Hey Everyone, I'm finally back after quite some time (a couple months or so). Upcoming for my blog will be posts concerning a New Media Team Project (ditto to a Educational Capstone) and a variety of different Raspberry Pi projects pumping out of the Advanced FOSS course. All in all, there's going to be some sweet hacks getting built and produced. I'll make sure to get some team support in putting these on Github for the internets. Until then, I'll keep updating this blog as the new knowledge f ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...