Presentations and Talks

The following is a list of talks and presentation that I have done on various topics.

They are sorted by the most recent first.

• 2025 November 3: Home Assistant Environment Canada Weather Alerts, and Appdaemon (link to video). In this presentation, I show how to get an email alert when Environment Canada issues a weather warning, watch, alert or statement. As well, I show how to use Appdaemon for getting a twice daily Forecast, aggregating data from my weather station, Environment Canada, and hourly and daily forecast from the Norwegian Weather Service (Met.no). The second part of the presentation shows how to use Appdaemon to implement a custom interface to a whole house Humidifier.
• 2025 February 3: Home Assistant For Weather (link to video), including temperature, humidity, rainfall, and lightning strikes. Also covered integrating IoT devices using rtl_433, such as AcuRite weather sensors and stations, and using WeeWx to get long term storage and statistics.
• 2024 November 4: Home Assistant to monitor indoor climate (link to video): including: radon, VoC, and CO2. Also covered MQTT via Mosquitto, long term data storage using InfluxDB, and visualization using Grafana.
• Microcontrollers and the Internet of Things, for the KWLUG.
• Islamic Astronomy and its Legacy in Arabic Origin Of Modern Star Names for the Kitchener-Waterloo Royal Astronomical Society of Canada.
• Incremental Backup For Linux for the KWLUG.
• Medieval Islamic Astronomy And Its Influence on Renaissance Europe for the Kitchener-Waterloo Royal Astronomical Society of Canada
• Forgotten History: Al-Sufi's Book Of Fixed Stars for Kitchener-Waterloo Royal Astronomical Society of Canada
• Open Source Software for Astronomy for the KWLUG meeting
• Frugal Astrophotography for the Kitchener-Waterloo Royal Astronomical Society of Canada
• Raspberry Pi Projects at the KWLUG
• Replacing a laptop disk on Linux and making hibernate work
• Flashing Android OmniROM on Acer Iconia A500 Tablet, Jan 5, 2016.
• Sept 2015 How To Replace A Linux Laptop's Hard Disk Preserving All The Data On it, and allowing the laptop to hibernate.
• Libvirt, KVM and VirtualBox, Nov 3, 2014
• Software Freedom Day, Kitchener: Making a Living with Free/Libre Open Source Software, Sept 20, 2014
• What is OpenWRT, how to install it, and how it is useful for bandwidth monitoring.
• Drupal Performance: Tips and Tricks at the Drupal Camp Toronto 2014
• Drupal Performance: What you need to know, for the London, Ontario Drupal Users Group
• Panel: Earning a living from Free/Libre Open Source Softare (FLOSS)
• HUGE? How to deal with 381 modules, 174GB database and 200 million row tables at Drupal Camp Toronto 2012
• Web Site Performance Optimization and Scalability at Drupal Camp Toronto 2011
• Drupal Camp Toronto 2010 3.4 million page views per day, 92 million per month, one server, and Drupal!
• On June 3, 2010: London (Ontario) Drupal Users Group: Overview of Views and Panels.
• On May 3, 2010: Overview of the MySQL Database.
• On April 20, 2010: 2.4 million page views/day, 60 million per month, one server at the San Francisco 2010 DrupalCon
• On February 9, 2010: Overview of the LAMP stack for the February GTA LUG meeting.
• On November 2, 2009 at the Kitchener/Waterloo Linux Users Group: Linux Tools for Monitoring and Peformance.
• On October 30, 2009 at Seneca College's Free Software and Open Source Symposium: Open Source for Fun and Profit: Making a career out of FOSS.
• On October 24, 2009 at Ontario Linux Fest: Introduction ot the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP/Python/Perl).
• Drupal For Fun And Profit: Making A Career Out Of Open Source, at DrupalCon Boston 2008, Drupal Camp Toronto 2008, as well as at the KWLUG.
• August 2007 Drupal Performance Tuning And Optimization; And Userpoints at OpenCraft in Cairo, Egypt.
• May 2006 Drupal Camp Toronto Presentation: Building Drupal Community Sites. Here is a one minute video by Roland Tanglao