Greetings List Lurkers,
Had to fire up the pellet stove this morning... Old man winter is on his
way...
This weekend was consumed by the Shelburne Mini Maker fair, which came
around on two of the nicest sunlit days. It was an excellent time and I
will go into greater detail as we move into discussing the TechnoRubble
project.
Dr. Mark Enhglehart's Mac Lampshade that boots lubuntu Linux. This is now
a feature at the Adult Swim, and is worth looking at... damn thing is
spooky...
Anyway, on to the status of the current Projects!:
THE TECHNORUBBLE REPORT TECHNORUBBLE -
The Website http://technorubble.org,http://technorubble.com
Setting up at the Shelburne Mini Maker Fair September 24 & 25, 2016 was
easy and cool. Young Shawn-of-the-dead and his lovely daughter 'Bree
helped and supported the effort. Looks we walked away with about $37.00
in technorubble sales, and a whole lot of good will from the makers who
forgot stuff or needed stuff, as the TechnoRubble collection often had
what they needed onsite. Ideologically the important concept was that the
entire TechnoRubble Project shall go to support the development and
deployment of the Barre Brain Barn Maker Space. Again, we need more
TechnoRubble. We are working out the details for getting this to us. The
idea is to get people to mail their TechnoRubble to us in a USPS Flat
Rate Box. We had an excellent sign at the fair that graced our booth
thanks to the...
VINYL CUTTER
I could not even properly spell vinyl when I began, but the good news is that
the US Cutter vinyl cutter is in place, assembled, operational and tested. Dr.
Mark used the cutter to continue a stencil project for him and show me some
smoke about vinyl cutting, kind of a maker thing. The prototype and
disorganized site for this is:
http://docbox.flint.com:8081/maker
I kinda feel bad because I finally figured out that you cut sticky backed
vinyl upside down and backwards. The stuff I gave Dr. Mark was basically
wrong. At this point I am seriously considering adding the plotter to
octoprint. Basically this would involve setting up a point where a cron
job would take any file in the que, run it through pstoedit with the
appropriate switches and sending it to /dev/lpr/usb0. The real question
remains how long can the USB cable get?
3DPRINT
Again, the good news is that the pre-ordered extrusion heads which arrived
before I began my travels to Washington DC arrived, and we suddenly had a
3Dprint capability. The bad news is that this lasted about two days.
Why is this so damn hard?
Again the key to this appears to bre the 3Decology constructed around the
HICTOP Prusa I3 3D Desktop Printer, whivch seems to help a lot, at least
there is a place to store the tools this thing needs. The take away here
is that 3D infrastructure is important to facilitate printing. I fully
intend to upolad a picture of the 3Decology here:
http://docbox.flint.com:8081/3D_print
I really want to get back to making angle brackets and cat statues...
Now I need to learn a tool to help me actually make something, and what I need
are Bezels. Any ideas or help would be much appreciated.
TRANTOR
The latest project coming sideways at us is Marius's server, which I have
tentatively named "Trantor" (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trantor). We
hope to have the entire Linux Format DVD series available there. God help me
if I have not started a visual.bash project for this, and the project now has a
website:
http://docbox.flint.com:8081/trantor
The first huge accomplishment was beyond starting the software, actually
backing up all 250 giga bytes we already have online.
Last week we got a test of trantor up and running. If you want to see it
try:
http://docbox.flint.com/~flint/trantor/test/
As you can see it containds all the
scanned in CD covers and backs.
CD cover acquisition was accomplished with the use of gimp, a
script-fu and something called deskew.
The special sauce used to get this prototype of trantor online was sphinx,
which now rocks my world. I am getting interest from some parties in
contributing more stuff to trantor. Do not be bashful. let me know if you
want something faithfully curated and systematically reproduced as nice
clickable html...
VMulater:
This is a working demo if you are interested in the wonderful world of zVM, I
have a ziddlewiki supporting this demo available at:
http://docbox.flint.com:8081/vm
Again, the bottom line is that Docker and tmux work fine together...
I may try to get a presentation of this together. Watch this space.
Anyone out there willing to go off the reservation with VM5.3?
Could you turn the Raspberry Pi into an IBM VM emulator? As discovered last
week, it appears yes...
http://www.rs-online.com/designspark/electronics/blog/my-raspberry-pi-thinks-it-s-a-mainframe
...and it appears here on a PI B. What will it do on a PI3? Still holding,
but getting warmer...
PITCHBOX
You may have heard that the PiTch-Box is an enclosure built out of the shipping
case the Raspberry Pi Touch Display comes in. The power supply design is
actually coming along. The latest incarnation of the PiTchBox is the PiTchBox
LunchBox which should be up on the site.
http://docbox.flint.com:8081/PiTchBox
The wonderful thing about our current society is that there is a great deal of
activity in the area of basement agriculture. In the spirit of this and due to
the fact fall is on the way here in the Frozen North, I have ordered a basement
enclosure for growing plants in. The goal here will be to experiment with the
enhanced phosphor Grow Lights attached to the PiTchBox. This would Flint
Indoor Phosphor Enhanced Indoor Greenhouse to keep me sane this winter.
I got the tent in the mail last week... More on this project as it
unfolds.
I hope to show Bit Ed one of the DC-DC converters, they are nifty, I will
try desperately to bring one today.
Anyway, we need to continue to develop the software and hardware PiTchBox
library such as...
JARVIS ON JENKINS
You may recall that brother Kevin Cole has ported Jarvis, a voice recognition
product to run on a Raspberry PI3. This is exciting and we are attempting to
reproduce this here in the Casa Flint Lab... His current comments is that
other projects are using Google or Amazon voice recognition. His is hard core
local.
http://docbox.flint.com:8081/raspberry#JarvisOnJenkins
In continuing travels and travails this project is on a hiatus, but is not out
of active development... This week will hopefully bring some developments...
PYRS
PYRS is in deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, background, I remain fascinated with
the idea of writing a python tax library... PYRS - A python interface to the
IRS! (http://docbox.flint.com:8081/pyrs) Maybe the conference can dissuade me.
This is at the hold point...
KINDLE LIBERATION FRONT
The biggest issue with the Kindles is that they are so damn useful...
http://docbox.flint.com:8081/kindle
Sadly Amazon no longer appears to be selling Kindle Fires for less than
$45.00 each... a real bummer.
To summarize, the meeting today is again at 40 Washington Street, Barre, VT
05641.
Topics for discussion as usual remain:
- Open Source Educational Human Development
I am working on an idea... I am changing the priority of our
eternal needs, and placing education first.
- Maker Movement A Maker Space in Barre? Why not? Could it be that the
commercial power centers do not yet appreciate the value? I need to
revise my paper on this subject and get it out to Lucas Jensen
who has good ideas about a Barre Maker Space.
- Move BOSI to become more git centric... develop gittlywiki... working!
check out tiddlywiki5 here: https://github.com/Jermolene/TiddlyWiki5
We still need to convert... Yea buddy...
- Blue Sky R&D, but in Vermont it will be Gun-metal Grey Sky(c) R&D.
- I fought the DREK and the DREK continues to win. Remember, What
really is holds us back is DREK!!! DREK is what happens to your
workspace (both hardware and software) when you fail to put stuff
away, or you let your friends or relatives use it. This is a cosmic
law. I am still fighting the DREK. How to get over it? Maybe slave
labor and more shelves...
These five points are becomming almost like policy!
Anyway, we have the technology and we will have Pizza tonight 5-7 at Hedding
UMC.
This is the official notice of the Barre Open Systems Institute (BOSI) Adult
Swim. For those coming in via the Google Plus and the Internet, and there are
folks who are gonna try, the swim stars at 6:00 PM EST.
Our ongoing major objective is to continue to try to figure out how to invest
the time and resources to turn the Barre Open Systems Institute into more than
just the Adult Swim technical clinic and more into a real learning facility.
One direction we have been working on is to begin thinking about classes. The
curriculum that I am most interested in is teaching documentation.
Once again, the goal of the meeting shall be as usual, to get organized and try
to get the various projects moving forward, despite DREK. We continue to wonder
about how to build the BOSI curriculum to this webpage:
http://bosivt.org/classes, Take a look if you dare...
Remember, the BOSI Adult Swim is essentially about helping out fellow users of
open source products in a clinic environment. Despite my very best of
intentions, the Adult Swim is really almost a perpetual Linux install-fest, and
only secondarily a learning environment,
The ever growing list of projects (now on our web site :^) includes:
- http://ledroid.org - Ok, this is a real project eh?
- http://bzinga.net - What happens when you combine Bash and Zenity?
- http://docbox.flint.com:8081/nodejs - ok, it is on the list.
- http://docbox.flint.com:8081/snobot - jesum they love this robot
- http://docbox.flint.com:8081/furmon - monitor that pellet furnace
- http://docbox.flint.com:8081/arduino - moving in the arduino groove
- http://docbox.flint.com:8081/javajive - to get better at Javascript
- http://docbox.flint.com:8081/tsp - Temperature Sensors Project
- http://docbox.flint.com:8081/robotsrules - The quest for Roberts Rules -
- http://docbox.flint.com:8081/visual.bash - Yea, I am not kidding...
- http://docbox.flint.com:8081/mrtg - remedial raw mrtg for the slow...
- http://docbox.flint.com:8081/raspberry - all versions
- http://docbox.flint.com:8081/strembot.org - maybe a very cool project.
- http://docbox.flint.com:8081/organized - oh please let me be organized!
- http://docbox.flint.com:8081/music - this may be the least organized
site ever!
- http://docbox.flint.com:8081/bb - A big noble idea.
- http://docbox.flint.com:8081/grantbot - A less noble idea to feed the
big idea...
- http://docbox.flint.com:8081/gitlywiki - is tiddlywiki5 the answer?
Otherwise, Barre indeed remains a great venue for a Linux and Open Source
Software discussion and general system rejuvenation. Expect to be remotely
preached at on the various topics of Open Source and how I am confident it
shall cure all the evils and ills of this wicked world. In a perfect meeting,
people would come in, sit down, see the stuff we have been doing and hopefully
help us get the DIY stuff we are doing done, or maybe just fix a laptop.
So, do not forget that the Barre library stocks "Linux Format", and the latest
issue is on the shelf, and it is good. The DVD's are available to checkout and
copy, we shall to continue provide copies and isos of each and every one. I am
continuing to duplicate about a years worth of DVD's which is quite a task. You
may want to watch this space for developments.
Anyway, come and do open source stuff. For more information about the BOSI
Adult Swim meeting time and location try this:
http://bosivt.org/directions
Show up at Hedding UMC if you have questions or are interested in Linux or the
concept of free and open systems. Again, we are in the basement of the Hedding
UMC facility which is actually working out pretty well.
Somehow we need to make progress not more projects!!!
If you wish to be included on the "Linux_adult_swim" mailing list, send a
response to this note.
This is Flint signing off...
I will be refactoring our newsletter at some point in the future (do not hold
your breath :^)...
Kindest Regards,
Paul Flint
(802) 479-2360
(802) 595-9365 Cell
/************************************
Based upon email reliability concerns,
please send an acknowledgment in response to this note.
Paul Flint
Barre Open Systems Institute
17 Averill Street
Barre, VT
05641
http://www.bosivt.org
http://family.flint.com/flint
skype: flintinfotech
Work: (202) 537-0480
