Last week there was a cluster of outbreaks of the future (thanks, Warren Ellis, for the term) in the field of 3D printing that caught me by surprise, not by their appearance but how they appeared in rapid succession to one another.
The first is an industrial grade 3D printer called the Objet1000, which is marketed for the production of full-scale prototypes and industrial models. It has a fabrication platform 39 inches by 31 inches in size (a little bigger, actually, but I'm deliberately dropping decimals today), and can print with any of 120 different substances, of which 14 at …
Now that things have calmed down a little, I've finally had time to finish and post one of my presentations from the Washington, DC cryptoparty. My presentation on GnuPG is now available for download. If there is anythings that needs to be fixed in it, please let me know and I'll get a new release out.
Please bear in mind that this is a high-level lesson on how to use GnuPG, so you won't learn how AES works or how to implement SHA-1, because you don't need to know that stuff to sign e-mail or encrypt files. If you want …
I still find the most disturbing thing of all how much of Manhattan was still without power. It's a little unnerving to see huge corporate towers completely dark - nobody working late, nobody fixing them up, just... nobody home.
This is probably one of the hardest blog posts I've ever tried to write. It's hard to write something like this so that it's not all drama, not all pathos, not all "holiday tragedy human interest story" (which is its own unique flavour of article, to be sure), and yet not come across like I'm trying to manipulate people by tugging at their heart strings. So, to that end, I've opted to write only the facts as I understand them, with a minimum of linguistic ornamentation.
Mylia, Chey, Mika, and Cindy are old friends of the family, and rented a …
A few months ago Project Byzantium sent an application for the Access Innovation Prize, an initiative that will award five $20kus grants to projects operating in five problem spaces (Blackout Resilience, Making Crypto Easy, The Bounty, The Golden Jellybean, and the Access Facebook Award).
As a result of the damage done to New York City by Hurricane Sandy the week before last, Project Byzantium was contacted by representatives of several NGOs and non-profit organizations we've been in contact with as a result of our work on community wireless mesh networks. We were asked if Byzantium Linux might be useful in assisting relief efforts in New York City by restoring communications on the local level. As this is one of our primary use cases, we responded in the affirmative, and were told that we might be asked to go to New York City to help …
Project Byzantium is back from New York City, where we were assisting the people of the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn restore their communications infrastructure following Hurricane Sandy.
I don't mention it very often in this blog, but my lovely wife and partner Lyssa Heartsong has been both knitting and spinning her own yarn for the past few years. In recent weeks, she has been setting up her own Etsy store to sell her work. Right now she has some of her private stash of hand-spun yarn up for sale as well as a few jewelry pieces and more will be on the way shortly.
If you'd like to take a look at what Lyssa has for sale, here's a link to her store. She would appreciate it …
I wound up not giving the whole presentation to the DC chapter of the Internet Society last week because the format got changed up at the last minute. But anyway, here is the presentation I would have given in PDF and OpenOffice Presentation formats.
A little over two weeks ago Sitwon, Haxwithaxe and I made the trek to Barcelona, Spain for the International Summit For Community Wireless Networks, partially because we thought that we might get some useful things out of it for Project Byzantium, but also because Project Byzantium had been invited to attend and present some of our work and ideas for the community at large at the conference. So, arrangements were made in due course, and our journey took us from Baltimore to Philadelphia for a layover, and then an eight hour transatlantic flight carried us to Spain. Sitwon was traveling …
