Posts by 'Zanarama'

Zanarama

Presentation Plan

Our group was unable to attend the PlayTesting session because we all had class. However, this is just as well because our project isn't something that would be very fun for kids to play, especially 4th graders. Our target is closer to Kindergarten students who are learning about weather. Right now, you can just enter the weather, and possibly log it. Our presentation ...

Zanarama

Open Source Gift Giving

As I have been browsing various websites to find some cool gifts to give people, I came across a couple of really cool open source gifts. The Whistled is a device that allows you to control a set of LED lights by whistling two notes. It also is a great example of an Open Hardware project! Skill Badges are a really cool way to highlight skills ...

Zanarama

New Game Plan

Working with sensors has not been going so well. I overestimated my skill in being able to interface with sensors. I can get the data using an Arduino, but when I have tried to use the Measure code, I cannot get it to work. In order to accomplish most of the project goals on time, we are pushing the sensors onto the back burner. For now, we will be focusing on recording the weather and saving it in the journal. If I have time I am still going to try to get the sensors working. Only time will tel ...

Zanarama

What, RocPy happened again?

Last Tuesday was RocPy so the FOSSBox + FOSSClass took a trip to U of R. I really enjoy going to RocPy because the people and the community are really cool, but I don't feel I am getting a lot out of RocPy recently. The subject matter is way over my head, and I barely understand the first few minutes of the lecture, let alone the deeper Pythoning. I would really enjoy if RocPy split the meetings into multiple smaller talks with some being very introductory, some being midlevel skills, and some ...

Zanarama

Literature Review - 'The Meme Hustler'

Who Evgney Morozov What The Meme Hustler - Tim O'Reilly's crazy Talk Where http://hfoss-fossrit.rhcloud.com/static/books/evgenymorozov- thememehustl... [from The Baffler No. 22] When 2013 The Gist Evgney Morozov provides a (rather harsh) criticism of Tim O'Reilly's impact on the tech world through his published work and quotes. Morozov feels that O'Reilly manipulates the technolo ...

Zanarama

Election Night Hackathon

Yesterday was the Election Night Hackathon here at RIT. The local elections were covered and data was gathered from a few surrounding counties. You can see the results here. The night was pretty slow for me since it was only local elections and I am not a NY native. I look forward to going the next presidential election in 2016. The biggest thing I learned from the Election Night Hackathon is that most pe ...

Zanarama

Another RocPy

The RocPy meetup for October mostly consisted of lightning talks from students in the HFOSS course with our project ideas. It was a little boring in terms of presentation, mostly because they are only ideas at this point; nothing has been implemented. My group gave our talk on the WeatherStation activity we hope to make. Our presentation can be found [here](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1mwnIw M74QtqYa4DF40oX9ZszIJwdEbochZqCFhcYX5M/edit ...

Zanarama

SmokeTest

We have recieved the XO laptops for the HFOSS course. Instead of getting a 1.5 like most of the class, I have been given a modified 1.0 that has a serial port soldered in. Its a pretty cool hack and will hopefully help in our work with sensors. I am really excited to get started hacking with sensors, but first I needed to test the functionality of the OLPC. The XO booted just fine and is already set up with a variety of activities that use sensors, although I may end up reinstalling the OS to t ...

Zanarama

HFOSS Project Idea

A huge part of the project for the HFOSS course is creating a game/application/contribution to Sugar Labs projects. As I am not a game design student I proposed a project that will take a little bit of a different path that would include hardware, my interest (and stronger suit). The XO laptops can interface with these sensors or, with a modified XO, a serial port. We are hoping to use these sensors to build off of the [Measurement Activity](http ...

Zanarama

Commarch Assignment

For the HFOSS course, we completed a Commarch assignment, basically just investigating an open source project and learning a bit about it. My group chose Fedora Badges, because I was familiar with it and it is an awesome project led by people that are already close to FOSS@RIT. Project: Fedora Badges IRC Channel: #fedora-infra, #fedora-apps, #fedora-badges on freenode Code Repository: https://github.com/fedora-infra/fedbadges **Mail ...