Farset Labs

I was fortunate enough to be invited to participate in a debate raising money for Farset Labs, a cause obviously close to my cold cynical heart. Will GenAI Revolutionise Our Lives For The Good In The Next 5 Years is top tier troll-bait from Garth and Art, and I’m very grateful to have shared the stage with the 5 other speakers. Even the lanky english one. I was particularly impressed by my teammates in their very human-led approach to this question (although everyone was great!) ...

Today, I’m no longer the Treasurer of Farset Labs, and in the next few days, I’ll officially have left the board of trustees of the charity that I helped form over 13 years ago. Farset Labs started as a Google Group that I started in 2010. It took until 2012 to get our act together, along with some entertaining hackathons riding on the backs of our friends at Dragonslayers. Over the past decade-and-a-bit, I’d easily say that Farset Labs has been the keystone of my life and my career, and I’m pretty sure that (before the renovations in 2019) you’d find my blood, sweat, and definitely tears staining various parts of the building. ...

This is a condensed version of a twitter thread in response to @silverSpoon asking about how Farset Labs would comment on recent news of Dublins hackerspace (TOG) being uncerimoniously turfed out of their third home thanks to developers just wanting to flip sites Agreed, and it shouldn't be down to companies to fill up the gap. https://t.co/Np46Znn3xH — Andrea (@silverSpoon) June 8, 2021 I wonder if @FarsetLabs has comments on how that works on NI? — Andrea (@silverSpoon) June 8, 2021 It’s similar up here, but that’s more challenging (and lines up with @jeffrey_roe’s comments in the piece) that hackerspaces fall between a crack in local development support between ’entrepeneurship/startups support’ (aka subsidised professional services and office space), the classical arts sector individual and studio support (which has its own significant issues, often a lot more bureaucracy than it’s worth, and stifling community revenue generation by arcane entertainments licensing that I’m sure if you start @adamtucks he’ll chip in) and last, the classical community centre/sports groups (such as the GAA clubs discussed in the original article). ...

Realised it’d been a while, thought it was time for an update. I’m gonna try and make an effort to get closer to an ideal of something like #weeknotes as I’ve always been jealous of Adrian’s ability to put this thoughts down and get them out the door in a sensible way… Anyway, use the Table of Contents above to skip to bits you may care about. Farset Updates So, this was the actual reason for this update but it started a weird thought process that led to this blog. ...

Super quick one this time; I’ve been experimenting with MQTT to act as a central messaging broker for “Farset In-Space Related Stuff” as part of the near continuous renovations and expansions. We previously had a well configured EMonPi set up with nice dashboards and things, but that died a death at some point during the move, who knows. Anyway, EmonPi has a built in mosquitto broker, which it uses to keep ‘state’ across several parts of the emonpi ecosystem. ...

I’m leaving Northern Ireland, and I’m moving to Liverpool. Via Portsmouth. I have spoken with a few people about the situation I find myself in, and a few more people about my decision, but I want to get it all down somewhere. Where did this come from? The short answer is that a series of unexpected events mean that it makes sense to move my research. Recently, my PhD supervisor, Prof Alan Marshall, was offered a research Chairship at the University of Liverpool, which he gladly accepted. It’s a great move for him (Another Russell Group, one of the original ‘redbrick’ universities, etc etc), but that’s his life not mine so all it does is provide an option. (Disclosure: I also work with Alan on his spinout Wireless Security company, TOM Ltd) ...

I was skimming through the Oral Statement from yesterday’s Assembly, with a specific interest in Dr Stephen Farry’s discussions on the NI Economic Activity Baseline Report (everyone loves Baseline reports these days, but very few ever seem to get followed up…) can came across a Question and Response between Sammy Douglas (E. Belfast) and Dr Farry. Mr Douglas: […]Will he outline what his Department is doing to ensure that we are educating our young people in the skills that the workforce needs? ...

** After a long time in the oven, Farset Labs is up and running. Unforanately we don’t have any of the crazy equipment yet, since we’re broke. As my first ‘official’ Farset Labs project, I’ve installed a ‘Big Red Button’ to notify the @FarsetLabs twitter feed and #FarsetLabs on Freenode to the status of the space. Basically, first person pushes the BRB down in the morning, then one of the directors key-unlocks the space to ‘close’ it. ...

IRC, Python, Ubuntu linux. Simples! Same as by Twitter post, but for IRC. Biggest problem with this one was working out that the IRC server needs to be kept alive with the irclib.IRC.process_once() command. This is wrapped in the while loop that assumes that there is other stuff going on for which you are waiting on a condition to be satisfied, but could easily be ignored if one is just sending out one message. Also, the PRIVMSG command can be used to broadcast to a channel, as is used here, or, as the name suggests, to communicate with a specific user. ...

Intro As part of the fantastic Hackaday Dublin Unconference in the Project Arts Centre over this past weekend, I got to speak about a project I’ve been gently pushing for several weeks now; boxes of laptops for people and community groups to use rather than cap-ex-ing any more pointless under-scoped under-utilised computer labs for everywhere. Comments/Collaboration/Assistance more than welcome Money even more welcome. Video Presentation Links Presentation Proposal Doc Hackaday.io Project Transcript This is the first time I’ve used a Mac for longer than 30 seconds in… ever so; plugging dongles and things in and the screen not exploding and creating loads of extended desktops all over the place is very very strange. ...