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April’s SuperMondays event, Makers and Hardware Hacking took me back to my youth with me tinkering away with various electrical components making transistor radios, battery chargers and bedroom alarms.
The Arduino looks like an awesome piece of kit and I wish I had one all those years ago. A affordable programmable chip using open-source software with a programming language based on a simplified version of c/c++. Expandable with an array of ‘shields’, you can add on things like motor controllers or Ethernet. Makes me want to buy one and get the old components box out of the loft.
The next step for hobbyists and for education are the Raspberry Pi and the Beaglebone which are fully functioning computers. Both of these run various flavours of Linux on the board and you can even run Android on the Beaglebone. The beaglebone is more advanced due to its maturity and like the Arduino, many expansion boards including LCD touch screens are a must. Thanks to Tony Dixon for bringing his Raspberry Pi along and making everyone green with envy!
A short talk on 3D printing by Cay Green provided an interesting insight into the history, hardware and software behind the technology.
To explore more about Hardware Hacking and the like, you can join like minded people at MarkerSpace in Newcastle.
Some links to resources of interest:
This month was by far the biggest I have been to with over 100 attendees. Many thanks to all those who organised and presented at this months event (sorry I cannot credit everyone as I forgot to take names!).
Today is the launch of SuperJobs a jobs board for IT and Digital jobs in the North East. Following my work with SuperMondays in 2011 to create a new WordPress theme, I was requested to update the theme to provide a link to a ‘job page’. However I soon realised that a single job page would be difficult to use and update once several vacancies were featured.
I put forward the suggestion that we use the ever popular WordPress blogging tool to create a new site for SuperMondays to manage the job postings. I set about creating the theme, which included a new name for the site ‘SuperJobs’. Using a standard post, along with custom fields and categories, the site now features a landing page with a list of the currently posted vacancies that links to a full information page. A category list helps a user to filter the vacancy list.
Visit the website at jobs.supermondays.org.
I have never been to a tea room and been presented with a ‘tea’ list. Like the ubiquitous wine list at a good restaurant, the list featured many different teas from around the globe which ranged from black teas, to green and fruit tea to the redbush or roobios variety. After a few minutes pouring over the list (no pun intended) I settled for Ceylon Orange Pekoe – which is nothing to do with the fruit, but rather uses the whole tender flesh of the leaf. I also ordered a Carrot and Coriander soup. The tea swiftly arrived in an elegant ceramic elephant shaped pot along with a wicker strainer and handle-less tea cup.
While waiting for the tea to brew and the soup to arrive, I took a moment to look around. Considering a noisy busy bus route was outside, the room was surprisingly quiet with a little ambient music playing in the background. It was similar to a Japanese tea room adorned with bamboo and wicker furniture and a traditional Japanese seating area. The red/brown tea was light and pleasant with a hint of a malty flavour which was a nice change from the usual strong teas I drink. I enjoyed the soup with its accompanying wholemeal roll.
Along with the extensive range of tea, Tea Sutra also offers complementary therapies from acupuncture to massage. But no coffee – the owner is a purist!
Tea Sutra is the perfect place for tea connoisseurs to chill out and enjoy a brew.
You can visit Tea Sutra’s website at http://teasutra.co.uk/
A monster year for work this year, so I thought I would list a few of the thinks I have done.
- developed a new marketing website for my employer, Newcastle Building Society and the related micro-sites.
- I designed and developed a new WordPress theme for the SuperMondays website – this is a IT user group I regularly attend that features talks about a range of topics.
- I started a personal project called the Digital Event Board to share events, conferences and training with IT professionals.
- Refreshed my portfolio and blog design
- Attended the DIBI Conference
- Started learning asp.net with c#.
I have redesigned the category tiles on the Digital Event Board to match the latest iteration of the logo. Also changed the main background to white and changed the layout to that using 12 column 960 grid which gives a better proportion of whitespace between elements such as the tiles and the right column. The slightly wider tiles also look better with the new rounded style, although ie6-8 users beware – this uses the border-radius property!
I recently decided to bin the Web Event Board, and re-launch with the Digital Event Board to expand the range of events avaiable as there was a lot of cross over with other feilds such as security and mobile. Take a look and let me know what you think. It is still a work in progress so may be a bit buggy, but I am looking for a formal lauch in 2012. If you have your own event, why not add it!
I recently wrote a function for wordpress to get posts by a certain category, which I thought I would share as it took ages to find enough information to write my own. This is useful for displaying certain posts on a page.
Read more…
I define myself as a developer who can design, and as such my designs can be good, but not great. I have an appricaiation of what good design is but not what makes a good design, so I thought I might learn something at this event from SuperMondays which I can apply to make a better website design.
I’m looking forward to the DIBI Conference at the Sage, Gatehead that is on June 7th! I went to last years which was great, and 2011 looks even better. It will be great listening to the likes of Jeffrey Zeldman, Jared Spool and Mike Kus.
I was looking forward to the recent SuperMondays lightning talks on April 26th 2011 with some interest, especially the HTML5 topics. Praise and thanks to all those presented, although I have a couple of points for the organisers to improve the session; I think an extra minute or two for each speaker to extend the Q&A to allow for an extra question or two from the audience, and I found the adjudicator calling remaining time a little distracting considering there was a visual cue.
Moving on to the speakers. Here are a couple of reviews on the talks that were useful to me…
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© Copyright Stuart Holmes 2006-2012. Some icon credits to Gentleface. Background from Subtle Patterns.
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