Just a recap what happened over Sunday's brew class.

I gave a presentation on the basics of homebrewing, and threw in some history about the brewing history in America and in Japan. I'm so glad that it was well received and plan on doing another in the coming weeks covering bottling, and the mini-mash method which will open anyone new to homebrewing to a much greater level of beer customization. That's where it starts to get fun. I'm looking forward to seeing everyone again!

Cheers!

Here is my picassa photo album:
https://picasaweb.google.com/112239751304644835134/August2011Kamogawa...

We started off at the beach. I took a swim in the ocean while Garratt
attempted to catch gravelfish his man made fish trap. Archi got the
shit kicked out of him by a particularly hard wave. The surf was
pretty strong right onto the beach.

Later we met Chris H, went up to his house (which is on the end of a
supremely steep driveway) and set up the tent in his garden. Its a
pretty large space they have, with a good breeze and cool shade all
around.

Me and MRE were hanging out at the space tonight and decided to make it prettier.

We used the Mac OS X Server motherboard that we had so much fun extracting during the clean-up, a bunch, I mean, a freaking lot of EL Wire and a hot glue gun.

The result is a hellish THS glow-in-the-dark sign!

This is very much a work in progress. The next steps include:

- bitch-slabbing some screens on it to display error message,
- make it creepy glitter, like an old las vegas shady neon sign,
- make some LED randomly blink on it as in old sci-fi movies computers,

UPDATE: This unit is now on its way to Congo for field testing.

Taylan and I were hanging out at the house, and felt like we needed to get some work done on the solar charger project.

So, I brought down my panel and charge controller, and Chris Shannon's big gell cell battery.

These charge controllers and panels have been sponsored by Global Solar Energy Corp in Tucson, Arizona, USA.

So I was trolling through data on my phone today while uploading videos for the THS Seismometer and I found this old video of Akiba talking about the LED solar lantern BEFORE it was the Tohoku Lantern!

First video ever!

Turns out it was still in my youtube account, so here it is:

Pieter and I went to MIT Media Lab to attend the Safecast meetup and discuss the radiation mapping project. Along with meeting everyone involved in Safecast on the US side, we got the chance to hang out at the High/Low Tech lab with Leah Buechley. Leah was the designer of the LilyPad Arduino and also works on craft-oriented applications of technology. I was struck by the similarities of hearing her talk and listening to Mitch Altman talk. One of the other things I was impressed with is that the supply jars in the High/Low tech lab don't have the usual things like screws or parts.

I had a craving.

A craving for a BLT.

But not just ANY old BLT.

A BLTHS!

First step, gather ingredients.
Obviously, I need bread, tomato, lettuce, and some nice crispy bacon.
Some of these items are easy to quest for. Others not so.

Lets take a look, one by one:
Tomato - I went to the local market for a big juicy tomato
Bread - Again, the local market provided

There's been a bit of discussion on the Google Groups mailing list about the use of this site. I thought I'd make a quick guide for how to make a blog entry. If you're comfortable with HTML, it's quite easy.

Things have been crazy in Tokyo Hackerspace recently. There are tons of projects going on simultaneously and everyone is buzzing about. We've been hosting a lot of guest speakers at the hackerspace as well to provide updates on what's going on, what they're up to, and to provide information about the recent events.

This is the project page for the Tokyo Hackerspace/RDTN Geiger project. This is an Arduino-based geiger counter shield that makes it easy to upload data to the internet and also interchange tubes. Since it's open source and Arduino-based, its also easy to hack this to other interesting applications.
Here's the dev history:

2011-04-03 Akiba, FreakLabs:'