Category: howto
-
Organisation hacking (part 1)
Over the last six months I’ve been taking a crash course in company formation, treating it like any other investigation into a strange and esoteric technology. Last year I registered FoAM Kernow as a UK non profit organisation in the mould of FoAM Brussels. Starting off with absolutely no knowledge at all (but with a…
-
Connecting Flask to Apache
When exploring the cosmos of python powered web frameworks it’s easy to get lost due to fast moving versions. Recently we had a lot of difficulty getting Flask connected via a WSGI script on Apache. This seems to be due to needing the object factory to be called specifically rather than relying on the module…
-
Adventures with i2c
In order to design the next version of the flotsam hardware I need to make it cheaper and easier to build. The existing hardware was very cheap in terms of components but expensive in terms of time it took to construct! With this lesson learned and with a commission on the horizon I need to…
-
Migrations in django 1.7
For the wild cricket tales project I’m using django again, the all new 1.7 version which has amongst lots of other shiny things has an all new migrations system. This is so you can change the underlying database ‘model’ for your site and it automatically tracks your changes and applies them to the data (via…
-
Scratch -> Lego Mindstorms
A bit of hardware hacking for Troon Primary CodeClub, who have tons of old style Lego Mindstorms they don’t use any more, and after a year of Scratch programming on their PCs are just getting started with Raspberry Pi. We’re using this Scratch modification together with the hardware I’m making which is based on this…
-
How to back up your encryption keys
Without really noticing it I’ve gradually acquired more and more encryption keys without understanding how to back them up properly. Until fairly recently I lazily assumed that remembering the passphrases would be enough in case of my laptop catching on fire, but this is not the case. I use GPG keys both for authenticity over…
-
A fluxus workshop plan
I’ve been getting some emails asking for course notes for fluxus workshops, I don’t really have anything as structured as that but I thought it would be good to document something here. I usually pretty much follow the first part of the fluxus manual pretty closely, trying to flip between visually playful parts and programming…
-
Compiling Scheme to Javascript
Recently I’ve been continuing my experiments with compilers by writing a Scheme to Javascript compiler. This is fairly simple as the languages are very similar, both have garbage collection and first class functions so it’s largely a case of reusing these features directly. There are some caveats though – here is an example of the…
-
Android Camera Problems
The DORIS marine mapping platform is taking shape. For this project, touch screens are not great for people wearing gloves in small fishing boats – so one of the things the android app needs to do is make use of physical keys. In order to do that for taking pictures, I’ve had to write my…
-
Re-interpreting history
A script for sniffing bits of supercollider code being broadcast as livecoding history over a network and re-interpreting them as objects in fluxus, written during an excellent workshop by Alberto de Campo and Julian Rohrhuber at /*VIVO*/ Mexico City. (osc-source “57120”) (define (stringle str) (map char->integer (string->list str))) ;;(osc-destination “osc.udp:255.255.255.255:57120”) ;;(osc-send “/vivo” “s” ‘(“fluxus:hola”)) (define…