Yet Another Blog
After a lot of debugging on bbvablogs.com, I needed serious fun to keep it up, and suddently I found the perfect project to remove the dust on my arduino board: a blinking led that would tell us when someone is visiting the website!
More links about this project:
Just in case you were not secure enough, please don’t look too anxious in airport:
“Travelers at Sea-Tac and dozens of other major airports across America are being scrutinized by teams of TSA behavior-detection officers specially trained to discern the subtlest suspicious behaviors.
TSA officials will not reveal specific behaviors identified by the program — called SPOT (Screening Passengers by Observation Technique) — that are considered indicators of possible terrorist intent.”
– source: seattlepi.com
No wonder which the manual book they used to develop this new kind of screening:
“It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself — anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a punishable offence. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime, it was called.”
– 1984 by George Orwell
What woud be interesting is to follow the propagation of airport security into real live. Today for example, it’s mandatory to put your name on your luggage when you travel by train (in France at least), is it something coming from airplane security?
The issue with decentralizing my living place it’s really hard to be at the right place at the right time. As an example I missed the 24C3 conference in Berlin last week, which was replaced by Wii session, not too bad 
Hopefully, all these lost moments tends to be more and more digitalized, so here are the conferences I found the most interesting so far:
There are plenty more of conference I want to listen, mostly concerning Storm malware which made a big buzz during 2007. Here comes interesting links from 24C3 if you want to discover other interesting sessions:
During december, while everybody was probably mad about getting new friends on Facebook, the grandfather of web 2.0, Flickr, released a new tool for their users: Stats.
To make it sexiers, they used a couple of retro-animated gif’s to tell you they’re currently builing your stat index, in a totally web 1.0 fashionned way:
If you have a Flickr account, you can activate your stats now.
As a reminder for futur Apache configuration on a Suse server:
This weekend, we build a media center to share a 500Go disk on the network (+150Go internal drive), using Ubuntu 7.10 and various open-source software.
Here is a list of them, and some links to ease their uses.
Any advice, tools to add to this configuration? Might be really great to use the NFS as a TimeMachine, and easily back all our important data this way.
After installing TorrentFlux on our Las Indias media center, we had some problem to use the Mininova search engine included in TorrentFlux.
To install the new engine, just copy the mininovaEngine.php in your torrentflux/searchEngines/ directory.
Reprap parts are now available on www.bitsfrombytes.com and ready to order!
From the Reprap Builder blog post, a complete kit with motors will be available in next days for a 300£ + VAT price, it’ll surely help a lot of reprappers who already have all electronic ready and just need all these parts to finish the cartasian robot.
There are some interesting options if you choose to buy the moulded parts kit: you can ask them to be prepared if you do not have necessary tools to drill the holes, and you can choose the resin color to customized your own reprap.
The scope of supply provided for each kit will be a great help too for people who already have some parts (like the extruder) from the RRRF store, and just need to order the cartasian robot parts.
Order will be placed this week to Madrid, hoping it’ll arrive next week to build it before Christmas.
The above RepStrap is made entirely from moulded parts or off the shelf items for the couplings and timing pulleys. I intend to do mouldings of the pulleys to further drive down the cost but thought I should get something up just to let people know it was still happening!
The above RepStrap does not have the Extruder parts fitted but these are as posted before.
On Friday we will have a web site up so people can order any or all of the moulded parts, I’m still figuring out what the bits actually cost in resin and silicone mould! But expect a full set to be in the region of £100 to £120.
