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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.
Apollo-NG is a mobile, self-sustainable, independent and highly-experimental Hackbase, focused on research, development and usage of next-generation open technology while visiting places without a resident, local Hackerspace and offering other Hackers the opportunity to work together on exciting projects and to share fun, food, tools & resources, knowledge, experience and inspiration.
In case you have been here before you might want to hit Shift+F5 and clear your cache to avoid any local caching issues. It was a hard decision to take away available timeslots from other research projects but it was necessary to update the rather quaint and non-committing old design. This project is about the future, about modernization and leaving old, inherited, legacy ballast from many contexts of human activity behind. The UI should reflect that.
Luckily, just in the same timeslot the DokuWiki developer crowd has finished the new Weatherwax release, which fixed a lot of issues and drastically decreased the amount of necessary plugins to get all needed features for this site. So a big thanks to all the people who have participated in DokuWiki is in order.
DokuWiki has proved itself here as a totally versatile platform, mixing together features of content-management-systems, wikis, blogs and enough freedom to intertwine them with a hacked up UI and only very minor changes under the hood. And still, even after testing many other solutions, when weighing the amount of required server resources and easy maintainability vs. features, performance and stability there still wasn't any other system that could even come close to its efficiency and ease of integration.
Thanks to Maximilian Batz from http://www.pi3g.com/, who sponsored two Raspberry Pi B models for the cause of Apollo-NG, it was time to see what more could be done with them. This essentially forked two subprojects:
The Tracker is working but still in alpha state (built as a mockup) and not released yet but after a combined amount of 10 days the pigi was finished, including the prototype boards. Some basic documentation is done, the github repo is online and basic prove-of-concept code is finished. It goes to show how amazingly fast we can dive into new technologies today and come up with a new thing without having any prior knowledge how to build a geiger counter. Sharing knowledge via Internet simply rules :)
After the last collaborative hacking session on DSpace, the client developed and changed a lot. We've already integrated automated testing, using phantomjs and travis, the primary git repo changed from Apollo to github, in order to facilitate Pull-Requests and combined issue tracking. From now on, please don't push DSpace stuff to the Apollo-NG Repo's but use the github repo's as your origin. Every push to develop branch on github is automatically synced to the Apollo-NG repo and then automagically built and deployed on the demo site. This way, we can always be sure, that when a clone from the backup repo is working, the backup is working as well.
Elf-Pavlik is trying to raise interest with other related groups so that the next dspace-hackathon will involve even more people with different backgrounds and capabilities to contribute. It's gonna be a lot of fun :)