The weekend of the RepRap build-a-thon at HacDC started off simply: Lyssa and I went to dinner at Konami. We haven't been out for sushi for a number of months, due to my getting sick there in 2007. However, the food is still good and we enjoyed ourselves. I was unusually popular that night; my cellphone kept ringing every few minutes for various and sundry reasons. After dinner I dropped Lyssa off at home, loaded my gear into the trunk of my car, and headed to Hasufin's to pick him up because we were off to HacDC to help set …
Saturday, 24 January 2009 Main Auditorium 10:00am Welcome and introductions 10:30am Plenary: "The RepRap Project" by Zach Hoeken Smith, Director, RepRap Research Foundation 11:15am RepRap Technology Overview from Local RepRap Builders 11:45am Activities Outline by R. Mark Adams 12:00pm Break for Lunch 1:00pm Build the Cartesian Robot with Zach Hoeken Smith
HacDC Workshop 1:00pm Assemble the RepRap Electronics 1:00pm Learn to Solder Breakout with MAKE:DC's Adam Koeppel 2:00pm Arduino Basics Breakout with HacDC's R. Mark Adams 3:00pm …
On 24 and 25 January 2008, HacDC, a hacker space located in Washington, DC will be holding a RepRap build-a-thon in conjunction with the Baltimore RepRap User's Group. The build-a-thon starts at 10:00am EST5EDT on Saturday and will run until 3:00pm EST5EDT Sunday.
The RepRap is an open source rapid prototyper which is unusual in two ways: first, it is affordable for the home hobbyist to both construct and operate (typically, it costs $500us to build a RepRap from scrach, compared to the $49,000+ that industrial rapid prototypers cost). Second, the RepRap is capable …
Lyssa took sick last week. On Thursday she woke up having trouble breathing while I was in the shower, which threw our plans into a tailspin. I took a sickday and drove her to urgent care (where I seem to spend far too much time in the waiting room these days), only to discover that she has a sinus infection. Lyssa spent the bulk of the weekend in bed pumped full of antibiotics and anti-inflammatory drugs, with the odd sortie to get food in some form or go shopping.
This also meant that I was running solo when I went …
Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, sapient lifeforms of all ages: welcome to the holiday season. I just wish that it didn't involve so much road rage in the DC metroplex, let alone being greeted with an upraised middle finger rather than a wave of good cheer. Maybe I'm old fashioned, but wasn't this traditionally the time of year to be good to one another (if no other time) and practice random acts of senseless kindness, especially during a season that seems to be blowing through like a nor'easter this time 'round. I think I've had a chance to blink …
Sorry for another late post, everyone - between work, wedding stuff, and trying to keep from falling ill, I've had a lot on my plate lately.
On Tuesday night, after coming home and having dinner, I ran a couple of last-minute errands for Lyssa and then set course once again for Washington, DC proper for the weekly HacDC administrative meeting. While I'm technically not a member because I haven't started paying dues yet, I've been doing a lot of hands-on electronics work at the site, more specifically my steampunk sonic screwdriver. Most of what I've been doing lately has been repairing …
While we didn't get hit by Hurricane Hannah, the DC metroplex certainly felt her wrath late Friday and all day Saturday. I don't want to say that it was raining cats and dogs but not long after waking up on Saturday morning I saw a squadron of squirrels wearing what appeared to be miniature SWAT gear high-tailing it through rain blowing at a forty-five degree angle toward a nondescript white van in the parking lot. Unfortunately, they've moved back in and are busily digging in the coffee and aloe vera plants on the balcony, Lyssa tells me.
If you normally browse my website directly (i.e., not using an RSS feed aggregator of some kind) you'll see that I made some major changes to the front page late last night. For the past couple of days I've been profiling load times and such like, and discovered that I could improve the code and structure markedly with some changes. I've been using the Firebug and YSlow plugins to see where the bottlenecks were, and as a result I removed a half-dozen or so badges from weblog directories that did little else but add to the page loading time …
One of the main reasons that I've been hanging out at HacDC lately is the fact that they've got a pretty well stocked electronics lab in the loft. There are shelves on the walls holding parts for sale and parts that have been salvaged from discarded equipment, boxes and boxes of spare everything you can imagine, and a couple of racks of power tools and other sundry equipment... in short, all stuff I don't have at my apartment.
More the point, the HacDC loft is a place where I can safely work on projects and not mess up the environment …
