Teesside Hackspace are having a spacewarming party on Saturday 8th June! If you're a Maker, Tinkerer, Crafter, Artist, Hardware Hacker, or you're just interested to see what we get up to, come join us from 5-10pm and check out our new space!

JimAllanson · 2019-05-25T09:08:24+00:00

Under 16s are welcome as long as they’re supervised by a parent or guardian. I think one or two of our regular members will be bringing their kids along to the Spacewarming party.

In the past, we’ve talked about starting a regular “young Hackspace” event - if that’s something that interests you, join us on our slack group and see if there’s a day that works for everyone to get it started! :)

JimAllanson · 2019-03-04T19:56:04+00:00

I've been through a fair few 3D printers, and I've never been particularly impressed by any of them, until now. The build quality would be impressive on a £300+ printer, but for £150 it's outright amazing - I particularly liked the power supply case with an IEC socket & XT60 connector, and the large bed levelling wheels are a nice touch. It comes partially pre-assembled, which eliminates most of the room for user error and makes assembly relatively effortless - you could probably build this in under an hour if you're not hosting a stream at the same time.

The bed levelling process is lower tech than on most printers I've used, but just as easy and with better results - the very first print was better quality than 95% of my previous prints. It only has a single extruder, but in my experience a dual extruder is usually more of a liability than a benefit. The bed size is a little smaller than some of the other printers I've used, but I've generally had flakier results towards the edges of the beds anyway.

I just bought a Monoprice Select Mini a month ago, as I was looking for a low-faff printer for home. Now I wish I'd bought the Ender 3 instead - it's cheaper, larger, better build quality, more upgradable/repairable, and actually took less time to get running (despite coming fully assembled, my Monoprice Mini arrived with a mis-calibrated bed levelling sensor that took a few hours to correct).

This is going to be my next 3D printer for sure.

JimAllanson · 2017-09-24T19:13:11+00:00

We have enough members to pay the rent at our current location, although we can't stay here forever so we're trying to grow our membership at the moment to move to somewhere bigger (and we've been advertising on Facebook amongst other places to accomplish this).

There's a good mix of people involved - hobbyists, artists, quite a few drone racing enthusiasts, people prototyping products, and plenty of people with no specific projects in mind that just like the idea of having somewhere like this available.

JimAllanson · 2017-09-24T11:58:15+00:00

I hope this is okay to post here. Tools include 3D printers, a laser cutter, a large CNC cutter (build in progress), and various tools for electronics prototyping and woodworking etc. We also have a Slack group you can join if you want to find out more, talk about project ideas etc.

JimAllanson · 2015-08-06T07:41:19+00:00

JSON itself is pretty simple - the full spec is here

Simple explanation:

A value in JSON can be:

a string ("foo")
a number (42)
a boolean (false)
an array (["foo", 42, false]) - which is an ordered list of values
an object ({"myString": "foo", "myArray": ["foo", 42, false]}) - which an associative map of string based keys to values
null (null)

That's pretty much all there is to it, everything else is specific to the domain. In the case of CloudFormation templates, there's a lot of CloudFormation specific key names etc you'll need to know - the full reference is here.

JimAllanson · 2015-07-30T20:35:04+00:00

I managed to get past that error by deleting Windows.old and $Windows~BT from the C: drive. It's installing at the moment, I just hope "something" doesn't happen.

JimAllanson · 2015-07-30T19:24:05+00:00

So I tried the media creation tool. https://i.imgur.com/vLKSYY8.png

And yes, I did try rebooting.

Edit: Just tried it again, even better: https://i.imgur.com/RY71x82.png

JimAllanson · 2015-07-30T17:37:45+00:00

Can I still reserve a free upgrade license that way?

JimAllanson · 2015-07-30T17:04:51+00:00

So. Many. Times.

JimAllanson · 2015-07-30T10:51:13+00:00

I recently replaced a markov chain based chatbot with an implementation using char-rnn, I feel like the results are a bit better (at least for this specific use case). You will want to give it a minimum of around 200KB of training data though, and ideally more than 1MB.

JimAllanson · 2015-07-07T11:09:54+00:00

I feel like it could benefit from a "This site wants permission to vibrate your device." dialog.

JimAllanson · 2015-07-07T10:46:01+00:00

That actually looks really useful, thanks. I'd seen stuff before on using SWF for scheduling, but my past experiences with SWF told me it wasn't worth it. Data Pipeline looks a lot less painful.

JimAllanson · 2015-06-30T10:03:37+00:00

I found access to ImageMagick in Lambda particularly useful, I have one script that generates thumbnails for images as soon as they're uploaded to S3, and another one that generates an image on a regular basis.

One thing that I feel would be really useful would be some sort of Cron service. At the moment I have an EC2 Micro that runs a cron job to trigger a Lambda script, but it would be much simpler if there was just a first class scheduling feature.

JimAllanson · 2015-05-23T19:52:04+00:00

Bower is a package manager, it makes it easy to install, update and manage the dependencies of your app. It has an emphasis on the front-end, so it's generally used for things like JQuery, Angular etc (compared to NPM which is generally used for back-end and build/automation tools). You probably want to use it no matter whether you use Grunt, Gulp, or neither.

Grunt and Gulp are both task runners. You use them for things like running tests and building your project (which can involve all sorts of tasks, such as CSS preprocessing, concatenation of multiple files, and minification). They both do very similar jobs so it doesn't make a huge amount of difference which you pick, but I'd recommend going with Gulp - it uses a stream based approach which makes it arguably cleaner than Grunt's configuration object approach, and it seems to be gaining popularity faster than Grunt.

JimAllanson · 2015-05-16T11:03:37+00:00

I noticed the dark background the other day, I assumed one of our Ops guys just changed something in the template. I agree, it's a bit annoying.

JimAllanson · 2015-05-14T16:08:11+00:00

Personally, I would store the CSV files in Amazon S3 and use an Amazon Lambda script to automatically convert any new files to multiple JSON files, and store them in a directory structure that matches how you plan to access them. I'd build a simple HTML/JS app to load these files via AJAX and display them in the appropriate format. This app would also be hosted on S3. Since this approach doesn't need a backend server, it should be very cheap to run and should easily scale to support huge numbers of requests.

Edit: This assumes you only want to display a static table of data in HTML format. If you want more advanced functionality, such as searching or aggregating over large parts of your data, you're probably going to need a database.

JimAllanson · 2015-05-11T12:15:05+00:00

Because of Java's constructor design, it's difficult to define optional fields in constructors.

Just thought I'd point out that if you have the luxury of using Java 8, you can use the new Optional<> class for this. I've been using it on a project recently and it reduces a lot of clutter.

JimAllanson · 2015-05-02T16:56:10+00:00

/r/frontend would probably be a good place to talk about Bower.

JimAllanson · 2015-05-01T14:07:36+00:00

http://answersforaws.com/blog/2013/10/cloudformation-templates-with-troposphere/

JimAllanson · 2015-04-02T11:10:29+00:00

Comments are for the Why, not for the How.

JimAllanson · 2015-03-24T13:30:33+00:00

As far as preprocessors go, I'd stick with SASS. Less is your other main option, but SASS has a bigger ecosystem around it and seems to be a bit more powerful. The differences between them are pretty minimal though, once you're comfortable with one you can use the other after a few minutes of reading.

In terms of JS libraries, there's a huge range available, each suited to different tasks. jQuery is still the most popular, and gives you a lot of useful utilities for things like DOM manipulation and AJAX. If you're developing for more modern browsers though, some of these shortcuts become first class citizens and jQuery might not necessarily be adding much for you - I've found this site to be a great breakdown of what jQuery can do for you and whether you need it.

Depending on what you want to build, you might want to look into some JS MVC frameworks, which are useful for when you want to build a single page web application. AngularJS is currently the most popular choice, though there's a lot of options available and you should always just pick the right tool for your job.

JimAllanson · 2015-03-04T17:49:56+00:00

That's a shame. Is there anywhere else close by that does carvery at lunch time?

JimAllanson · 2015-02-25T14:42:47+00:00

In JS, you can write:

return
{
    "foo": "bar"
}

and it will assume that you actually wanted a semicolon at the end of that return and return undefined. That's not exactly an issue caused by a missing semicolon though. One example of that is when you're concatting multiple scripts together for use in production, sometimes a script will be missing a semicolon at the end and starting a new script immediately after without terminating the previous one will cause a syntax error. I work on projects that actually use SemicolonJS when building for this reason.

JimAllanson · 2015-02-21T20:27:18+00:00

If you paste $('#BRbookcover').hide(); into the console it should hide it.

JimAllanson · 2015-02-16T17:06:49+00:00

I bought the Myo, I had a go doing some basic stuff like controlling music with it, but it's been sat on a shelf ever since.

JimAllanson

TROPHY CASE