screencast of his desktop during the presentation, which he combined with the audio from the podcast. Get it here: https://archive.org/download/kwlug-2019-04-01-openvms-nixos/KWLUG-OpenVAS-Proxmox-joined.mp4

Also, Bob provided some additional information following his presentation. He writes:

From my show and tell last night, some links of possible interest:

• How to install OpenVAS Vulnerability Scanner in Kali Linux (Easy peasy): https://www.linuxhelp.com/how-to-install-openvas-vulnerability-scanner-in-kali-linux
• Install OpenVAS on Debian 9 (Stretch) (I got this running inside a LXC container from this tutorial): https://www.blackhat.pm/tutorial-install-openvas-on-debian-9-stretch.html
• Kali Linux - Penetration testing Distribution: https://www.kali.org/
• Metasploitable - purposefully vulnerable machine for training: https://sourceforge.net/projects/metasploitable/
• Proxmox ISO installer can be found here: https://www.proxmox.com/en/proxmox-ve
• Adding Proxmox to an existing Debian Stretch machine: https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Install_Proxmox_VE_on_Debian_Stretch

Note: The location for this meeting has changed. It will now be held at TriOS College.

Chris Irwin will give us a practical overview of UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface), the successor to computer BIOSes, and GUID partition tables, the successor to MBR tables.

Jason Eckert will tell us about Pop!_OS, a Linux distribution by hardware manufacturer System76. This presentation will be beginner-friendly.

Unfortunately Tom will not be able to present the Linux Mint presentation this month.