I had to split up my posts to avoid my hiatus post from being an unreadable mess.

This post is a bit of a recap of some projects I’ve worked on or am working on. There are another two posts following this one covering some larger posts.

Startup weekend mentoring

I haven’t participated in another Startup Weekend in Perth since my first one. I don’t think I ever wrote it up in its full glory either, needless to say it was pretty intense and despite not having the experience I was after, I learnt a bunch and would recommend it to anyone who is interested in that kind of thing.

In preparation for the SWPerth7 event the organisers did a call out for mentors. This is something I’m interested in, but I honestly didn’t expect to get accepted. Heh, suckers.

Mentoring was a great experience, and I genuinely hope I was able to help the teams with their planning and validation - my feedback seems to suggest so. I was a bit worried I’d commit a cardinal sin and be prescriptive about things “You should do this or that”, but I was able keep it to leading questions and answering specific advice questions - so yay for that.

In the future, I’d love to do this again and aim to get some of the pitch coaching mentor timeslots. I think I might have more to help on this side of things.

Distillation automation

I managed to get most of the parts together to completely automate my still for the purposes of , uh.. extracting essential oils and distilled water.

The hardest part so far is the temperature probe which is an annoying 5mm in diameter in stainless steel. I was hoping to use a one wire digital probe, however the smallest package for these is 5mm in diameter - leaving no room for the stainless steel shroud.

I’ll have to order some K-type sensors, and once they arrive and the shed is cleaned - I should have some updates on that particular project.

Video streaming

I’ve been pretty interested in getting involved in the video streaming project over at the Perth Linux Users Group for a while now.

They’re looking to move from DV capture to HDMI over USB and have been waiting on some custom hardware to get made, which looks like a good path forwards.

But in the meantime my work has given me some budget to put together a solution with off the shelf parts. I’ve happily spent the entire budget and have a nice pile of bits ready to go.

Whilst I’m still keen on the open source solution, it’s going to have to wait a while for me to play with these new toys.

Expect a post on this soon.

WACAN

I’m happy to be a founding member of this organisation. A bunch of guys involved in WAFreeNet incorporated an association to further the goals of building a community operated wireless network across the region.

The incorporation (or rather, some of the people involved on either side of the should-we-incorporate fence) has caused some division in the community, but has also achieved some really great stuff. Specifically, the organisation has a relationship with WAIA which has helped secure a tenancy for a great core node at QV1 as well as access to some CDN traffic over the network.

I’ve perpetually been unable to participate in these networks - since 2003(?) I’ve been testing line of sight to each house I’ve lived in with no luck. More recently I’ve had perfect LOS to QV1, but at the wrong angle for the sector panel - but it looks like our new house should be able to manage an ok connection.

My involvement in this group has primarily been as a member, I’m not really interested in committees any more - but I’ve organised a few public meetings (none of which I’ve been able to attend, heh).

I think I’ll keep doing that for a while.

Pelican Modules

I promised a while back to put the code up for some of the pelican modules I wrote to support this site. As of sometime last year, they’re now available on GitHub here and here.