Late last year I posted that I'd migrated my website to a new blogging package called Pelican, which is a static site generator. If you noticed that my site's been screamingly fast lately, that's why. My site doesn't have to be rendered one page at a time with PHP on the server, and it also doesn't use one of Dreamhost's likely overloaded database servers as its back end. However, this brings a couple of drawbacks. Logically, a site made out of static HTML5 pages doesn't have a control panel to log into, so there isn't any way of controlling how …

Leaning Tower of Hangout - noun phrase - The covid-19 quarantine phenomenon in which one discovers a stack of hangouts on one's work calendar, all for the exact same time, all flagged as required, all scheduled while you were asleep the night before.

ref, Towers of Hanoi.

I know, I know, I should get around to writing a proper New Year's post. I won't have time to do that for a day or so. I would like to make a brief announcement, however - there will be a development sprint for Project Byzantium at HacDC on 6 and 7 January 2012 starting in the early evening. It'll probably be cold at the 'space so dress warmly. We're going to be working on the final roadblock before we publish v0.1a, which is the captive portal, or the website that mesh clients will see when they first associate with …

The final schedule of events for tomorrow's RepRap build-a-thon has been announced:

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 …