Posted by skullkey on November 20, 2013 at 7:57 pm
OK- so you missed out, deal with it, or come around.. 
Beer!!
we had a lot of new faces- will see how many wont come back- really tried not to scare them off…
Andrew Turpin popped in to meet Richard- Richard is in Brain thingy mag of ITWeb.
Daniel is still fine.. he is still less than a percentage cyborg.. You even get blood glucose implants… Rfid, nfc etc..Not the same one as in pets.. i asked.
Bernhardt came around want to build a fire starter for braai’s. Better airflow for starting brikets.
Jan Davel came around, i met him with the innovation hub competition 2 years ago.
ASked him about gasification- turn out that he know a lot about it-but he think is it is cute, but over complicated.
Off the shelf version for R2.5mil each- can be bought in Pretoria. That version work well.. Can sell 1Mw to Eskom.
but a internal combustion running 24\7 dont last long. For the competition he build a Brayton Cycle the money was a bit short- but developing it with NWU in Potch.
Jan and myself are planning of building a Rankine_cycle in the back at h4h next year.. Wonder if Schalk will notice…
We are aiming for 2kw generation- with a thermal battery of about +5000l of hot water.. will need to be creative on safety..
Org and Francios did not roll on the floor laughing, so this idea cant be to far fetched.. worse case is we have 5kl of hot water on tap.
Devin- met your girlfriend’s father. We had a interesting talk about sack spiders etc.. nasty little f#$%rs – he lost most of his index finger from a bite.
Continue Reading
Posted by skullkey on November 18, 2013 at 8:00 am
We are busy planning Random Hacks of Kindness (see rhok.org) for the first weekend of December 2013. It is an international event and we have been organizing this in Pretoria (organized by House4hack, UNISA, CSIR, SAP Research) since 2011 and think it is time to also bring it to Braamfontein!
For the December 2013 event we have teamed up with UNISA, CSIR, mLab, ThoughtWorks, JCSE
Register now!
Continue Reading
Posted by skullkey on November 14, 2013 at 8:50 am
Ok i was late at h4h.. went to Microsoft SQL users group first.. Kind of a support group for DBA’s .
So i got there at 21h00.
Arnold and Philip came around, so there was “some” talk about quadcopters. Add Gert and some others and it lasted for hours.
Philip brought his little ninja. This pic from http://ninjablocks.com/ .
What i found fascinating was the packaging- – bit weird..But when is the last time that you got something that you where super exited about that there was a bit of TLC bestowed on your purchase? And the box can be re-used- not the cheapest – not penny pinching-but flair.
But – there is some fine print- it read “hack me” (the purple tag) But YOU probably knew that..
I helped someone with a arduino problem… OK, it was just installation, use 1.0.5, do NOT use 1.0.3. I listened when Gert told someone else..
And then all of the sudden it was 1AM way past bed time…
Till next time,
Kobus
Edit: Before Kobus arrived, Gert almost broke the first rule of House4Hack:don’t be on fire. He wanted to see what happens when you put 220V on a 30V rated poly-fuse. Well nothing happens until the fuse current is exceeded and then FIRE
Edit: Before Kobus arrived, a few of us also had a skype session with the Wildlife Conservation UAV Challenge leader team, most of them residing in Washington DC and Casper van Zyl, CEO from Johannesburg based Global Unmanned Systems, joined us in the studio as well. We also brainstormed a few ideas around thinking outside the box regarding the challenge/competition.
Continue Reading
