Mois : novembre 2007

[RepRap] Mould parts arrive soon

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ReRap moult parts

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.

More on RepRap Builders blog…

[WordPress-Mu] Community Tag Cloud

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A new and better plugin, MuTags by MrHenry, is now available on WordPress Mu forums

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.

[RepRap] Completed Shotbot at Metalab

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Few people in Vienna have just finished a RepRap Shotbot:

« This was a collaborative effort with a lot of people at the metalab, grl vienna, and monochrom! »

This machine will print out shotglasses this weekend at roboexotica.org

This is near the RepRap Holy-Grail, I hope it would print some RepRap parts soon! The hardware in use is 2 Arduino Board, and the new electronic parts from parts.rrrf.org.

Photos by Brex

[Robots] Feed hitting

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rFeedReader got recently few complaints about people hit by our Feevy robot, and I discovered today it was not the only bot hitting my blog.

After looking at my blog stats since the beginning of the month, I got this feed hunters list:

Bot hitting

All major news portal need the last posts from the most popular blogs, and as long as your webserver is fit enough to receive all this free load, nobody will care. The only problem is these 6 bots are doing the same job many times a day, we’re looking for a refactoring master to solve this problem.

More info about each of these bots:

[Ruby] TwittLine

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There’s always a nice thing to do during insomnia: close all the open ideas you’ve got in mind!

So I wanted to have something working about yesterday Twitter Timezone idea, here is the result after using Twitter4R and Sparklines gems:

TwittLine

The sparkline is only created from my friends last 20 twitts. With so few samples, we can’t really see any ‘timezone‘ effect, but some social behaviors appear:

  • Rush hours: some people twitts mostly during the evening;
  • Exclusives: others have only one or two big peaks, it would mean most of their 20 twitts were written in the same period of the day;
  • Flat twitting: twitts seems equally reparted all along the day.

This experience might be extend in the next days, opening it more to public test, and it’s still looking for your suggestions to improve by itself.

[Idea] Twitter Timezone

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One of the interesting part with Twitter is its worldwide use. On my Twitter, I usually get European twitts at the end of the afternoon, and South-American twitts during the night.

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:

Twitter Timeline

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.

[Ruby] rFeedReader 1.0

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rFeedReader is finally ready for its first major release. After a lot of bugs correction, and a big testing cleaning today thank to Pere‘s Google Reader OPML, 99% of feeds should be readable now.

rFeedReader is a feed parser to read feed and return first posts of this feed. Special parsing from sources like Flickr, Jumcut, Google video, …

I invite you to download and test it in your Rails application, all new bug reports are welcomed!

sudo gem install rfeedreader