We are continuing the dinner meetup tradition at J&B Family Restaurant 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 79 Victoria St N in Kitchener, near the corner of Victoria and Duke Here is a map. 

There is parking in front of the restaurant. The nearest City parking lot is at Hall Lane.

Normally you can probably just show up, but J&B is a small place. If you plan to attend please make sure to RSVP to dinner@kwlug.org, so the organizers can make an accurate reservation. If you know what you plan to order from the menu, please include your order as well so the restaurant staff can prepare food in advance.

Note: the location for the in-person meeting will continue to be LIB 323 at the Dana Porter library, not LIB 329. This will be our in-person home for the indefinite future.

Megan McDermott and Martin Anderson-Clutz from the Waterloo Region Drupal User Group will tell us about the venerable content management system Drupal, and its relevance in the modern web. They will review Drupal basics, show examples of what Drupal can do and demonstrate installation, setting up content, adding functionality and more. 

Doug Moen will share "A Luddite Perspective on GrapheneOS", a secure and open-source firmware for (some) Android phones. Amongst other things, he will share why GrapheneOS is suited to his threat model and ethical system, why Calyx and other FOSS phone distros are less well suited, and why he rejected the GrapheneOS app store in favor of F-Droid. Along the way he will discuss the philosophies behind his choices, including  Ned Ludd, malware, surveillance capitalism, Kant's Categorical Imperative, and threat models. 

This month's meeting is part of Waterloo Tech Week. They request that we add the following blurb to our publicity: 

We are official event hosts with Waterloo Tech Week 2025, a celebration of what’s been built here, and what’s still to come. We’re building something great together. September 8-11, 2025. waterlootechweek.ca

Bob B will show us some esoteric "Stupid Bash tricks" he has collected over the years.

Jason Eckert will tell us how to use Hugo to generate static websites.

Khalid Baheyeldin will continue his series of talks about Home Assistant by telling us about AppDaemon, an execution environment that interfaces with Home Assistant for writing custom apps in Python. He will demonstrate a simple app, and then show some more involved ones, including an app for emailing weather updates, and an app to replace his humidifier's humidistat.
 

Spencer Hughes will demonstrate how he uses Ceph and Proxmox for network storage. He writes:

Proxmox supports Ceph for VM storage, but the built-in Ceph deployment can be used for much more. Learn how to use the Proxmox-managed Ceph cluster for storing any kind of data and accessing it over the network. 

Spencer Hughes will show us how he plans his annual Christmas party using FLOSS. He writes: 

This talk describes the technology I use to organize and operate my annual Christmas party using open‑source software and other tech services. Topics include RSVP handling, inventory and food scheduling, network and media, sharing useful links, and some fun party favours we’ve setup.

Khalid Baheyeldin will demonstrate some additional ways he uses Home Assistant. He will explain voice to text functionality, email and voice alerts for such events as extreme temperatures/humidity and door openings. He will also demonstrate a custom-made garage sensor that informs him about a light that is left on unintentionally, and the surprising reason why he had to swap out the ambient light component in the sensor after several years.

Shravan Dwarka will tell us about the popular floss database MariaDB and the powerful load balancer, proxy and firewall for SQL traffic ProxySQL.