I made these, and finished them for the Epilog competition Instructables are running. They’re controlled by an arduino mini reading a rotary potentiometer to determine how many of them to switch on:

I’m still very much a newbie with both a soldering iron and a compiler, but I’m finding both more comprehensible than I expected. How [...]

Amazing glitch music visual tracker:

Open source, runs on Linux with PS2 pads. More details over at Planet Damage, he doesn’t seem to link the project website, but it’s fijuu.com.
(via The Day They Tried To Kill Me)

Just tried to sign up for the last round of tickets for BarCamp London 4, and they ran out in less than a minute, before I’d even got down the reg form. Friends who were trying to register didn’t even get to see the form.
I went to BarCamp London 2 in Feb 07, and it [...]

I finally decided to upgrade to Feisty, and lost half a day or so to the process.
On the upside, I learned how to set up Samba shares, which is incredibly easy: Shares are defined with a human readable text file including logins and permissions. They work straightaway too. It’s a magnificent difference to Windows networking [...]

I just saw this DIY multitouch screen on Instructables, based on the work of Jeff Han. I am now fidgety with excitement.
I knew the hardware was very simple, but had no idea that there was OSS software to support it :)

Some of the stuff shown in there is a bit blobby and has that cobbled [...]

Since January, I’ve been almost exclusively using Ubuntu. Before that, I knew absolutely nothing about using Linux. I was a Windows/DOS user for 12 years, stretching right the way back to Windows 3.1.
At the same time as switching to Ubuntu on my home desktop, I also started a new job, and all the computers at [...]

Another gem via John Robb. It’s another part of the amazing story that I’m watching emerge this year: The black economies that have served as the scapegoats and bogeymen of ailing institutions are in fact suffering exactly the same shocks.
Fatal intersection: The arc of a crime crew:
Big gangs have a shadow of their former influence [...]

BarCamp London 2 was amazing. Met loads of interesting and fantastic people. Marvelled at the incredibly techy venue (One meeting room had a smart glass sound proof wall with a pure SF, switch operated sliding door :) ).
Played werewolf, which is one of the simplest and most compelling games I’ve ever played. A perfect mix [...]

John Robb today on goods becoming information:
As the percentage of the value of more and more products/services become information, these products are vulnerable to open source competition. This gets even more interesting as we move towards highly decentralized fabrication (which is moving quickly), which turns even the most mundane physical object into information + feedstock [...]

If you want to try Linux, for setting up your drive I’d like to pass on a recommendation given to me for GParted, a live CD designed for partitioning. By gum does that thing work well, with the cabability to do every major file system (Including XFS). Partition Magic has nothing on it, and doesn’t [...]

I’ve been expecting a flavour of Linux to surpass Windows not just structurally but also aesthetically for some years, and, for technical users, in Ubuntu it now has.
Thanks to this howto I’ve got Beryl working with an nVidia card. It gives Ubuntu a more flexible version of the aesthetics of OSX. Jelly windows. Stretchy titlebars. [...]

(Most of this post will be old hat to anyone already familiar with Linux).
This weekend I installed and got to know a bit about Dapper Ubuntu. The structural differences between it and Windows XP and 2K are profound.
I don’t want to Microsoft bash. I’ve used Win2K with a love/hate relationship for many years, in that [...]

From todays trawl:
Fab@Home: Immensely cool open source home fabricator, for about £1200. Make any plastic components you want using this and CAD software… whether they’re copyrighted or not.

Fabbers (a.k.a 3D Printers or rapid prototyping machines) are a relatively new form of manufacturing that builds 3D objects by carefuly depositing materials drop by drop, layer by [...]

I’m catching up with some homebrew DS stuff, and found this delightful looking widget via Dev Scene: A DS cart for homebrew applications containing a three axis motion sensor, and it’s only $25. I was going to wait until my warranty was up before flashing my DS with homebrew friendly firmware, but this has successfully [...]

Hacker con runs arphid tracking (Shorter summary here). Repeat: The difference between surveillance and sousveillance is where the data goes.
(Via Beyond The Beyond)