By:
On:

I got a dockstar about a year ago because it seemed like an interesting device. It was designed to be a simple NAS for personal use, backups, media files, etc. It was mainly interesting because it ran a stripped down version of Linux as it’s stock OS and with a few commands, you could change out that version of Linux with one of your own. A few months back I learned about the Piratebox Project. I looked around and noticed that I had most of the parts to make one of my own already. I found a 3×5 card box at Walmart for the first design, but when I found a book box featuring a pirate ship on the cover, I knew I had to finish this project. I ordered a battery off Amazon along with the tiniest switch you’ve ever seen and I had all of the parts. A few minutes, some Velcro and double stick tape at the shop and I had assembled a battery completely wireless filesharing device. If you happen to have a cat5 cable, it could serve everything over that too. Details after the break.

Read More →

By:
On:

Taking the time to write up a blog post is hard and with technology these days, it’s easy enough to just pickup a camera phone and start recording. Tim and I had wanted to do weekly updates about the changes to the shop, but it’s turned into less than monthly updates. I’ve just been posting them on my Youtube channel since there’s no good way to do groups in Youtube anymore 🙁 Here’s June and August’s updates.


By:
On:

Recently, we had a Minecraft tournament at the shop. Tournaments are not tournaments without a clear winner. We were stuck with the problem, how do we know who won? We came to the conclusion to assign a simple point system to some of the ores, ingots and minerals you can mine in the game. To actually calculate these points, a little bit of programming was used to read the player inventory file on the server. The player file is only written to disk when a client disconnects. This was easily remedied by just stopping the server and calculating the points once each of the inventories were flushed to the drive.

The following is the code we used to read the inventory file and calculate an overall score:
Read More →

By:
On:

Recorded on February 8th, 2011. Jimshoe, Brimstone, Nykodemus, Just Tuttle, Alii, Crashcart bring you yet another Hackerspace Digest. Alii describes the Makers’ recent pig roast and tech expo. Brimstone talks about Thingaday and 091 Labs’ Movie night. The group talks about the movie nights they’ve had before, and about bringing them back. Brimstone tries to get others interested in a coworking day like 091 Labs. The group also debates Hack Clubs verses Hackerspaces. The group remembers the Two Hands project coming to their hackerspace and is excited to hear that the footage will finally get edited. Upcoming events (all of which have passed since the time of this writing 🙁 ) include: Outerz0ne, which the group has enjoyed in the pas and Notacon, which the group has not attended before. Other events include the 555 contest and Hive 76’s Open house. Nykodemus gets everyone interested in Open Source Ecology.

Show notes are on the wiki, as usual.

Standard Podcast [ 45:14 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

By:
On:

Brimstone, Darkjedi, Strages, Crashcart are back again with episode 008. Recorded February 1st, 2011. Crashcart talks about the Evalbot and it’s contest. Crashcart attempts to describe the carnage of our first cupcake for the Global Hackerspace Challenge. Brimstone raves access control in a number of spaces. Brimstone also talks about Noisebridge’s Drama and Strages explains inventory systems across spaces. Strages introduces the Huntsville Open Manufacturing Meetup. Show notes are on our wiki.

Standard Podcast [ 30:42 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download