Tag: projects

Living in the Future, or, HackLab Buys a Cupcake

On September 1st, I sent an email to the HackLab discussion list asking for folks to commit. Less than 24 hours later, members and non-members alike stepped up and pledged $700 in addition to my initial commitment of $200. Our MakerBot Batch 7 CupCake CNC will ship in early October, hopefully in time for MiniSoOnCon!

3D printing is so amazing. This is the MITS Altair of a DIY revolution whose shape I’m not at all certain of. I couldn’t be more exited to see what the hacklabbers make and how we improve the machine, too.

In alphabetical order, the donors were:

3ric Johanson
Alex Leitch
Byron Sonne
Chad Mounteny
Cheryl Mok
Chris Pilkington
Dale Babiy
Dan Kaminsky
Eric from NYC Resistor
Kate Raynes-Goldie
Sergio Martns
Seth Hardy

Welcome to the future, folks.

-Leigh

My ideal Twitter client

Since the demise of Twitter’s Jabber server, I’ve been frustrated with pretty much every client I’ve tried.  And I’ve used a few:

  • twhirl – doesn’t stop scrolling up when it’s out of focus
  • twibble – random crappiness, memory leaks, poor recovery from posting failures
  • tweetdeck – doesn’t remember the groups you set up so if you accidentally close them you’re screwed, and also doesn’t work on 64-bit linux (same applies to twhirl – it’s an Adobe Air issue)
  • a couple of console clients, all just sort of generally crap.  Mainly frustrated by their inability to scroll backwards – I like being able to not look at twitter for a few hours without missing out on stuff 🙂

So here’s my ideal client.  I’m going to start writing it on Wednesday, once school’s done.

  • works with an irc client.  I ❤ irc, and I can keep it running on my shell server, accessible from anywhere.
  • search functionality: I want to be able to join a channel and have that act as the search term on summize / twitter search such that /join #search-25C3 shows me the results for this search in real(ish) time.
  • groups functionality (like tweetdeck) – I’d like to be able to set up groups of followees to see only their tweets.  There are a couple of reasons for this: wanting to have a “quiet” group containing just the people I care most about, avoiding what on LiveJournal is termed “unfriending drama”, grouping friends geographically, or whatever.  But it’s been sorely lacking in my Twitter experience so far.
  • keyword exclusion – if I don’t want to hear any more about #AnnoyingVendorCon, I want to be able to exclude it from the tweets I’m getting.
  • proper IRC direct message functionality: dm’s should show up as /msg windows.
  • following and unfollowing from within the client – this hasn’t worked properly in twibble for a while.

I’m going to start working off Mike Verdone’s existing Python Twitter Tools – should be a good start.