There is going be a small Maker Faire after party at NYCResistor. If you have been to one of our craft nights, it will be along those lines. Come bring a project and hack on it. If you don’t have a project bring your self and get inspired. Either way come over and drink a beer.
UPDATE: I forgot to say that its on Saturday September 17th @ 8:30. Free Entry.
Since we don’t seem to have any copper phone lines in the space, we haven’t got phone server there yet…
I decided to use some trickery and get a sip phone up, and the number is 1-212-931-0593.
I like Tetris; who doesn’t? The rules are simple, and it’s a good test of strategy and speed without eye hurting graphics. I’ve played it on a few Nintendo handhelds, my PC, and on Sony’s gaming consoles. The people over at MIKONTALOLIGHTS in Finland developed a platform to play it on a building by using the windows as light pixels and a cell phone as the controller. Check out the video (hosted on CollegeHumor):
It’s similar to a project from Blinkenlights and the CCC based in Germany. Their project also used a mobile phone to control lights (windows) on a building, except they were playing pong and uh, MIKONTALOLIGHTS used color. The Blinkenlights and CCC projects are still cool as they’ve done a lot of animated graphics on the side of a building. Check out their gallery if you haven’t already.
Here is another great console application that doesn’t get the recognition it deserves. This text based browser supports up to 256 colors (but due to the limitation of your console, it will most likely be 16 colors.) and displays web pages really well. In fact, on some non-large screen phones, I’d rather have this as my browser.
It also supports mouse clicks, which is great if you’re on a page with a large number of links. It even supports scrolling with the middle mouse wheel.
Some cool features that are rare in the console world are the ability to parse mild Java script, a download manager, and support for tables/frames.
It’s also extremely small and immune to shock sites. The browser’s most common use is to look up help information after an X server crash. I also use it a lot over ssh when I don’t want to download something locally and then upload it to my server. It is especially useful when the server requires authentication before getting the file.
Maybe not as useful as HTOP, but it’s still handy if your tired of white backgrounds that hurt your eyes. —Link
I saw this over at Hack-a-Day and while this is nothing new, its still worth blogging about. This is a great example of how hacking every day things to create new useful things is cool. Expecially if you make something that cost $300 for $20.
“Speakers and microphones are physically similar – usually mics are much smaller to allow decent high frequency response. In this case, [Nathan] wanted something to pick up kick drums or bass guitars, without the cost of a commercial version like the subkick. It’s build around a dual coil 12-inch subwoofer. The passive circuit design allows the coils in the speaker to be configured for differing impedance, phase and isolation.” Link
I thought I’d make the first Software post to the blog. And since I am always on the hunt for good console, non-GUI, based applications to make my life easier, I thought I should share one of my findings.
For those of you who use ever used Linux or Unix in an environment where you only had access to a terminal, and you wanted to see an overview of system resources, you have probably used top. Top is nice little task manger that displays whats running, and its memory, cpu, owner and so on. But its ugly and a bit hard to understand. It looks something like this:
I don’t like it at all, and searching for a something to replace it, I found HTOP. Their website doesn’t really glorify how great this tool is, and their screen shots are blah, so here is one of mine.
As you can see everything is pretty =). Shows you what all yours cores are doing, even in my beefy 8 core machine. The ownership of a process not only by the user, but by another process which called it. It also supports mouse clicks (one of the few terminal applications that do). And can be customized completely to your liking for each user on your system. In public spaces people are often wowed by it, because it looks so kick ass, especially in full screen.
It took some time to understand what the colors in the graphs were, so I’ll label them here. Red is system usage, blue is idle usage, and green is user usage.
This has been an application I have used almost daily for the past year. Its also a rare sight, as most console applications lack in the level of control that htop gives you. Enjoy it!
Or maybe a very popular blog. But none the less our name is mentioned.
““You have to organize,” says Nick Farr, who set up ‘hackers on a plane’, hauling hackers from DefCon to Germany for a hacker camp. “All it takes is getting a group of people who are local and interested and start talking about it, get to a shared vision.”
“NYC Resistor is creating a space in Manhattan New York City, another group is working on an art gallery/hacker space in San Francisco, possibly the two most expensive cities in North America.”
I just got my shipment of Arduino clones from Modern Devices, that we posted about 3 days ago. After putting 3 together and programing them, I must say that this device is simply perfect for breadboarding. It can be powered by the breadboard, or it can power the breadboard by USB or a power adapter.
Also, I know my work area is a mess =)
Its a bit expensive at $3000+sh but this thing seems to have every hand held tool you might need. – Link
