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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.

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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.


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CAKE

Many members of Makers Local 256 like to come up with crazy ideas. A few also like to write down those crazy ideas and keep track of progress on our wiki. An interesting fact about our wiki though: It predates us having a space, in fact, it predates us even having a name for our organization. (you can find discussion of possible names on our wiki.)[1]

Our wiki instance was installed on July 31 2006. It was originally instantiated to document one person’s projects, but was quickly opened up to friends to record their activities. Without knowing it, the shop was starting to follow the Design patterns [2] before actually forming.

Through out it’s current run, the wiki’s not strayed too far from it’s vanilla MediaWiki installation. We’ve added a handful of extensions to it over time[citation needed], to add in our mass collaboration. We’ve migrated from a real machine to a virtual machine, from vm host to vm host. We’ve constructed bots to report on changes, even devised a way of building an ICS compatible feed from content on each of the pages.

Our latest endeavor is to further build upon the Semantic MediaWiki Extensions[3]. We want to make adding and editing projects and events easier and more friendly for our less wiki-adept members.

Here’s to another 5 years!

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Makers Local 256 show and tell is when we encourage members and guest to tell us about their current projects or neat new toy. We hope this will become a regular occurrence at our shop, and be a source of fun and inspiration.

This week, Phil added a heated bed to the makerbot. This greatly reduces the chance and the amount of curling in the first few layers of plastic, as it cools.

Tim recently finished designing a new circuit board that will become a two-factor authentication token. He’s using gEDA-PCB to create the board, with comes form schematics made by Matt. Tim also managed to spend some time showing off his new (and jailbroken) Kindle 3.

 Nathan explained his quest for finding the best remote backup solution.  First duplicity, then rdiff-backup with sshfs -> encfs, then rdiff-backup with sshfs->eCryptfs.  And restore rdiff-backup using archfs. The end goal is an off-site backup that is encrypted, but still manageable on a per-file level.

Wayne just finished up his Subject Delta costume. For those unfamiliar with “Subject Delta” It is a video game character from the game Bioshock 2. For those unfamiliar with Wayne, or 2storyprops, they achieve an insane amount of detail on all their props and costumes. seriously check out the photo link bellow.

Makerbot Heated BedTim's latest circuit boardSubject Delta

 

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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:
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