I've already done my obligatory post of some version of the song Birthday by The Cruxshadows what happened this last year that I can look back upon?
It's funny. I was sitting there earlier tonight at dinner (yes, I post-dated this entry so it would match up with the other one) and I came up with a bunch of stuff that I'm kicking myself for not having written down. I guess that's the way it goes - thoughts go in, thoughts go out, but unless you trap them somehow they're probably not going to come back. But I'll take a stab …
Now that I've had a couple of days to sleep and get most of my brain operational again, how about some stuff that other parts of me have stumbled across?
Building your own electronics is pretty difficult. The actual electrical engineering aside you still have to cut, etch, and drill your own printed circuit boards which is a lengthy and sometimes frustrating task. Doubly so when multi layer circuit boards are involved because they're so fiddly and easy to get wrong. There is one open source project that I know of called the Rabbit Pronto which is a RepRap print …
There is a phenomenon I've come to call Ubuntu Syndrome, after the distribution of Linux which has become the darling of nearly every hosting provider out there (and no, I won't call them bloody cloud providers). All things considered, it seems to have a good balance of stable software, ease of use, availability, and diversity of available software. It also lends itself readily to the following workflow:
Use a tool like packer.io to automagically instantiate a copy of Ubuntu at the hosting provider of choice.
I know I haven't posted much (at all, really) for most of a month. I'd love to say that I've been out having wacky adventures and gallivanting about Time and Space, but I haven't. Work has been, well, work, and eating me alive to boot. This is the first evening in quite a while (because I'm writing this as a timed post) I haven't gone straight to bed after getting home. So, no interesting news articles, no attempts at humor, no witty insights, However, last December I took the opportunity to pay the Monterey Bay Aquarium a visit. I don't …
3D printers are great for making things, including more of themselves. The first really accessible 3D printer, the RepRap was designed to be buildable from locally sourceable components - metal rods, bolds, screws, and wires, and the rest can be run off on another 3D printer. There is even a variant called the JunkStrap which, as the name implies, involves repurposing electromechanical junk for basic components. There are other useful shop tools which don't necessarily have open source equivalents, though, like laser cutters for precisely cutting, carving, and etching solid materials. Lasers are finicky beasts - they require lots of power, they …
The thing about microblogging, or services which allow posts that are very short (around 140 characters) and are disseminated in the fashion of a broadcast medium is that it lends itself to fire-and-forget posting. See something, post it, maybe attach a photograph or a link and be done with it. If your goal is to get information out to lots of people at once leveraging one's social network is criticial: Post something, a couple of the users following you repost it so that more people see it, a couple of their followers repost it in turn... like ripples on the …
Midway through December of 2014 Windbringer suffered a catastrophic hardware failure following several months of what I've come to term the Dell Death Spiral (nontrivial CPU overheating even while in single user mode, flaky wireless, USB3 ports fail, USB2 ports fail, complete system collapse). Consequently I was in a bit of a scramble to get new hardware, and after researching my options (as much as I love my Inspiron at work they don't let you finance purchases) I spec'd out a brand new Dell XPS 15.
Behind the cut I'll list Windbringer's new hardware specs and everything I did to …
I now have a contact page for the Brighter Brains Speakers Bureau. If you are interested in having me present on a professional basis, please look over my bio and contact me through that route. We'll work it out from there. Whoa. Is this what being grown up is like? Weird.
