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August 29, 2015 : Winkekatze at LHS

London Hackspace has succumbed to the Winkekatze/Beckoning cat/Maneki-neko meme.

/m/p/jasper/phone/thumb_IMG_20150829_171650457.jpg

tags: lhs cat

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June 24, 2015 : Borg Is running

London Hackspace was donated a some nice IBM servers a while back, they have a proprietary interconnect that lets you link up to 4 machines together into a single system (with NUMA).

It's been languishing in the space for a while, but thanks to Ben It's now (mostly) working:

/m/p/jasper/phone/thumb_IMG_20150624_190607.jpg

512Gb of RAM and 16 x 4 core cpu's isn't too bad :)

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January 6, 2014 : LHS RFID login app busted

Recent changes to the London Hackspace Website broke my NFC login app thing (It was just doing web scraping).

So if you've got the app, don't expect it to work.

I'm waiting on a new laptop atm, and in any case I probably won't fix it until there's a stable API etc...

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We've got more and more boxes on the network at London Hackspace. I wanted a way to find them all automatically and give me a menu to ssh into them.

It turns our that it's pretty easy to do with avahi, on the servers - apt-get install avahi-daemon, and then drop this into /etc/avahi/services:

<?xml version="1.0" standalone='no'?><!--*-nxml-*-->
<!DOCTYPE service-group SYSTEM "avahi-service.dtd">
<service-group>

<name replace-wildcards="yes">%h</name>

<service>
<type>_ssh._tcp</type>
<port>22</port>
</service>

<service>
<type>_sftp-ssh._tcp</type>
<port>22</port>
</service>

</service-group>

Then on your laptop install install avahi-ui-utils and run bssh for a list of things to connect to.

There is one annoyance, if you get an entry for ipv4 and ipv6, and if you have both ethernet and wifi you get an entry for each, so each host is repeated 4 times!

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January 3, 2012 : Doorbot App

London Hackspace has an RFID card entry system that lets people register whatever RFID card they have in order to unlock the door (Since we're in London, most people are using Oyster cards).

Since I got a Galaxy Nexus I've been interested in playing about with it's NFC support, which is a layer on top of the usual RFID stuff.

I've written an Android App that uses your phone to grab the serial from an RFID card and then add it to your Hackspace account. So if you've got a phone that supports NFC you can add your own card your self.

apk here:

http://pointless.net/~jasper/LHSSelfEnrole.apk

and code here:

http://pointless.net/hg/lhsselfenrole/

to use it:

  • install the apk.
  • run the App.
  • wave card at back of phone, observe serial number appear in 'serial' field.
  • enter LHS membership Username and Password in the supplied fields.
  • hit 'Go!'
  • relax and let technology do the rest for you...

I was hoping to be able to generate a random serial number and get the phone to pretend to be a card and use that to activate Doorbot, but I haven't worked out how to yet. (The android SDK really focuses on NFC stuff, not the lower level RFID things, so it might be a bit like trying to spoof a mac address from http).



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