Our black ABS came in; thanks to Village Plastics! Raft-free printing by using double-sided tape on the build surface. Saves time and $$. Also check out these spectacular parametric-modeled screw-boxes from thingiverse (video of 3D-PO printing one below).
Holy petabyte rack Batman
Data storage is expensive, but raw hard drivers are cheap, and with big data centers measuring capacity in petabytes it’s become pretty clear storage is big money and big business. And when something becomes big business or money, some of those customers (who don’t want to pay big money) are going to get into the ‘Open Source The Thing And Make It Cheap For Me’ game. Which is exactly what backblaze has done with petabytes on a budget.
These guys have designed a fracking Rack System with 67 Terabytes of data in 4U for less than a small car. Then, to make sure it’s cheap and stays cheap, they are sharing the design. 45 Drivers in a 4U Rack, with room to spare. Also amazing is that they run their access to the system via HTTPS instead of something like Fibre Channel, SQL, or SCSI. So my main question is: How long till we get one at the hackerspace? For, you know. uuuhhh, Backups?
September Wrap-up & Announcements
We’ve been busy at Hive (not so much solving the Hive collapse problem, but we like the idea) and have not announced anything since last month. So, lets fix that right now. FIrst off, we just finished our second “Scrum sprint” with some moderate successes. Here’s a brief summary of what we did over the last month:
August Wrap-Up:
We did a ton of awesome things in August. Brendan and Far helped Tory Franklin with her exhibit at FLUXSpace (http://www.thefluxspace.org/pages/current.html), and we also made a Frabjous (or it’s almost done at any rate) http://www.georgehart.com/sculpture/frabjous.html
We built a MakerBot (http://makerbot.com/) and Jordan heroically lead efforts to get it working in only two days (the last two Saturdays), with help from Dan, Brian, Far, Brendan, some Adams, and… anyone else I’m forgetting who also helped.
We attended the Make:Philly BBQ, shot some water rockets, and there was much rejoicing.
Jordan, Brian and many visitors hacked on an iPhone app for ShareUrMeal… that’s almost done. Brian & Far hacked on a Python script to enable Python shell tab completion in multiple operating systems.
We cleaned and reorganized much of the space at the Hive. It’s a little bit less cluttered now.
Here is a quick list of upcoming events at Hive76! Our calendar can be found at http://www.google.com/calendar/ical/hive76%40gmail.com/public/basic.ics or on our website at Hive76.org.
Upcoming Hive Events:
PhillyCocoa iPhone Deviation
+ Thu, September 4, 7pm – 10pm at Hive76
– The local cocoaheads hang out, and build apps for iPhone and Mac. If you want hands on mac devs to work next to, this is the place. This week we’re hoping to finish up our “ShareUrMeal” app!
Python Hacking Night
+Monday, September 14th, 7pm-10pm at HIve76
– We hack on and play with some Python code, and try to get some kind of new functionality
working by the end of the night
Django Hacking Night
+TBD, probably Thu. Sept 17th or Mon. Sept. 28th
– A complement to Python Hacking Night, Django is the web framework “for perfectionists with deadlines,” and is written entirely in Python. Anyone experienced with Django, or looking to get some experience, come on by. Contact Brian w/ interest/questions/date preference. we have one or two experience Django developers lined up to help run the class, but Brian’s organizing it to learn more himself! brian dot glusman (a) gmail dot com
Guitar Effects Workshop
+Mon, September 21, 7:30pm – 10pm
-Come hang out and work on making Pedals and effects! Bring your own.
Makerbot Class
+ Sat, September 19, 1pm – 4pm
– https://hive-76.ticketleap.com/makerbot-class-09-19-2009-13-0 for more info
Makerbot Party
+ Sat, September 19, 7pm – 8pm
-Celebrate the day’s successes with the Hive!
Hive76 Scrum
+ Every Weds 7pm – 7:30 pm at Hive76
– The weekly member check-in and planning. Short and sweet (15 min) time for members to brag about what they’re doing, and talk about the space.
Hive76 Open Hours
+ Every Weds 7:30 pm to ? at Hive76
– The weekly open hours. Anyone can come hang out, and use our space (and some tools, depending on crowd/complexity). Drop in to check us out!
Make things awesome, and Make Awesome Things!
– Hive76
PLUG Into Hive76 == Success!
Our first official PLUG Into Hive76 was a great success last Thursday! We talked about ideas (including netchacing), Adam Grossman did a mini presentation on the 3D vision project, Elizabeth Krumbach donated a new tome to our library, and then we ate cake. Thanks to everybody who showed up!
3dPO Lives!
3dPO, our newest robot is alive and well! Yep, these are all playing back at real-time speed. w00t!
Swiss ‘white’ Trojan programs
To make a short story shorter, Ruben Unteregger is a swiss programmer has spent the last 7 years working for a branch of the Swiss government (Swiss Department of the Environment, Transport, Energy and Communications (UVEK) ) to create a so-called ‘white’ trogan program to sniff and scan VOIP calls. Since much of VOIP (such as Skype) are encrypted, this means he was was writing a client-side Trojan, which would record calls to mp3 files without the computer owners consent or knowledge.
As usual, if there is a way to break encryption, it will be skipped in favor of grabbing the data before/after encryption happens. Being an awesome human being(tm), Ruben Unteregger released MegaPanzer to the public, and has done a good interview explaining in simple I-have-to-explain-it-to-my-mom language what the whole thing is about. It’s an interesting interview, and worth the read. Other coverage is also here.
Or you can watch the nifty ‘How to take over an e-banking session in 7 easy steps” video if you are lazy.
How to Plunder a Bank Account with Megapanzer 0.1 – I’m not such a fan of this web player……
PLUG Into Hive 76
Tonight PLUG and Hive 76 meet for our monthly collaborative meeting, entitled: “PLUG Into Hive 76”. Expect extreme amounts of fun and possibly kernel debugging. Or not. In any case stop by at 7 PM this evening. We’ll be brainstorming about projects and future project ideas.
Photos from Open Hours
One of the Atom (or is that Adams?) took some photos of our open hours last night. The place was packed with people working on our MakerBot, frabjous, LED lighting for our newspaper box, and all sorts of other trouble. We also spent some time deciding on new membership rules, which will be posted in a few days once everyone has had a chance to give some input.
If you want to see what 11 crazy hackers working on 4 separate projects squeezed in one 10×20 room look like, you should check ’em out.
Hive76 Meeting (and stuff)
Wednesday we had a Hive76 scrum (a mini management meeting) and Open Hours, as we do every week. But unlike every week, this time we have a fresh in the box MakerBot to unpack and mess with. Also, I grabbed some photos of the occasion. If you are at least kind-of friends, want to help build this thing, and have some technical, software, or 3d modeling skill, come on out Saturday and help get our MakerBot put together and online!
Water Rockets, Boosted!
Just in time for the Make:Philly BBQ this Sunday, here’s an article on building a water rocket with passive, drop-away boosters. According to the article, these rockets have been successfully launched over 600 feet. Check out the link for more details, and be sure to come out for Make:Philly BBQ and bring your rockets!