Notes from January 2017

Some of the things that I have found interesting in January 2017.

Maps and Data

• Maps of American infrastrucure - A great series of maps of American infrastrucure

Projects

• Universal Play Machine - Universal Play Machine is an installation of five giant mechanical flipbooks sited in the forest of New Hampshire USA.
• Orbicular Lamp - A series of 3D printed shadow lamps based on veins leaves.
• RPI Music Player - A Raspberry pi music player project for streaming music from devices.
• Rune Audio - another Embeded music player project simlare to the RPI Music player. Used to stream music from devices to your stereo.
• Simple LED matrix made out of solo cups.
• Emulator in a NES Cartridge

Tips and tricks

• Battery testing with a megntic parts tray
• A guide to fire safety in industrial Spaces
• 10 Bullets. By Tom Sachs - A prop shop’s rules of the shop.

Games

• HexCells - A logic puzzle game that I fell in love with this month. No guessing everything has an answer. There are two sequels to this game.
• Sneaky Cards - A card game where you give intersting tasks to strangers in public.
• Project Euler - Project Euler is a series of challenging mathematical/computer programming problems that will require more than just mathematical insights to solve. Although mathematics will help you arrive at elegant and efficient methods, the use of a computer and programming skills will be required to solve most problems.
• Stories: The Path of Destinies - A neat steam game where you build a story around players choices and actions. PC, RPG, Actiation-RPG.
• The Jackbox Party Pack 3 - A great party game. Everyone uses their cellphones/tablets to enter their answers.
• Turtle Wushu Tutorial - A simple game of protector your turtle. I like playing it with LED throwies instead of turtles. The follow to this game is 16 Bit Turtle Wushu Tutorial

CNC / Laser / 3D printers

• Microsoft/maker.js - Maker.js is a JavaScript library for creating 2D vector drawings for CNC and laser cutter machines.
• PIP Boy 3000 mark IV - Instructions and files to 3dprint and assemble a PIP Boy from fallout.

Intersting

• Japanese wood paper art
• The birth and death of javascript - This science fiction / comedy / absurdist / completely serious talk traces the history of JavaScript, and programming in general, from 1995 until 2035. It’s not pro- or anti-JavaScript; the language’s flaws are discussed frankly, but its ultimate impact on the industry is tremendously positive.
• How to generate human readable onion names - Brute-forced a custom hidden service address.

Movies

• Don’t Breathe (2016) - The acting could use some work but its a great idea for a horror movie. “Hoping to walk away with a massive fortune, a trio of thieves break into the house of a blind man who isn’t as helpless as he seems.”
• Series of fan made super hero films
• Lists of some great movies - I have been slowly making my way thought this list. Lots of great movies that I have never seen.

Local

• Puzzled Pint - Local meetup of people that attempt to solve a puzzle while drinking a pint.
• Archery Tag - Its like paintball but with bows and arrows. Lots of fun with a big group.

Home and building automation

• Mosquitto - A well maintained, fully featured, open source MQTT Client/SErver/Pub/Sub/Broker.
• phpMQTT - A Simple, single file, MQTT Pub/Sub client. Does not support SSL/TLS
• Awesome MQTT - A giant list of MQTT resources.
• MQTT Spec - MQTT is a machine-to-machine (M2M)/”Internet of Things” connectivity protocol. It was designed as an extremely lightweight publish/subscribe messaging transport. It is useful for connections with remote locations where a small code footprint is required and/or network bandwidth is at a premium.
• MQTT websocket client - A client for testing your MQTT broker’s websocket interface.
• Install and secure the Mosquitto MQTT broker on ubuntu - A create tutorial on how to get started with the Mosquitto MQTT broker.
• Node Red - Node-RED is a tool for wiring together hardware devices, APIs and online services in new and interesting ways. Works with Raspberry PI and such.
• Installing and setup for Node-RED - Install Node.js and Node-RED, get an SSL certificate from Let’s Encrypt, and use Nginx to handle secure connections for Node-RED.
• LoRaWAN - Long Range Low Power Wide Area Network made for embeded devices.
• Developing IoT Mashups with Docker, MQTT, Node-RED, InfluxDB, Grafana A great intro to one persons home automation stack.
• Using SQLite with Node-RED - A simple tutorial on using SQLite with Node-RED.
• Thingsboard - Device management, data collection, processing and visualization for your IoT solution
• MQTT Warn - Subscribe to MQTT topics (with wildcards) and notifiy pluggable services. More info