reetings List Lurkers,
May 1st. The rest of the world is celebrating May-Day. The American
workers, or anyway what is left of them grit their teeth and hope for
retirement as the boot heals of the plutocrats push their faces ever
farther into the mud...
Sadly, from the perspective of this technologist, part of this oppression
is based upon the "Gunslinger" approach to software development. The very
cream of the meritocracy that are skilled at software development
knowledge are invited into the plutocracy, while the rest of us survive as
best as we can. The days of worker unity are remnants in history books,
and the smartest among us know that they can aspire while their fellow
workers toil or not without recourse.
I believe that this is all about to change. Linux Torvalds triumphed over
closed source software, but the unintended consequence of his latest
accomplishment, git, has been to restore mass assembly to the art and
craft of software development. I both hope and predict that this
unintended consequence is the ending of the suzerainty of the gunslinger
and the advent of "human wave" software development, because I believe
that this may result in re-ordination and revitalization of (information)
worker bargaining units, something totally lost in the medieval hierarchy
of information workers today. Somehow the trick the new Guilds or
information specialist communities must pull off it to help educate the
fledging information workers, which is what BOSI has been about for the
last decade or so, and we fully intend to get good at it!
So happy May Data...
Other news;
1. #1 SoN who arrives Wednesday, shall be here to actually
assemble/repair/re-provision the printers and other 3D stuff that is lying
around in the upstairs of the barn, as he actually has his amazing lights
to print (https://vimeo.com/204402154).
2. For some reason my copy of Fritzing has gone on the Fritz, and I have
been busy enough to not get to fixing it Trying to do collaborative design
with a broken tool is not fun. Maybe we can get to the bottom of this (I
so much want to blame Ubuntu:^). Kevin has more cool 3D CAD software to
investigate and exploit, see next.
3. Kevin has just gotten back from a local DC Maker/Hack event and has much
very cool stuff to share. The DC hacker space is clearly a place to be in the
Makerverse. Folks actually sent HackDC thank you emails. Very cool.
4. Now if I can only find the time.
First, a family event that has me loading into the Barre Mini Maker Faire
on the afternoon of the 12. I got roped into attending a wedding on the
day of the Barre Maker Fair... Oh woe. Dr Scott and Doug are being very
accommodating. The BOSI gang, and the rest of the family will be
attending the Faire and eating the barbecue...
Then back and off to Pycon on 17 May for 5 days.
Then at the start of June we begin the Visua Bash tour. First off through
the DC Megagrinder and on to the SE Regional Linux Conference and Craft
Beer Show in Charlotte NC... (Not bad...) thence to Murrels Inlet SC...
thence home, only to hit Ohio State University in Columbus to hob-nob with
the IBM VM'ers...and finally back to Vermont to catch my breath, get more
craft beer and head down to the SHARE conference in Providence.
QED, I am under so many guns and thus this screed will be mercifully
short.
TECHNORUBBLE
As mentioned above, the folks at the Barre Maker Fair are being very
helpful. Again, we put in 12 May at 16:00. The Barre Maker Faire could
be a lot of fun so set aside time Saturday 13 May to attend.
TechnoRubble is confirmed as an exhibitor, at this new Maker Fair Vermont
the Barre Maker Fair. Again, this will be, held in conjunction with the
Barre Barbecue Festival Saturday May 13 from 11:00 am to 4:00 pm at the
Barre Granite Museum. BOSI and the Adult Swim are proud to attend.
As all the TechnoRubble is bagged, Sgt Soulfix and I spent Sunday
evening getting it
organized
The
Barre Maker Fair stock will include some towers and a few old but quite
serviceable
HP Laser-Jet printers. The sad part of these is that newer copies of
Micro$oft Window$ products do not provide drivers for these printers which
work very well otherwise. They end up in the waste stream. The irony
here is that Linux provides drivers for all these hearty old printers!
The printers we shall exhibit are in excellent shape.
A vast part of the new TechnoRubble is thanks to Dr. Mark, lotsa shiny new
TechnoRubble now untangled and bagged. So this upcoming meeting is now
about final sorting and packing of the Technobble into cartons for display
and sale.
Aubrey has been complaining that there is to much scutt work and not
enough training in programming languages like Python and Bash. We could
always use more TechnoRubble, with an eye towards being ready for the
next two Maker Fairs.
After the Barre Maker Fair, we should maybe follow up on the interesting angle
to deploy TechnoRubble at Libraries. At the meeting in February, J West came up
with this angle and I would very much like to set up at Kimball and the Aldrich
Libraries and see if this would work. I may also try to get some traction at
the Kellogg Hubbard. The famous Jessamyn West showed up at our meeting last
week and checked out the whole TechnoRubble Project. Hope she remains
interested, and the Maker Fairs provide inertia.
- The Website http://technorubble.org,http://technorubble.com
- The new donation letter has been updated, and is being used!
As usual, we need more TechnoRubble. Two local sources of TechnoRubble might
someday be the ReStore and CVSWD. The TechnoRubble untangling and packing is
part of that effort. An additional part of this effort could involve the Code
for America Vermont brigade, who have not posted in several weeks. The idea is
to make TechnoRubble much more network centric (after all what created most of
the technorubble?) get people to mail their TechnoRubble to us in a USPS Flat
Rate Box. Get TechnoRubbble available on Amazon!
Lets start with the hard part: A TechnoRubble Taxonomy
http://docbox.flint.com:8081/technorubble#TechnoRubbleTaxonomy
After the Barre Maker Fair I will get farther to this.
VISUAL BASH
The news flash here is I squandered precious time writing Menubot.sh
(http://docbox.flint.com:8081/visual.bash#menubot.sh), but as a final
piece of work I am content with it. I am inclining more towards taking a
shot at bzinga...(http://bzinga.net/) Bzinga may be promoted to a
full-fledged project, but not till the fall.
In addition to BOSI giving a talk on VisualBash at the SE Regional Linux
Conference down in Charlotte NC after Pycon, we will also be giving talks
about Visual Bash at the next VM Workshop which is coming to Ohio State
University, taking place June 22nd - June 24th, 2017, additionally we will
be presenting at the SHARE conference in Rhode Island August 8-11th.
http://visualbash.org/
I wonder if anyone in Burlington might be interested in Visual Bash?
KINDLE LIBERATION FRONT
All's quiet on the Kindle Liberation Front...
The Bummer is I think that one of my precious kindles was left in the car
and walked away. For $35.00 I would like to simply get another, but
Amazon is out of stock!!!
http://docbox.flint.com:8081/kindle
Did you ever try to use a Kindle outside in the sun? What we need is aware of
a version of the Universal Insight Virtual Realty Glasses or the like for the
Kindle, which would allow you to operate the Kindle in full sunlight. 3d
Teleconferencing and system management could be way cool as well. Anybody see
such a thing? I am thinking about trying to fabricate one based upon the
original cardboard, now that we are getting back into 3d printing this summer.
TRANTOR
Sort of recovered from the eventful week inspired by Sam, but not quite.As
you recall, Brother Sam was playing around with the library setup, and
thought it would be entertaining to boot the server off of one of the
sticks that the server can print. One thing led to another and the next
thing you know is that Sam has formatted the trantor server - Twice!
So a fair amount of last week was spent bringing this back from the backups.
It was actually a healthy activity, as we finally got a chance to work on the
"sane" routines, and tweak the installation process. Sam learned a thing or
two as well.
Parallel with this is the load-in of the next 50 or so DVDs provided by
Brother Tom Krasner... It is getting there...
Sarah the librarian still wants a press release. I hope that the concept of
Library Based Local Destinations has not been completely wiped out by
entrenched powers would so much prefer that to raise revenue by concentrating
everything in the very expensive DII Data Center at National Life, likely for a
hefty monthly fee! I may still do a press release, and after talking to her
will no doubt have a draft for her to review on the Trantor web site shortly.
Sarah has been busy, I may stop by and see how things are tomorrow.
Other Digital Collections?
Do not be bashful (pun?). let me know if you want something faithfully curated
and The real question here is should I simply rebuild bosivt.org based upon
sphinx? Or, we could do it all in reStructuredText... Todo this we would need
a translator lets call it the rosetiddily project. To convert tiddly markup
into standard markup, from there a reSturcturedText version of reality should
be no problem.
Not to digress, but the hard part of trantor turns out to be:
1. Getting a State bureaucracy to recognize
Free Open Source Software (what's in it for them?)
2. getting the visual bash trantor prototype complete, with
appropriate features, which is sorta done..
TADA
Teleconferencing from Adult Swim starts again at 6 PM EST today. I would
dearly love to know how to do more than one party, we like Joseph Hart but is
there more we can do?
Hopefully these will be discussed on:
https://hangouts.google.com/hangouts/_/flint.com/tada
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? We clearly have a
Maker Faire coming to town. Could it be that the
commercial power centers are beginning to appreciate the value?
I need to revise my paper on this subject and get it out.
Here is the statewide plan:
http://docbox.flint.com:8081/bb
who has good ideas about a Barre Maker Space. Why not do digital stone?
- Move BOSI towards reStructuredText. I am seriously considering a
tiddly2rest converter. This would allow us to become more git
centric... avoid the need to change to gittlywiki...
We still need to convert... Yea buddy... Shut up Effin.
- Blue Sky R&D, but in Vermont it will be Gun-metal Grey Sky(c) R&D
(GMGSR&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? The secret
may be empty pellet bags. Is TechnoRubble organized DREK?
These five points are quickly becoming more than our policy, and more like a
prayer...
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,
and figure out where our good chairs went. 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, besides getting ready for the Barre Mini Maker Faire and
Barbecue, 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, does work,
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,
While we need to update this list soon, the ever growing list of projects
(now on our web site :^) includes:
- http://docbox.flint.com:8081/vm - A Docker copy of VM370
- http://docbox.flint.com:8081/kindle - The Kindle Liberation Front
- http://docbox.flint.com:8081/pyrs - A pythonic interface to Income Tax?
- 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:
Directions to the EVENT:
http://docbox.flint.com:8080/bosivt.org/directions or, go to http://bosivt.org
and click on 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 we like 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 continue to refactor this newsletter, and at some point in the future
(do not hold your breath :^), it shall become readable!
Ok, back to the deadlines!
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
