091 Labs

Saturday, 11th December 2010
11:00 AM – 5:00 PM

As a perfect aftermath to Ignite Galway, Rob from tog.ie in Dublin is gonna do his cool workshop, Building It!

During this day-long workshop, you will be walked through the process of designing an interactive electronic device: from an initial idea right through to the working device.

We will start off with a presentation covering the whole design process. Next we will demonstrate the necessary steps and tools in more detail. And last but not least you will assemble the finished device.

The device we will be building will be a Mini Mood Light. Consisting of two multicoloured LED’s, a small micro controller and a number of buttons which will allow the user to selected a suitable colour which reflects their mood. We’ll be demonstrating each of the steps including schematic capture, PCB layout, PCB fabrication and programming the micro controller.

You should have a basic understanding of electronics and the C programming language. The workshop is targeted at makers and amateur inventors who want to use open source tools to create open hardware devices.

The workshop will run from 11:00 through to approximately 17:00, with a break for lunch. Food will not be provided, but we have a tuckshop and there are shops/takeaways nearby.

The cost of the workshop will be 40€ waged, 30€ unwaged and 20€ 091Labs members.

The numbers are going to be limited to twelve adult/older teen participants.

If you want to attend this event, please email ellen at 091labs dot com

A quick post to say thank you to everybody who made it along for the Open Data Hackday at DERI and 091Labs last Saturday. We had a great turn out.

We really want to promote the opening of Irish Data and this was reflected in the apps people made on the day. These included

* A map with RSS alerts showing the latest planning applications submitted to Galway City Council
* A multi company bus schedule application for searching connections between Galway and Dublin.
* An interactive map of public toilets in Galway with details about opening hours and wheelchair access.

For more information on the event see http://bit.ly/OpenDaWest and on Open Data in Ireland generally check out Open Data Ireland mailing list , http://ie.ckan.net/

We are already planning a follow up event for late January and it looks like the folks at Scraperwiki will be coming over too. All in all 2011 is looking good for Open Data in Ireland.

On top of all that we got a great write up in Silicon Republic

Saturday December 4th is International Open Data Day

International Open Data Day is a gathering of citizens in cities
around the world to write applications using open public data to show
support for and encourage the adoption of open data policies by the
world’s local, regional and national governments.
Open Data policies can increase government transparency, spur digital
enterprise and improve civic participation.

This Saturday NUI Galway’s Digital Enterprise and Research Institute
www.deri.ie will be hosting an Open Data Hackathon at their campus
located at the IDA Business Park, Lower Dangan from 10am till 5pm
followed by project presentations and a public discussion on Open Data
at 091 Labs at the Fairgreen near the Radison from 6pm till 7pm.

For updates, who’s coming and direction see
http://bit.ly/OpenDaWest
We also have a forum for discussion on boards.ie
http://bit.ly/OpenDaWestForum
For further information see
http://www.opendataday.org
or email opendatagalway at gmail.com

This post started off in my head as a guide to firewalling your home server, but it gradually evolved, mentally, into a workshop for securing the information on your Linux laptop with GRUB, KeePass and Truecrypt. Click the (awesome Hackers) image below to RSVP your place for this once-off workshop!

…and secure it too.

When Aaron, Matthew and I incepted our Linux classes, we did so with a nebulous aim of offering a course of comprehensive beginner material, with our ultimate, nebulous goal being to offer “more advanced stuff”. Well, here we are. I dove into the basics of manipulating the Bash shell, simple scripting, SSH, and confidently administering a headless system as root. In the midst of my preparations for these classes, I had a theatric lightbulb-over-head moment: How hard would it be, really, to turn a desktop into a basic home server? Set aside performance and security concerns for a moment and just consider accessibility and turnaround time to live access on the Internet.

As it turns out, this takes about one hour. Maybe two if you are installing Linux from scratch. All you need to begin is a method to connect your dynamic home IP to a static domain and then a method to remotely access your home server:


apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
apt-get install openssh-server openssh-client


Sign up for a free DynDNS account and domain (remember to complete checkout!).


apt-get install ddclient


Populate three lines in /etc/ddclient/ddclient.conf with:

1. Your DynDNS user name.
2. Your DynDNS password.
3. Your DynDNS domain.


/etc/init.d/ddclient restart
/etc/init.d/ssh start


Now give DynDNS and ddclient about five minutes (on the safe side) to update. Congratulations, you have a live Internet server for your file-access, media streaming, jerking-around-while-at-work, and general geek needs.

Now, we have a server. Locking down its Internet connection? Mmm, ten minutes. It was actually over an hour for me because I was engrossed in crash-learning netfilter/iptables syntax from scratch.


#/bin/sh

# Permit TCP connections to and from this machine on port 22 (SSH).
iptables -A INPUT -p tcp -dport 22 -j ACCEPT
iptables -A OUTPUT -p tcp -sport 22 -j ACCEPT


You’ll eventually need to open up ports for NTP, mail, DNS and others, but really: This is all there is to it. And because I am awesome, I wrote all of this up on Google Docs and made it freely available for download. Any notes suggesting alterations, additions or deletions can be made directly on the document, or by email to me directly.

Your Home Server and You