Past Meetings

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.

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.