You can see a demo of Pressmark installation on bookmark.alexgirard.com

Pressmark includes Wordpress Prologue theme, which has been used by Wordpress team to have a twitter-like dev-blog.

Prologue include Gravatar support, so go to upload your avatar on gravatar.com to have a nicer output!

If you feel like adding your own modification to the code, you can clone/fork the project on Github: http://github.com/alx/pressmark/. All contributions will be welcomed!

Ideas to extend Pressmark:

• Bookmarlet, Jabber bot for easy posting;
• Import from bigger social-bookmark accounts (delicious, magnolia, …)
• Cross-blogging to decentralized bookmark management in various blog spaces

Installation

• Get Pressmark sources:
  • Download it from Github
  • If you’ve got git installed, clone it from Github (to easily get last updated)
    
git clone git://github.com/alx/pressmark.git pressmark

• Move the source to your webserver, ask a geek how to do it if you don’t know
• Wordpress configuration: copy ‘wp-config-sample.php‘ to ‘wp-config.php‘ and fill up the MySQL database information.
• Access to the website where you’ve installed Pressmark, and begin the “2 min. installation” from Wordpress
• Now that your website is ready, go in the administration pages and activate the following options:
  • In ‘Design‘: select ‘Prologue‘ theme;
  • In ‘Setting‘: select ‘Anyone can register‘ and set the ‘New User Default Role‘ to ‘Author‘ if you want your users to post links;
  • In ‘Plugins‘: activate ‘WP-OpenID‘ plugin

So here comes my first Textmate Bundle, thanks to the elegant work of Arduino team to make it easier to upload program from command line:

Arduino.tmbundle

Once installed, only one shortcut is available to make and upload your program on the Arduino board: Command-Shift-A

You can clone/fork the project from Github too, make your own repository and I’ll be glad to add your patch to the current simple bundle.
And come back during the week, you’ll surely see some update during the intensive RepRap hack session!

‘register_post’ action

You won’t be able to add more errors in $errors if you do not make it global in register_new_user() of wp-login.php:

function register_new_user($user_login, $user_email) {
global $errors;


‘user_register’ action

For some strange reason, $user_id is not available, you’ll need to add this hack to read it in your hook function:

$user_id = (int) func_get_arg( 0 );


Fully assembled and tested, in a wooden crate for easier transportation, I’ll hope to have the time to make some demo at the end of the month.

What’s missing:

• electronic: we already have all electronics, but it has became a bit obsolete over the last few month, it would be great to upgrade it to Arduino platform;
• experimenting: we’ll need to melt stuff then, and see how it reacts. Faboroni, another fabbing project, has made a recent experiement with various cooking material (chocolate, cheeze, …). And I’ll need to find a source to buy some plastic polymers, or make our own.

Then, will it be possible to plug your wiimote in RepRap?

Johnny Chung Lee has release a lot of really cool wiimote hacks, and the Reprap Forum is now looking how they could be used

More links about this project:

• WebVisitors Blinker: original idea found on Make! blog
• Arduino XMAS hitcounter: same idea, bringing the remote server processus, and moving a motor if you need more fun
• pySerial: Python module to access arduino board

• What is terrorism?: a german woman speaking about the experience to see the police busting her house to take her boyfriend away, under the suspicion of terrorims, with various accounts about the intelligence methods in place to monitor her family and friends. Conclusion: keep your mobile phone switched on if you don’t want to be suspected as a terrorist. [mp3]
• Hacking in the age of declining everything: a hacking environmentalist session, where everyhting on Earth seems to go to disaster, and how certain societies deal with it, or not. A climate-change speech, oriented to geek audience, with a great speaker. [mp3]
• Design noir: Electronic engineering is easy enough today to provide some power to individual purpose: someone launches an idea like tv-be-gone, and anyone can modify it to his/her own benefit. Repeat the process to switch of your own external world annoyance. [mp3]

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:

• Sessions index
• Conference recordings

Because the last version of Wordpress-mu is quite new, there is no proper plugin to start using new tag system available with Wordpress 2.3 system.

Here is a quick hack I’ve put in wpmu-functions.php to display a proper tag cloud of all blogs, please send me feedback and tell me if you find any bugs:

Code for get_community_tag_cloud()

Copy this funtion in your /wp-include/wpmu-functions.php and then add to your theme:


get_community_tag_cloud($display=true);


For more updates, please follow the Mu Forum thread about this hack.

Comparing my twitting habits with those of my friends, each one of us could have a twitting timezone, that we’ll be surely different even if you live in the same ‘real’ timezone.

Here is a screenshot of what could be the result:

It could be easily done using the API, unfortunatly, Twitter reduce the API use to one request per minute, so it’ll take one hour to build such a timezone with all your 60 friends… but I’m pretty sure someone will have fun to do something like this soon.

After a first try with tiny space between LEDs (see last post), here is another try with enough space to build a proper cube, still following MakeZine instructions.

The fun parts were to add transistors to the board, allowing to get more power for each led level, and the programming: Persistance-Of-Vision and binary manipulation for led on/off switching.

If you need it, you can download the arduino program related to this circuit.

Big mistake: first it was hell to solder all the tiny intersection of led cathods, then there is no way to pile up the array of leds if you don’t let space between them… maybe there’s a solution to that, and I’ve not find it yet.

Anyway, it was ready to connect to Arduino board, and to try to program this new led-matrix. Easy and fun, only problem is debugging messages while verifying source code on Arduino software that doesn’t help much, I’ll have to learn more about its syntax limitations.

Here is the result, 5 days before returning to Toulouse to visit Claire: