This year I will learn stuff!!

So, the year is 2013 and it will be remembered as the year I started dabbling with physical bits of tech! Things like this, this and this!

I want to learn the basics of electronics and some manufacturing techniques like mold making, casting, etc.

 

How I will learn

While I love reading and will probably read up a lot on the things mentioned above, I plan to learn mainly by doing. Doing short focused projects with tangible output. Some of the current ideas that I have are making a pinball machine, making a 3D scanner and making a wind driven marble machine!

I plan on using the internet a lot and open education resources as far as possible (I have one or two college textbooks lying around)! I also hope to get some advise from people that knows a lot about the things I want to learn.

I also intend to tell people what I'm busy with and what I have learned from completing a project and hopefully getting some constructive feedback.

 

Why am I telling you this, publicly, on the internet!?

Well, two reasons actually. One - I tend to struggle with follow through and saying this publicly gives me a little more incentive to get serious about it :)

And two, learning is way too important to rely on other people to map out what you learn. Education is something that you should do yourself. You know what you like, you know what you want to achieve and you know how, when and where you learn best. And if you don't know these things the solution is to find out, not to hand your education over to a government, university, company or even worse - no one!

Go forth and hack your own education!

Octasphere

A while back I played a bit with webgl and decided that I want to draw a sphere.

UV spheres have their problems, so I considered doing a icosphere. But to draw an icosphere you have to start with and icosahedron and then subdivide. Generating the initial coordinates for the icosahedron felt like too much work for the lazy me.

Instead I opted to start with an octahedron and subdivide from there. An octahedron has a modest 6 coordinates that you need to start with and they happen to lie on the primary axis!



I have no idea why octospheres aren't more popular? Until my experiment, I've never knowingly encountered one?

You can find the code on github!

Visualizing Lernanta's inter-dependancies

This project happened during a flight from Berlin to Durban on the 1st of October.

The data comes from a small project that I've done earlier, but the visualization using HTML5 canvas happened in transit!

Update: Forgot to say that the code is available on github

pi in a box

Yes, of course I'm talking about the raspberry pi! When I received my pi the first thing that I decided to do with it was to put it back in a box. But not its original box, a new and improved box that would allow me to use it!

So I got out a cutting board, a carpet knife and an old cereal box. Here is what happened:

Not yet folded

Folded, closed with some pi inside!

I made one mistake in my original box - I forgot to add a hole for the power adaptor.

Although this box works without any glue, it doesn't work that well. For my next pibox, I'm thinking of a way of keeping everything together without any glue! I didn't originally plan to go all hippie with the recycled material and the gluelessness, but the idea grew on my as I proceeded!

Notifications at P2PU

Over at P2PU we recently revised how we do notifications. A mayor part of the update is allowing people to reply directly to a notification by email.

Any module in P2PU can send a notification to a user. If the module supports receiving a reply to the notification, it passes a callback URL to the notification module when it sends a notification.

   notify(user, 'subject', 'notification text', '/comments/4/reply')

The callback URL get saved together with a response token that is then attached to the email address the notification is sent from.

   reply+@reply.p2pu.org

We make use of sendgrid for sending and receiving email. Sendgrid provides a API called parse that handles receiving email. The parse API calls a specific URL on P2PU whenever a reply is received.

The reply then gets handled by the notification module where the token is verified and the user sending the reply is determined.

The notification module then uses the callback URL to let the original module know that a user responded and passes along the user and the reply text.

   POST /comments/4/reply user='Bob', text='The reply text comes here'