A huge and unique cross-cultural fablab in Europe!

I was wondering what +Florian Horsch was doing lately. If you are a reader of this blog and do not know already about this great person, you may remember him because he kindly invited me the Fabcon conference for a speech about the businessman and the maker in Germany, 2014. I would have bet he was on a novel and useful project, but I did not expect it to be this big and humanist.

One of the biggest European fablab (725m²), and most probably the most inter-cultural one!

PC crash: back to a working state in 5 minutes!

For the last 15 years, both my hardware and system upgrades always evolved AROUND my work, and not the opposite! The overwhelming majority of configuration files, preferences and application shortcuts survive through both system software and hardware upgrades for decades... when you are running Linux.

Linux is never putting its foot in the door. Focus on your work, it even keeps your preferences and settings.

Yesterday night my motherboard died without warning (hopefully it is not my high end i7 CPU!). I had work in process to deliver, and some of it was not synchronized with my remote servers yet.
No biggie! I brought my 4-year old old Core2 duo Desktop back from the dust in the garage, I plugged my hard drives into it, and I booted.

Bang, back to work in 5 minutes in the exact same state. Linux is so useful and so efficient!

So why is it so easy to change your computer on Linux without impacting any of your own data and preferences?

Being a contractor or a full-time employee?

Working as a contractor versus regular employment?

I regularly see the fear about working as a contractor. Lately I was part of a discussion that started like: could it be risky for any subsequent 9-to-5 career? I strongly disagree: being a contractor is interestingly a warranty for me to find again a new job in case I fail as a contractor! In my opinion, it will indeed help most careers, as I an employer I would favor people that took the risk to try, whether they were successful or not. Contracting both provides and requires skills at the same time, more than any regular 9-to-5 job.

I feel like I can handle all sorts of professional blows, like being fired. And first of all, well, I will not be fired as long as I am my own boss! This is because I feel each day insured by varied and evolving professional experiences together with a growing professional network.

Here is a post about how I ended up as being a very happy contractor, after having been a state employee, a full time engineer in a small family-owned company, then in a stock-valued much larger company, then a CEO and a CTO in a start-up (silly names), and a very well-paid part-time employee in a startup... before I flew on my own in the naked simplicity of a contractor in a cooperative, with no mess.

Disclaimer: my experience is all in the so-called "new" technologies, but it may still help beyond.

"It is better for your safety that we are opaque" (Volkswagate)

"It is better for your safety that we are opaque"

I just read an article on the BBC related to Volkswagen and the "(...) argument for stopping people fiddling with those systems, because if you don't know what you are doing - or even worse do know and have malicious intent - you could create genuine safety issues."

Volkswagen in 1969 by John Muir
But are we still complete idiots?

This post not only relate to Volkswagen, but to any big company using proprietary stuff and saying it is good for you. You can replace "car" with any non-open piece of software or hardware alike. Transparency is just so hard to depreciate, especially when you are talking to your own customers.

Headlines again... 3D printing guns, a passion?

Headlines again: 3D printing yet another part of a gun. So what?

Please Cody, yes, you the guy with big stainless-steel thermoplastic bollocks, please, now I want new stuff, like 3D printing bazookas, ammo or landmines!

I already tackled the subject it in this older post but telling that a 3D printer is probably not the best tool to use is not even my point here. Using a 3D printer to print more guns is no surprise, but I wish headlines focus more on noble usage like e-NABLE prosthetics. It is an excellent project, where volunteers 3D print free upper-limb prosthetics, like artificial hands for others. If your printer is idle, you should go and read about them!

E-NABLE: is this not a better use for 3D printing, according to you?

This way we have people printing tools that may harm people, while other people do repair them. Nice absurd world.

Here is my point for once: why do the words gun and freedom have to be put in the same sentence almost each time pro-gunners start to argue? What the heck?

Contributing to projects hosted on github: a step by step howto, and an illustration with Marlin (3D printer firmware).

Git is powerful... and very painful the first time! / Github contribution howto / Tweaking Marlin for better 3D printer menus.

Git mess, only partially resumed by Oliver Steele.
Indeed, the upstream higher repository is not shown here,
as seen on this other bigger, clean and useful cheat sheet.

I eventually wrote a feature to fix something that annoyed me for years: allow multi-line commands in the LCD menus of Marlin, a very well known firmware for 3D printer.

I needed it for my Delta printer: these printer do require precise calibration, often with a sequence of gcode commands (check the end of this post for more and why I wanted these to be in my menus and not as initialization files on all my SD cards nor on a PC over a USB cable).

Now, Marlin is hosted on github, a community front end to many other open source projects. Actually, the linux kernel itself is developed with git so it works, for sure.

I often tried to use github, but I never went past a simple git clone of a repository. It was still better than to download a zip archive, because you can easily get the new stuff with a git pull. But here and partially out of curiosity, I wanted to try and contribute to a project at the source.

Now... what a huge and painful procedure just to give a hand! Seriously, it is mind boggling how much crap and megabytes need to be handled just to help and submit a few dozen f*king lines of code to an opensource project hosted on github. This is too bad since I am sure many programmers would be glad to give a hand to project they stumble upon (like me, often), but without this need to become administrators of complex and shared projects themselves!

This article is all about posting and contributing to a project hosted on github. You'll get the calibration g-code line I used at the end of the post if you really ask yourself.