My Prusa i3 -The Beggining

It's been a while, actually almost a year since I last bloged, and what a year...
So after oSC13 I've decided among many other things that I did to finally start building my own 3d Printer. I was determined to build a Prusa Mendel V2 when I sudently changed my mind and decided to build a Prusa i3. Just to be honest I just think that Prusa i3 is more beautiful than Prusa Mendel.
 I was reading on how to build a 3d printer since I first saw one in oSC11 but I though it was to complicated and I asked the help of a friend who knew electronics. For many reasons the friend jumped out of the idea so I 'paused' the idea since I did not had the knowlege to do it on my own and the fact that organizing oSC13 was a very time and consitration consuming thing. Finally this January I decided that I will try to make one of my own and see what happens, so I wrote down the BOM of PRusa i3 and started looking to buy the parts. Nowdays I am at the point that I have almost all parts gathered, except the Hotend that I think deserves some more searching before purchasing one. Today it was the first day that I started putting together the frame. A rookie mistake holds me down from completing the frame today but I am pretty sure that I will have the frame assembled by the end of next week. It is Summer and being a Forest firefighter make time a luxury so the end of next week is not that far. 

Amazing Google Code-In

Happy new year my reader, I wish 2012 to be a successful year for everyone. After many days sick in bed today I finally managed to do some work and review two tasks I had on hold(sorry guys), later I realized that students had completed 21 out of 24 task I had and I found that really impressive. Most of the tasks I had as a mentor where video tasks and translation tasks, basically things that will help newbies (and not only) to learn and do things easier with openSUSE. To be honest I never thought GCI would go so well and produced so high quality products but I have to say that things have changed a lot since I was a student and this was not so long ago ;-) .

I started along with the other 2 Stathis (Iosifidis and Agrapidis a.k.a Diamond_gr and Efagra), as they are GCI mentors too, to review the results of the work we got from it as a local community and so far it is quite amazing. Given the fact that the next few months we will try and improve the Greek wiki of openSUSE the GCI was so far a great help. 

I really hope most of the students will stay around and continue the amazing work they do if not openSUSE in FLOSS generally.

TheHackerspace opening: When Great things happen

 I rarely envy people, one of the times I did it was when some guys from Athens announced the creation of a Hackerspace there. I also envied them wen i saw that they started making good work and organizing well. After that I heard about the creation of P-space at Patras and I thought that it was only a mater of time for some people to make something similar to my City.

 A few weeks ago I heard that Efstathios Hatzikyriakidis along with Stavros Kalapothas and Stergios Kalamopoulos where starting a local Hackerspace. I knew Efstathios and he had helped me on the past when I once sent him an e-mail because I wanted some help for Arduino. He was very helpful back then and in a way he had earned my trust.

  So yesterday it was The-Hackerspace opening, and it was an open invitation for everyone to attend and have a talk about our City's Hackerspace. Almost 30 people where there, all curious and all genuine interesting (at least from what I can tell) for it. We had very interesting talks while waiting for the organizers to present us their ideas about the-Hackerspace and you could find all kind of people among us, from hackers to Window users.

At a certain point the people that gathered us all there got our attention and started presenting us their way of thinking of how they would like  the-Hackerspace to work. I was amazed. Their ideas were (are) progressive but at the same time doable. I admit that it was far from what I expected to see in a good way. From what I saw and from the talk we had after their short presentation, other people had the same opinion with me. After that we had a cake and a few hours later we left with the best impressions.

If you are from Thesssaloniki or from a city near there is no excuse for not at least make a visit there. You can find more information about the location of the-Hackespace at http://the-hackerspace.org/location/.

In a city that Great things rarely happen, the-Hackerspace is something at least innovating and it surely deserves our attention and support.

Ελληνική κοινότητα Mageia

Το Madriva ήταν εξ' απ' ανέκαθεν μια από τις διανομές που μου άρεσαν ιδιαίτερα. Το φόρουμ τους, ήταν πολύ εξυπηρετικό και τα παιδιά εκεί βοηθούσαν αρκετά και ήταν ευγενικότατοι. Χτες μου ήρθε μια ειδοποίηση στο mail μου για την δημιουργία του νέου τους φόρουμ. Είναι ακόμη στην αρχή αλλά είμαι σίγουρος ότι θα πάει το ίδιο καλά. Κατέβασα το iso και το Σ/Κ θα το εγκαταστήσω για να το δοκιμάσω, σε καμία βδομάδα θα σας πω και τις εντυπώσεις μου, αν και είμαι πολύ θετικά προδιατεθειμένος με την συγκεκριμένη διανομή και με την δικτυακή κοινότητα.
Μπορείτε να βρείτε το φόρουμ της κοινότητας εδώ http://www.mageia-gr.org/forum/
Να ευχηθώ καλή τύχη στα παιδιά για την προσπάθεια τους και μακάρι να δούμε και κάτι παραπάνω από μια δικτυακή κοινότητα στο μέλλον.

Hard Rock and Free Software: part one

Some days ago I was reading again a book about Terminal command line and at some point I felt like listening to music and especially some good old 80's Rock so I picked one of my favorite play-lists and BANG, Skid Row Poetry right in to my face...

Since I was born they couldn't hold me down
Another misfit kid, another burned-out town

Never played by the rules I never really cared
My nasty reputation takes me everywhere

I look and see it's not only me
So many others have stood where I stand
We are the young so raise your hands

They call us problem child
We spend our lives on trial
We walk an endless mile
We are the youth gone wild
We stand and we won't fall
We're the one and one for all
The writing's on the wall
We are the youth gone wild

So listening to those lyrics of 'Youth Gone Wild'  I started thinking what are the similarities when I was starting my life as a Rocker and my life as a Free Software supporter. I found many similarities that I hadn't noticed until that day. I was shocked to be honest, so I thought why not blog about it? And here we are, as always continue reading at your own risk ;-)


1) Family affairs 

Well when I was a young boy and started to listen to rock my father wanted to send me to an exorcist because he thought I was possessed, to be honest I felt possessed my self with all that energy that music had that I never experienced before.

When I grew up (?!?) and discovered Free Software, my father though I was possessed for a second time in my life since he suddenly saw me standing in front of a screen reading for hours, standing still, I also felt a bit strange since the power of knowledge of that new stuff filled me with energy once again.

2)Surrounding Community

Back then, when I started listening to Rock and I went to my friends with a tape filled with Aerosmith, Twisted Sister, Deep purple and Scorpions they thought I was becoming something else that they don't like so we split and I was alone until I found some other Rockers and started crush in to places where we spent all of our time listening to Rock, some of us tried to learn to play guitar and drums. We were part of a community.

When I started using Free Software and I tried to talk to my friends about it and shared them some live Cd's I had made for them, they said that I was loosing my mind, so I was alone until I found others like me and a LUG where we crushed all of our free time and running various Linux distro's, some of us tried to learn Python, Java and Pearl. We were part of a community.

3)Freedom of doing whatever you want, freedom to fail.

As Rockers we started playing guitars and drums and we didn't have to be good, we didn't wanted to be professionals, we just cared to play. We organized gigs and we were drinking beers. Many times we were having gigs with just our friends, some times even without them, we are talking about epic fails but we didn't actually care because we did what we wanted just because we liked the whole situation, we didn't want to make money out of it, we did it for ourselves and that is why we had great fun with it.( Although we all dreamed at least once to become RockStars)

As Free Software users we started writing code(not me :-p ) testing various distributions and also building custom distributions based on other distributions or playing with various GUI's, we don't care if what we are making actually works most of the times and we enjoy failing, since we liked the road better than the actual destination. We tried to convince people test what we do. Sometimes some of our friends did that,sometimes not even our friends accepted to try it. We didn't actually get bothered by it(at least for a long time). We didn't care about making money out of it, we had our jobs. We did it(and still do it) for ourselves and that is why we have great fun with it.(Although we all dreamed ourselves at least once as the next Linus Torvalds).

That's it for now. Part one ends here.

Do what you Love
Love what you do
and
Love thy guitar as you Love thy desktop
Because those will guide you to the path of ...

Kostas Koudaras

Hardware Hacking: Το μεγάλο κάψιμο

Πολλά πράγματα μου έκαναν εντύπωση κατά την επίσκεψη μου στην SCaLE. Ένα από τα πράγματα αυτά ήταν το hardware hacking και η ενασχόληση του κόσμου με το λεγόμενο Free Hardware.
Στην Ελλάδα το ποιο γνωστό από όλα αυτά είναι φυσικά το arduino για το οποίο πρόσφατα έλαβα πολλές χρήσιμες πληροφορίες από τον Ευστάθιο Χατζηκυριακίδη ο οποίος είναι και από τους Έλληνες που 'το έχουν' σε αυτόν τον τομέα και τον οποίο επί της ευκαιρίας ευχαριστώ πολύ για την βοήθεια.
Γνώρισα τα παιδιά του Crashspace και έπαθα την πλάκα μου, Κολλητήρια  μοβ μονόκεροι, τρισδιάστατους εκτυπωτές και arduino για να τους ράψεις στα ρούχα σου η για να φτιάξεις καπέλα που δείχνουν τον μαγνητικό βορρά  Κάψιμο μεν ως ενός σημείου, απίστευτες κατασκευές από την άλλη και πάνω από όλα απίστευτο γέλιο και εποικοδομητική σκέψη. ότι μπορούσες να σκεφτείς, αυτοί μπορούσαν να το κάνουν κατασκευή...

 

Helen South and Leigh Honeywell

...And a happy new year

 2011 Finally came, I wish you all a healthy overall year although this new years dawn found me ill with a cold and fever, as a result of recklessly insisting on riding a motorcycle at -2 C. From the start I sense that this year will be a hard working one. 3 days ago I opened my eyes from fever and I found last years jobs awaiting. I lost the deadline I gave to my self for releasing the openSUSE Weekly news. I didn't shared the articles for translation to the people and I had left my candidacy for the board without a candidate amongst other things that I had to do. I was in panic for about 2 seconds, I confess that no matter what I do I hate not completing the jobs I took over. Two seconds later I tried to concentrate,  I chilled out and let things role. Thank God I have good people around me helping me, so I finished all the works around the Greek community, I even found the time to organize some new things like a very interesting event that we will announce in the next few days.
 Other than that I made some work with my candidacy, I prepared my Board election platform and started make some planning for my campaign. I still have lots of hard work to do. The other candidates are really interesting people and all of them have contributed a lot to the project. It is going to be a hard race and this is good because it will be interesting to the end. I believe that no matter the results, openSUSE community will be the final winner.

Merry Christmas to all

When I became an openSUSE ambassador a few months back I wanted to make a difference. I believed that openSUSE had not the right place in the Greek FOSS community and was undermined by the lack of a Greek community to support it. I believed in it and with the help of all people that are involved one way or another to the Greek openSUSE Community, proof is obvious now.
Being part of a community was. from the early years of humanity. really important for people and co-operation showed them how to achieve great targets that it would be impossible to achieve as an individual person.I see the Greek openSUSE community getting larger and stronger each day like a newborn. I see people care for other people to get a good quality software and share the philosophy of FOSS, share the philosophy of sharing.
Sharing is really undermined at our days and it mustn't because love starts with it and love with no exchange is the material that can really make the difference to the world. I want to thank the openSUSE community for all the love and the sharing and I wish you all Merry Christmas. I wish you all to be healthy and capable to continue changing the world to a better place.