The Dublin Maker Faire

On Saturday (15th July), I was lucky enough to attend Ireland’s first Maker Faire at Trinity College, Dublin.  It was a fantastic and incredibly inspiring event.  For those of you who don’t know what a Maker Faire is, it is ‘a family-friendly showcase of invention, creativity and resourcefulness, and a celebration of the Maker movement.  It’s a place where people show what they are making, and share what they are learning.’ So there!

Some of the exhibits on display included:

• Scalexercise, from Buildbrighton, that uses exercise bikes to power a Scalextrix track. 
• Breandan Lane brought along his SteamPunk carousel, which I thought was rather scary looking, and the product of a warped mind.  But he more than made up for it with his simply outstanding musical rocket, which was a centre of attention for the entire day:
• The simply amazing Lego Faire that was built by Presentation School Warrenmount. For me, a recovering Lego addict, this was the highlight of the Faire:

There was a lot more happening at the faire, including an underwater ROV built from everyday parts and controlled using an Arduino, the 14ft drum from Fuinneamh, and loads more!

Personally, I found the faire incredibly inspiring.  Particularly as I have recently signed up as a STEM Ambassador to try and promote STEM subjects in local schools.  I’ll be especially interested in encourage coding in schools, and I hope to mentor a school taking part in this year’s Lego League, hosted by W5 at the Odyssey.  To prepare for this, I will be playing researching Lego MindStorm and the Raspberry Pi over the summer. 

Mint Really Is Mint!

Just a quick blog post to sing the praises of Mint, a user-friendly Linux operating system.  I have been promising my brother that I would rebuild an old laptop for him for several months.  After finally completing the physical rebuild at the weekend, I faced a dilemma as to what OS to install.  The only Windows options open to me were Windows XP (9 years old), or Windows Server 2008 (fine as developer workstation, not great for a non-techie end user).  I did look at buying an upgrade to Windows 7, but I couldn’t justify the £80 price tag for this 7 year old laptop. 

So I thought I would try out a Linux OS for the first time.  After using this excellent online wizard to select a Linux OS, I plumped to install Ubuntu.  Unfortunately, Ubuntu wasn’t configured to deal with the wide screen on the laptop, and after booting, it would only display a blank screen.  I did search for a fix, but despite spending some time on the command line, I wasn’t able to update the display configuration. 

After this, I remembered reading that Mint was a variant of Ubuntu specifically designed for first time Linux users, and decide to give it to go.  After an insanely short time (approximately 15 minutes), Mint had smoothly installed itself, and was ready for use.  I am already very impressed with the options to install and automatically update applications using the software manager, and the overall performance of the OS.  Remember, this is a 7 year old laptop, with only 500MB RAM – I dread to think what the performance would have been like if I had installed Windows.  So, my brother has his laptop, and I am left a Linux convert!

New Mobile Phone

 

I finally got around to buying a new mobile phone today.  While it isn’t the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Android handset that I really wanted, the Nokia 7230 is a definite step up from my last mobile phone.

I’ve just finished synchronizing my contacts using the Nokia Ovi service (Mobyko does not support the 7230 yet), and I’m now looking to use the open source application GCal Sync to sync my google calendar with the mobile phone’s calendar.  Assuming I can get GCal Sync to work, in the future I will also be able to develop and deploy my own custom applications to the phone.

Alan Turing and The Lego of Doom

It seems only fitting that my first blog post should hark back to the founder of modern computer science, Alan Turing. I I came across this article in the Spectrum magazine that highlighted Mike Davey's DIY Turing machine.   The Spectrum article includes a video showing his Turing machine in action:

It is a simply amazing piece of hardware, and a great help in visualizing what Turing had in mind when he wrote his seminal Computer Science paper.  Though I still prefer the Lego of Doom version: