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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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The past couple of days at the shop have been incredibly productive ones, which given the lull in the regulars showing up is saying something. We managed to settle on a standard base look to new project pages on our wiki and hopefully will get most of the older ones converted to it soon. The coolest part about this is that it’s all available at the click of a button. Nathan’s really been diving into mediawiki hacking. David was a huge help at this as well, he seems to have a knack for seeing things other people miss.

We’re making some steady progress on various multitouch fronts. Got my 19″ monitor taken apart and semi-ready to be turned into a more advanced version of the MTmini you can see below. We’re also still planning on making a large multitouch screen for multi-person use. Got an old rear projection TV coming today that we plan on getting great use out of.

Did some brainstorming on some other projects we’re looking to finish by October, that I’m not really at liberty to talk about just yet. October’s going to be a really great month for the group. Can’t wait for Phreaknic. With any luck we’ll most if not all of them done with time to spare.

We’re looking at doing an open house relatively soon just to see what like minded people come out of the woodwork. We’re trying to get some projects together to show off what we’ve done so far and maybe some we’re working on in the near future. We’ll also likely have some interactive things, namely in an attempt to keep people there for a bit so they can get a true feel for the shop and the environment it provides. We’re all about creativity and collaboration. Might even do a “rent party” sort of thing to drum up some funds for the shop.

So yeah, the shop’s coming along nicely, despite the sparse attendance as of late. It’s a good thing we have some really dedicated people involved with the shop, and we could always use more of those.