(no subject)

2017-Apr-17, Monday 12:33 pm
Aaaaaaand done! My LJ is wiped down, all images moved. After 13 years, 1 month, 1 day. So please let me know if you stumble across any deadlinks.

(no subject)

2017-Jan-18, Wednesday 04:17 pm
You may have noticed a lack of updates. That's mainly because finding, and updating, all the image links in my blog takes a very, very long time. Did you realise I've had this blog nearly eight years? I certainly didn't.

In other news, I'm falling down the Quantified Self rabbit hole. I'd like to have a blog to reflect it. So that's another project on the backburner.

Updates of stuff

2013-Mar-12, Tuesday 09:01 pm


Work has been keeping me busy so coherent ... speech stuff ... is little beyond me at the moment. (I'm going to a grammar workshop on Saturday, maybe that will help.) So this will be blessedly brief.

Those are crepe-paper cherry blossoms at the top. I roughly followed this tutorial, only I lack a tree branch.

I've taken to learning how to needle-felt. Here's my first attempt at a rectangle in green wool, and conductive stainless-steel fiber.



I've also been experimenting with fusible fibers (and sheets) together with conductive fibers as well.



In tangential news we got a 3D-printer. I haven't logged much time with it yet but am looking forward to some of the translucent and UV-reactive plastics.



Finally, to conclude, I'm going to be busy this year attending all the things.

April, Saturday 6th. Anime Dublin (facebook twitter) Showing people how to make LED-flowers.

April, Saturday 27th - Sunday 28th. MakerFaire UK (website twitter) Helping out at the TOG hackerspace table.

June, Friday 7th - Sunday 9th. GaelHack (website twitter) Doing... something.

July, Saturday 27th. MiniMakerFaire Dublin (website twitter) Again helping out TOG.

July, Wednesday 31st - August, Sunday 4th. O.H.M. (website twitter) Trying to forget that I dislike camping.

Now to find the energy required to do it all.
I came upon this post just before bed, and now am having trouble getting my ticking brain to sleep. These photos, reportedly the first colour photos ever taken in Ireland, are 99 years old. They represent some of the poorest people and places of that time, some of the furthest from Dublin, and some of those retaining most of the old native Irish way of life. These people were the neighbours of my ancestors; my grandparents' parents. Irish identity is a tricky thing, a nebulous thing. For so long the colonised, the Free State only 89 years old. The records of our recent past burnt in uprisings, the stone monuments of the ancient past strewn about the landscape. And in between only the stories. (This is a good podcast by the way, if you're interested in the old Irish stories.) Then out of the blue (I like to think of the internet as blue) comes these photos.

It struck me, looking at them, how many are doing something, associated with their craft. Which in turn reminds me of the Hands boxset of documentaries from the early 1960's about traditional crafts, with a focus on those dying out due to industrialisation. I come from a people that tell stories and make things. What with the nature of this blog and all, it just kind of resonates. And my, how the world has changed in a hundred years.

Some days are just *sigh*

2012-Sep-05, Wednesday 10:26 pm
Hello. Well, I was going to tell you about how I'm getting into making bags, show you a nifty little glasses case I made yesterday, and maybe go into some cool Lilypad related stuff. But. My home router decided to bork its own wireless functionality, I wasted an hour trying to fix it, and the helpdesk doesn't open until 9am. Then I thought, isn't technology grand, I'll just connect to the mobile internet through a hotspot on my phone. Yeah, except for some reason all my attempts at uploading photos result in nasty xml-tastic error messages. So I'm throwing in the towel and putting on a few CDs for the rest of the evening. Oh, and things will be back to normal (more regular like) around here shortly, presuming the internet starts working again.

Well that's cool

2012-Apr-12, Thursday 09:35 pm
A short post, just because I think this is a brilliant idea; a hackerspace, a safe space for women and mothers, and the icing on the cake, child-care! Mothership hackermoms. I look forward to more innovations on the hackerspace model, it promises to be interesting :)

*edit* Forgot to give props to Julie for finding the link.

Checking in

2012-Apr-08, Sunday 04:22 pm
Hi! Still really really busy, but that should be easing up a little in the next few weeks. In the meantime if you find yourself missing my ramblings (ha!) I've written a short Intro to IRC and Intro to Mailing Lists for tog. I'm thinking of doing another one on website certs, and email signing/encryption, but I doubt they will be the least bit short.

For instance, tog got itself a cert from cacert.org. It is not one of the Certification Authorities (CAs) trusted by default in many browsers, but is a not-for-profit and popular amongst security/computer folk. In order to use the tog website in https you either have to accept the cert when the browser gives you a warning, or import the Class 3 cert before visiting the page.

Other than that I'm just spamming my twitter with links, and not enjoying my distinct lack of chocolate this day. Okay then, back to assignments! ... *sigh*
/me is here. /me is just very very busy. But, just back from Vancouver, Canada. Expect photos. ... Eventually.

A short aside

2011-Dec-15, Thursday 02:50 pm
Half the screen on my laptop is broken, and at six years of age the insurance has expired. This means a momentous event is about to occur, the New Laptop. And I'm getting all excited. It's coming with Windows 7 (which I haven't tried yet), so I think I'm going to have to dual-boot it with linux. Probably Fedora, but I'll have to try a Live CD first to see if the USB problems I went through are hardware/driver specific. I have an existing Windows XP VM I'll probably set up under linux too. And I'm thinking of setting up a lamp stack on CentOS to play around with WordPress. Which means I might have use of the IE-testing VMs Microsoft made up. Also a full Eclipse set-up for Android development might be fun. Then there's also the software/IDEs for my music player and xBees that are Windows-only. Can I set-up my VMs in a third partition and have them happily accessed from either OS? That'd be neat. And a media partition too, which I could set up with rsync to external backup. Am I going to need software version control, if for nothing else then Arduino code? If so, which one? ... Maybe this is all just overkill. Then again, I am a computer geek ;) Oh the things I'm going to learn!
I attended the Knitting & Stitching Show in the RDS this weekend. Actually, in the very hall I had my first and second year college exams. *shiver* It was my first time going, and I went with a mission. One that I unfortunately failed to complete. See, I went looking for fabric, a kind of fabric that doesn't seem to be available in the retail sewing shops around here. And while there was lots of lovely fabric, it was mostly quilting weight cotton. I saw one or two stands with dressmaking fabrics, but sadly none had what I was looking for.

The rest of the hall was full of knitters, embroiderers, jewellery suppliers, machine retailers, and small designers showcasing. Now and again I'd stumble across a stand a little bit unusual, like Colourcraft. More of a general craft suppliers I was surprised to find that they stocked many items I had failed to locate anywhere within reasonable shipping rates. Things like standalone wax pots (originally made for beauty salons, sold for batiking purposes, but which I intend to use for candlemaking), foil transfers, fusible thread, and even Angelina fibre (what do you mean you've never heard of it? To google with you!). Needless to say, I shall be keeping myself busy for the next while. Which isn't hard, as I've been brimming with ideas lately. But powerful all-consuming ideas that have to be written down right now. Which tends to get in the way of actually doing any of them. But I hope to strike the right balance soon.

I got the 'WordPress 3 Complete' book earlier this week, and devoured it in a couple of evenings. Looking forward to setting up an environment to play around and write some things I've been meaning to get done. Ahh php, it's been a while.

Also, I don't think I've mentioned it here before but I'm starting up a reading group, book club kinda thing, very casual style, at tog. Primarily we'll be reading speculative fiction. Some classic sci-fi and cyberpunk books with a maker/hacker ethos, or that look at consequences of new tech. But it will be up to suggestions and majority vote of the group. First meeting is Friday 25th, and we'll be talking about “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” by Philip K. Dick. It's my second time reading the book, and I still prefer it to 'Blade Runner' :)

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