Category: BerkeleyLUG News/Events

(reposting, as this was posted earlier (2019-09-13) in a demoted location)

One-off Pi Day

BerkeleyLUG is having a one-off Pi Day this Sunday, 2019-09-15 from 12Noon to 3pm at Cafe Blue Door.  The regular BerkeleyLUG Pi Day is still the first Sunday of the month (next one is on October 6th.)

As regular BerkeleyLUG participant tomrlopes wrote on the mailing-list within the past two months :

Same place and time as the Berkeley LUG meetings:  Cafe Blue Door from noon till 3 pm.  Raspberry Pi, Arduino or any single board computer welcome.

Tips:
Enable ssh (headless):  create empty file ssh in the boot volume
Preconfigure WIFI: mount rootfs partition and edit /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf  so that it looks like this
: country=US
: ctrl_interface=DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=netdev
: update_config=1
: network={
:       ssid=”Blue Door Cafe”
:       psk=”bluedoor2019″
: }

Search for a new locale

Cafe Blue Door has gotten quite crowded with students on the last couple of regular BerkeleyLUG meetups, what with Cal’s Fall Semester fully underway.

As regular BerkeleyLUG participant michaelpaoli wrote earlier this week in a Comment following the last post https://berkeleylug.com/2019/09/02/site-hosting-moved-httpsberkeleylug-com-now-on-balug-virtual-machine/ :

… meeting venue has been bit of an issue and there’ve been some changes on that. This past Sunday’s meeting (2019-09-08) didn’t work so well with venue … though still many of us did settle/”squeeze” in there after a while (and attempting some nearby alternatives).

We’re continuing to look at / research alternatives – both venue, and possibly adjusting timing (notably possibly starting earlier).

One alternative that may be worth exploring before/during/after the One-off Pi Day this Sunday is Wrecking Ball Coffee Roaster’s 1600 Shattuck Ave shop in North Berkeley, at the site of what used to be a Philz Coffee.
As its East Bay Express writeup Wrecking Ball Coffee Expands to the East Bay wrote :

The downstairs level of the two-story cafe is full of light. Upstairs, there’s a long communal table for studying, a couple of small tables, some armchairs, a couch, and a small outdoor area that’ll be turned into a kids’ play area.

Note from the respective Yelp pages https://www.yelp.com/biz/85-c-bakery-cafe-berkeley-4 and https://www.yelp.com/biz/algorithm-coffee-berkeley-2 that both previous BerkeleyLUG meetup venues 85C Bakery Cafe and Algorithm Coffee shut down within the last half-year.
Please feel free to share your thoughts and suggestions on any or all of the above, in the below Comments.

So, effective 2019-06-09 we have a new meeting location:
Cafe Blue Door
2244 Bancroft Way
Berkeley, CA 94704
1-510-665-6000
(please also see our meetings page)
as 85C Bakery Cafe has permanently closed their Berkeley location. I think folks will generally find the variety of food and beverages at Cafe Blue Door to be better than 85C Bakery Cafe, and Cafe Blue Door also lacks the display of sportsball screens and the noise of them and their fans that had become quite problematic at Bobby G’s Pizzeria. Cal students also return for regular session 2019-08-21, so we will want to keep that in mind as we continue to investigate potentially better meeting locations, as Cafe Blue Door may become more crowded/noisy once the Cal students are back in full force.

85C Bakery Cafe is now permanently closed – at least for their Berkeley location.
So … BerkeleyLUG meetings – new location to be decided soon.
In the interim, there is, another Pi Day: 2019-06-02 noon-3pm meeting at:
Algorithm Coffee Co.
1122 University Ave.
Berkeley, CA 94702-1699
See also: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/berkeleylug

And yes, after various communications, at least for now we’re moving our meeting location back to
85C Bakery Cafe. (for current meetings information, location, etc., see: Meetings).

Algorithm Coffee Co. was certainly worth the “experiment”, and certainly had a fair number of advantages,

there were a couple key issues that made it “not (yet?) good enough” to continue meeting there – at least presently, most notably:

• noise levels and acoustics – the place has little in the way of sound dampening materials/surfaces, fairly loud music, and patrons can be relatively loud to.  Net effect, we had approximately 20% of or attendees find it intolerably loud – so loud they wouldn’t come back and/or it was headache inducing, etc.  And I’d also guestimate about 1/3 or more found the noise level rather to quite annoying … e.g. I could converse with persons adjacent to me, one further away or across the table, with difficulty, but further away at same table – mostly couldn’t have a conversation – I couldn’t overtalk the noise for them to hear me, nor could I generally hear them over the noise.
• seating – seating was difficult/tight – though we did manage to get chairs have have most (about 90%) of us squeezed around one large table, there weren’t that many free chairs available, and a lot of the time folks were shuffling chairs about, or looking for chairs that might be available that could be relocated (e.g. most all the outdoor seating chairs got dragged in by patrons, so the would actually have a seat at a table).

So … back to 85C – at least for now.  We’ll continue to look for better – several persons are working on it – feel free also to assist/volunteer/suggest – might be best to mostly do that on our List.

Here’s a bit more useful info than the previous brief posting on our hopeful change of venue for the Berkeley Linux Users Group away from 85C Bakery & Cafe and to Algorithm Coffee Company :

• Algorithm Coffee Company’s main webpage is https://www.algorithmcoffee.co/
• The direct Algorithm Coffee Co. ‘Location’ webpage is https://www.algorithmcoffee.co/pages/location and the main West Berkeley location is on the South side of University Ave in-between San Pablo Ave and Curtis St.; also located diagonally across University Ave from the Berkeley Public Library’s West Branch landmark https://www.berkeleypubliclibrary.org/locations/west-branch
• Mapping/Directions to the 1122 University Ave shop are via GoogleMaps at https://goo.gl/maps/fighiLn2CYv and/or via OpenStreetMap at https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/1671198550
• The full Sunday hours of Algorithm Coffee Co’s Flagship Location in West Berkeley are 9:00am – 5:00pm (as per its ‘Location’ webpage ), although BerkeleyLUG has been regularly and officially meeting at the 12:00 Noon – 3:00pm timeslot from its inception up to the present (as per BerkeleyLUG’s ‘Meetings’ webpage at https://berkeleylug.com/meetings/
• Here is Algorithm Coffee Co’s pic of the inside of their main location….
• Besides the previously provided links to this very website here (https://berkeleylug.com; the starting point for posting comments), one can also provide feedback and suggestions on the move to the new location at the BerkeleyLUG mailing-list  (see https://berkeleylug.com/googlegroup to subscribe to or to access mailing-list messages.)

Please feel free to leave your comments and thoughts on this post below.

Yes, we’ve got a new location:
Algorithm Coffee Co.
1122 University Ave.
Berkeley, CA 94702-1699

Temporarily trying it out, or permanently?  I’d presume permanent unless updated here and here.

The BerkeleyLUG meetups have been moved from Bobby G’s Restaurant to 85c Bakery at 21 Shattuck Square just across the street.  85C Bakery’s direct contact telephone number is 510.540.8585 and the store’s general website is www.85cbakerycafe.com/

Meetup dates and times remain the same, as listed at the ‘Meetings’ page https://berkeleylug.com/meetings/

Reason.
For those of you who still may not realize this, Bobby G’s Pizzeria has been under new ownership since this past Winter; several months after the Bobby G’s post of November 8, 2015 https://berkeleylug.com/2015/11/08/bobby-gs/. The new owners have kept things they way they were before under the restaurant’s founder Bobby G — well, *mostly* that way — until they made some key renovations this past Summer. Among the most significant renovations the owners made during the last couple of months significantly affecting our BerkeleyLUG meetups were their adding more TV screens around the restaurant, adding more TV speakers all around the place routinely blaring televised sports, and making enough structural renovations to the place (e.g., raising the ceiling) so that the televised sports sounds heavily reverberated all around the place.

The key decision we made was essentially based upon our inability to actively participate in BerkeleyLUG discussion at Bobby G’s, given all the ambient noise and sound discordancy (“vibrations” as someone put it one afternoon at Bobby G’s.) BerkeleyLUG participants actually had to leave Bobby G’s on past meetups over the last month or so,  due to the level of noise preventing even simple conversation!

This situation was simply unacceptable.  And we received a clear indication at a recent meetup that Bobby G’s new management wasn’t liable to accommodate us by lowering the speaker volume on the televised sportsgames just for us, while other paying customers were cheering on their sports teams and enjoying their beers.

Hence we made the change to the new venue nearby.

Please respond with your thoughts and suggestions in the Comments section below or on the BerkeleyLUG GoogleGroup mailing list https://berkeleylug.com/googlegroup/

As announced 2016-09-26 we have a new venue.
For our meeting dates, times, location, see:
Meetings – BerkeleyLUG
Anyway, generally best to look there for our meeting information.

Yes, at present our main web page has a series of blog posts … some of which may have information which is, or may become, quite outdated.

Perhaps we ought change how we have that laid out on the site, and how (un)clear that certain content is/isn’t blog postings. I expect we’ll at least discuss that soon – likely at upcoming meeting(s) and/or on list.

I want to express my gratitude to Bobby G’s Pizzeria and their staff at 2072 University Ave for providing a great atmosphere for us to host our meetings on the second and fourth Sundays of each month from noon to three. Chef Anthony’s Fettuccine today was perfectly prepared, beautifully arranged and delicious. The six televisions provide entertainment between talking about Linux. The pizza and extensive beer list are always a hit. Thanks Bobby.