Rustic Retreat
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Live broadcasts and documentation from a remote tech outpost in rustic Portugal. Sharing off-grid life, the necessary research & development and the pursuit of life, without centralized infrastructure.
Subscribe to our new main project Rustic Retreat on the projects own website.
While watching some fast cars on a multi-lane street from above today, one observation came up with repetition: Fast movers, that wanted to overtake slow movers (on the right line) almost never used their turn signal (blinker) to indicate their intention to move to the left lane and afterwards to move back to the right lane. Why is that and how could that be helped?
A7B5BC2V79RH. Helping upstream projects directly seems to be a much more logical choice to put work into, instead of rewriting code to enhance it for oneself only. Today, the development time was invested into the new video.js interface for MediaGoblin, to give it a real “production grade” finish with MediaGoblin visual identity and to make it easier for other hackers in the future, to change the skins to their liking.
For tomorrow, MediaGoblin promises a real treat: The change from MongoDB to SQL.
You will have to wait to find out, if it's just one of April Fools' Day's hoaxes or the real thing :)
Buying Sparkfun products and being in europe always was a little bit annoying due to shipping times & customs hassle. Stephan Watterott, CEO of Watterott-Electronic, offers many sparkfun products and other greatly hackable devices and components in his Shop, shipped directly from Germany.
Stephan was also kind enough to become a sponsor and is willing to provide necessary kits and components for Apollo-NG's Hackerspace and R&D Lab, to let other hackers play with them and to enhance the functionality of the Odyssey or Aquarius:
When the current maintenance cycle ends and the next R&D cycle begins, all development tasks will be weight by importance, to identify priorities and then decide what is going to be needed.
Thanks for your support Stephan, we greatly appreciate your generosity.
Operating and providing a website for a project always inherently leads to finding ways, to let more people know about your content. Social media bookmarking is a great way to do just that. But, as every so often, many people compromise comfort for reasonable security, including some javascript $social_media_provider offers to easily integrate it, allowing $social_media_provider to track each visit a user makes on any other website, that includes just the button/badge. Most users aren't even aware of the fact that this is happening in the background.
So called “environmentalists” often claim that burning wood is “evil” but mostly forget in their argument, that domestic energy has to be produced somehow for humankind to survive. There is nothing evil about burning wood, quite the opposite in fact, wood can be a renewable energy source, when used properly. Simply put: To keep it sustainable, it's important not to burn more wood than nature is able to reproduce (i.e. grow trees) and to increase the amount of usable energy that can be harvested.
In order to avoid disastrous deforestation, which happened on the Easter-Islands, is currently happening on Haiti and will become more obvious in India and Africa in the near future, it's imperative to help these people now, by putting a stop to burning wood in open fires or simple stoves and not to implicitly deem them evil because, as of now, they simply have no other choice but to burn wood.
The expression security = usability-1 can be interpreted in many ways. Either things become far too complicated, so that regular users just don't want to be bothered with them or the amount of energy it takes to complete a security-related task is just insane.
To wipe a 1TB (1024GB) disk with random data or prep a disk for encryption, it takes a little more than 4 days (97 hours) when utilizing /dev/urandom. Who would want to wait 4 days for a supporting task like this to finish? Just considering the energy it takes, to keep the whole system up and running, only to write random data to a disk, clearly demands higher random data bitrates without sacrificing quality. Hardware-RNG's are good alternative but not always available, so you might want to give /dev/frandom a try.
Even the earliest Apollo-NG design drafts already included multiple GPS dependencies for a number of subsystems. Apart from obvious navigation assistance, GPS will also discipline the reference clock module and the 10MHz reference oscillator module GPSDO. The first prototype was hacked around an old Rockwell/Connexant Jupiter TU30-420-031 GPS receiver, found on eBay.
After a long odyssey the Command-Module (CM) named Odyssey finally arrived and will undergo Pre-Launch preps immediately. On her first 600km long voyage, she proved to be a fine ship.
The new Batronix BX48 Batego is an extremely powerful, compact and easy to use universal programmer, that also comes with Linux support. After 3 failed attempts with different Galep-Prommers to write an eprom, Andre Bauer, managing director of Batronix, was kind enough to sponsor one of these nifty devices for Apollo-NG's R&D Lab. Thanks a million, Andre!