[Noisebridge-discuss] Noisebridge Reverse Engineering Bar

Rubin Abdi rubin at starset.net
Tue Apr 21 09:36:46 UTC 2009


I've been wanting to have some display somewhere in 83c printing 
information, random or not. As much as the LED sign is great, it isn't 
something people can simply write some small widget for, and the greeter 
machine is kind of slow.

Inspired by the recently donated table from an Apple store, I give you 
the Noisebridge Reverse Engineering Bar!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/rubin110/3461575549/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rubin110/3461578465/

I used a shuttle PC and a monitor that were sitting around for a while 
without a loving home. The machine is respectfully called Donkey, 
running Debian Lenny. It's connected to the network via wifi, at boot it 
loads up Firefox and full screens. The page it requests is sitting on 
pony's http server.

Look familiar?

http://iiheart.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/dsc05219.jpg

The general idea is once I pound out CSS a little more, folks can write 
little modules or widgets that'll display on the screen, refreshing 
after a hand full of seconds. Ed quickly wrote some simple PHP to scrape 
the public user list for our wiki and display 8 random users.

Here are ideas some of us came up with on what this display could show...

* List of upcoming events, scraped off of the wiki
* Weather forecast
* Bart times (I think Steen said he was on top of this)
* MUNI times
* Random photos from our Flickr pool
* Fortune
* Current emails from the announce list
* Some sort of ticker with interesting information that no one will care 
about
* The current date and time
* Dump of http://search.twitter.com/search?q=noisebridge
* Display checkins from Brightkite and Foursquare
* Newest posts from planet Noisebridge
* SVN checkins to pony

It's basically like a big ass Chubmy.

I've created wiki pages for both "Donkey" and the Noisebridge "Reverse 
Engineering Bar". Please poke me if you'd like to create a widget for 
this whole getup.

Miloh and I will be building a mount for the monitor shortly, so it's 
not taking up any desk space.

-- 
Rubin Abdi
rubin at starset.net



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