Past Meetings

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.

Continuing our successful Origin Stories presentations from last January, a fresh batch of KWLUG members will share their stories about how they first got involved with Linux and where it got them in life. 

Andrew Sullivan Cant will lead us through a tutorial on GNU Parallel, based upon the four videos in this Youtube playlist. This presentation will be useful on its own, but is possibly the introduction to a more advanced GNU Parallel presentation to be held later.

We are continuing the dinner meetup tradition at McCabe's Irish Pub and Grill 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 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.

Charles McColm will lead a tutorial on vector-drawing program Inkscape, showing how it can be used for flyers, logos and more.

Colin_ will demonstrate the unique features of Logseq, an offline-first, privacy-focused open-source knowledge base. He will show how to use the integrated todo items and flashcards to track progress, manage sprawling projects, and boost memory retention, and how its research capabilities have helped turn him into a productivity superhero.

We are continuing the dinner meetup tradition at The Coop Wicked Chicken in Kitchener, starting at 7pm. Note that this dinner is on a Monday. 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.

Note: The location for this meeting will be hybrid, at the UW location.

Andrew Maguire from NetData will discuss "10 practical machine learning use cases in observability!" He writes: 

I will walk through 10 practical, clearly motivated and formulated use cases for ML in observability. What is the problem, what are the inputs and what are the outputs. The main overarching theme is that of “ML as UX”  being an approach that actually can be very useful for us once we cut through all the buzz and hype from our marketing friends. These use cases give us “humans in the loop” more tools that sometimes might help us solve our problem quicker and less painfully. Let’s go beyond dashboards and begin to look at useful, mature, practical and realistic ways we can make ML less sexy and more boring - just another tool we can leverage to get on with our day quicker.

John Steel will continue his Cools Tools presentation on mitmproxy with a deeper dive into HTTP and how mitmproxy interacts with it.

We are continuing the dinner meetup tradition at McCabe's Irish Pub and Grill 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 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.

We will hold this meeting online, and at the University of Waterloo location.

Mikalai Birukou will offer an interactive demo of the latest version of PrivacySafe, his privacy-protecting web platform. Audience members a will be invited to follow along by downloading the PrivacySafe clients on their own computers and interacting with the features. Low- or zero-touch clients are available for MacOS, Linux, and Windows.

Nathan G will tell us about his efforts to emulate the Game Wave Family Entertainment System, a Canadian-designed video game console. 

We are continuing the dinner meetup tradition at The Coop Wicked Chicken in Kitchener, starting at 7pm. Note that this dinner is on a Monday. 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.

Update, Sept 7: We will be holding this meeting in a hybrid format, online and at the Dana Porter library. 

John Driezen will demonstrate some features of  Double Commander, including how  to rename multiple files. John Steel will demonstrate the fuzzy finder fzf, and the SSL snooper mitmproxy. Andrew Cant will show us Foreman, a Ruby gem that makes it easy to launch projects with multiple processes. Nathan and Nick will tell us about xargs.

Mikalai will present PrivacySafe next month.

We are continuing the dinner meetup tradition at McCabe's Irish Pub and Grill 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 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.

This meeting will be held online. 

Ron Barnes will demonstrate KDE Connect, a program which allows easy communication between all of your devices. Ron calls this "the killer app of KDE".

Brent Clements will demonstrate the digital audio workstation software Ardour. (We rescheduled this presentation from July's meeting.)

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

This is a supplementary informal meeting; we will still hold virtual 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.

Note: This meeting will be held online.

Note: Brent had to postpone his Ardour presentation. Jason Eckert kindly agreed to fill in with a fun presentation refreshing us about the UNIX philosophy.

Jason Paul will tell us about Dev Containers and Cloud Development environments. He writes: 

Development containers are Docker containers that are specifically configured to provide a fully featured development environment- including libraries, frameworks, and other software dependencies.  The dev container and configuration are defined as code, so it can be consistently reproduced and shared, and can be spun up when needed and shut down/destroyed when finished.  Jason will go over a number of  options for using Dev Containers with Visual Studio Code locally on Linux, as well as some options for cloud based development environments that use this technology.

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 Wednesday. Future restaurant meetups will alternate between Mondays and Wednesdays.

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.

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.