It’s software night at the lab again this evening, from 7pm or so onwards. Would anyone be interested in talking about ideas/projects for the ‘Open Data Challenge‘?
There might even be some existing software projects from the wiki and/or Markos’ list which could be adapted for it.
On a more local note, Martin sent a reminder that Culture Hack Scotland is coming up soon too – will likely be some good opportunities there too!
For those of you not following on the mailing list, this was the first live cutting done by our CNC mill conversion a couple of weeks back. Now we just need to complete the automation of the Z-axis, which is in progress.
The hack lab equipment list is getting quite long, including:
That is until now. We have coat hooks! Five of them in total, spread out around the lab.
A delivery of Club Mate has safely arrived in the lab, complete in original yellow crates. A staple drink at European hacker camps and hacker-spaces, it’s a caffeinated drink with less sugar than typical caffeinated beverages. Best severed chilled, the taste is often described as iced tea like.
If your in the lab and fancy trying a bottle help yourself, suggested donation of £2 into the glass on top on the fridge.
Many thanks to Club Mate UK for supplying us.
Made good progress on the speaker cabinet at the Hacklab last night, ably assisted by @tinyblob. Unfortunately, the screws I bought for the back panel are a few mm too short so I need to do some shopping. Getting close now, though.
I still need to chisel out pockets for handles on the accompanying 4U rack box but that shouldn’t take long.
The switch by the lab door is now back in working order (for the time being) and tweeting at @EdinHacklabOpen 
Software night is on again tonight from 7pm – check out the previous projects list and the Edinburgh software projects spreadsheet, and bring any other ideas/discussions/code.
Software News: No-one else seems to have cared, but I’ve been ecstatic since Google finally made the Maps API accessible over HTTPS for free (previously a £10k yearly subscription).. woot!
Hopefully catch some of you down at the lab
Cheers,
Jay
A rather amusing way of preparing ham by one of our regulars John Alexander
Martin and I worked more on the Mill->CNC project.
“We tried to get the Linux-based CNC software EMC2 running with the mill. The initial idea had been to use Jay’s ITX machine for this, but it turns out this won’t run the necessary realtime kernel due to not having a working local APIC. We had a dig through the cupboard for other machines but didn’t find anything usable.
Does anyone have something spare that could fill this role? It needs a parallel port (a real one, not USB), a working local APIC under Linux, and ability to run a recent distribution.
Alternatively there’s an older release of EMC2 based on Ubuntu 8.04 that might work on the ITX, I’ll try tomorrow night.” — Martin
Software night is rolling around again – the lab will be open from 7pm onwards tomorrow evening (Wed 23rd March).
I’ve been doing some work integrating Janrain’s social sign-on into one of my websites and will be happy to talk about the upsides and downsides of that.
Meanwhile, Markos/@qnoid has posted a good summary of what software hacking is going on in Edinburgh at the moment to the TechMeetup mailing list – and linked to a neat Google spreadsheet project list. Some food for thought/discussion/finding work!
Cheers,
Jay