Royal Society of Hackers, Designers & Watchmakers

I’m In! Meet me at the Outhouse at about 14:00 for an afternoon of hackery and fun.

I’ll be working on a few pet-projects that seem to spring out of my every step, and I’d love to see what everyone else is up to.

Unfortunately, I (also a Sam) am taking over a little more as Sam Collins is now based in london, the silly fool.

At The Outhouse, Edinburgh again. We always say it starts at 12pm but it’s Saturday and most people seem to be asleep then, so let’s say come along at 2pm (we have the space until about 7pm). See you there!

One project I’d like to get started is a web/email/twitter based discussion forum for TechMeetup that would provide a way for announcements and discussions to take place amongst one group of people, without unnecessary spamming. (I have some ideas…)

Same time, same place: 12 noon onwards at The Outhouse, Edinburgh. Spread the word and bring a friend!

Thanks to everyone who came to the last meetup. The turnout was good, especially considering the unusually sunny weather that day.

Projects worked on included the new much-improved Techmeetup site that’s due to go live soon, a cool dashboard for Pivotal Tracker (no link yet), better parks project, and Facesnap. Abdel (@abdels) from said.fm is also learning Io, so if you’re interested or have any tips, get in touch with him.

The next meetup of The Royal Society Of Hackers is on Saturday 19th of June. Tech chat + coding + beer = win. Come along and bring a friend.

(If you have any pictures from the meetup, please post them in the comments. I forgot to take some.)

—Hasan

You’ll be able to plug Facesnap into your website to let your users take and upload their pictures with a webcam. Main use case is to make it easier for your users to submit a profile picture. Facesnap can also be used by bloggers to host their own mini-DailyBooths.

On the tech side, the whole thing will be written in Javascript (Node.js) using VertexJs for storage.

Get in touch if you’re interested. @hasanv

I will drop past and gently poke some stuff to do with Elastik, the open source ticketing system that aims to be incredibly flexible. Will also be chatting to people about another BarCamp …

James

I’m using iMovie for pretty much the first time, putting together a video for the startup I work for (TenBu). Trying to make it humourous and effective at showing off our product, a security alarm for your mobile phone and other things you’d rather not lose.

Likely looking for a bit of tech help when I get frustrated, or to add some cool effects, as well as suggestions of how to make it funnier :). Aiming to finish it at the Royal Society and not let it drag on and on.

The idea is simple: geotagged data of your expenses. So you went out to town and spent a few quid here and there. I would personally be interested in seeing which ones are the “hotspots” where I spend most of my money (which can then be classified into different sorts, of course.) This is something I *would like* to work on, not something I’m actively pursuing. If you’re interested just drop me a line: ulises.cervino@gmail.com (no, I don’t really fear spam, gmail seems to be doing a pretty good job so far.)

Given: 1) your current balance and 2) a list of expected income and expenditure and optionally 3) an estimated burn rate (possibly based on historical figures), it should be possible to produce a graph that forecasts how your bank balance should (roughly) change in the future. Sites like wesabe and mint seem to have all the info, but they’re focused on the past, on what you’ve already spent. Sadly there’s not much you can do about that apart from feel guilty, and I’ve yet to find anything that does forecasting well, so I’m pondering putting something together that will produce a bar graph that displays such a forecast, and possibly lets you set targets and maybe even suggest ways to meet them (for example, if you want to break even at the end of the month, then you need to spend -32.50 for the next 23 days…). So far this is a handful of sketches, rants and the least efficient python script ever.

Last Royal Society of Hackers (RSH?) I was working on an art installation - an interactive interpretation of Hans Christian Anderson’s The Little Matchgirl. I’m just setting it up now at Battersea Arts Centre. A bit of a change from my normal hacking diet of data analysis and social media.

Daniel Winterstein

(winterstein@twitter http://winterstein.me.uk)