Over the past couple years, I've been developing a Customer Relationship Management app (CRM) for hackerspaces, and it's now ready to release into the wild! Meet Seltzer CRM!
Seltzer CRM is an open source (GPL) CRM web app for hackerspaces. It's based on the LAMP stack, and has been in use at i3 Detroit for a couple years, growing with us to our current level of 75 members.
There are plenty of CRMs out there already, and even some open source ones, but all of the ones I've come across are rather complicated and have a learning curve before people can use them productively. Seltzer CRM is built around two goals: 1. Be significantly useful to the average hackerspace administrator without any training; 2. Be easy for a typical hackerspace web dev to hack on and extend.
In addition to my "official" Maker Faire Detroit project, I created a giant VU meter for the after party.
It's powered by a Velleman mono VU meter kit. This is the same kit Eli Skipp used for her VU meter scarf. I replaced the single LED outputs with opto-isolators which provide a 12V signal to the segments.
The segments are made of masonite and frosted acrylic, connected by 1/4-20 threaded rod. I used 12V LED strip lighting, and each segment has 18 LEDs on it. There is also an aluminized mylar shroud around each segment to reflect stray light back in. With the shroud on, it's very bright, even in an artificially lit room.
Special thanks to the following awesome people who helped me with design and construction: Paul K, Sean D, Joe B, Becky T, Mike B, Roger S, Nate B, Ted H, Nick B. And of course, it was made at i3 Detroit!
This is just a preview, I'll be doing a full writeup soon!
This is a quick talk I gave at the first Ignite Detroit. "Research into the brain is uncovering how we make decisions. The limbic system, an ancient and primal part of the brain, and the neurotransmitter dopamine turn out to play a very important role. The emerging understanding of dopamine in the limbic system is shedding a new light on addiction, compulsive behaviors, and some of the quirkier parts of human nature."
The thesis I did for my Masters in Applied math at the University of Waterloo / Institute for Quantum Computing. My supervisors were Josef Paldus and Frank Wilhelm-Mauch. Chapter 3 is a very thorough review of using the WKB approximation to find bound state energy levels. Link.
A series of drawings I did every day for a few months in 2008 and 2009. They were a ton of fun because I never knew what I was going to draw until I drew it. Full set here.
This is a photo series I did in 2007. It was meant to be a thing-a-day for the month of February, but I got off to a late start and it ran into March. At the time, I was taking a year off between undergrad and grad school, working as a freelance web developer, and soaking up the art/music culture of Detroit's Cass Corridor.
In January of 2005 I participated in the Snowflake-A-Thon hosted by the Simplicity group at the MIT Media Lab. The challenge was to write the simplest program that produced the most beautiful snowflake. You can see the gallery of all the snowflakes and a video of mine here.
My program created a hexagonal grid, and assigned a number to each hexagon. The center started as "1" and the rest started as "0". After every time step, the value of each hexagon was added to each of its neighbors, modulo 32. I ran the code for a few time steps and then mapped the numbers to a gradient from dark blue to white. I got the idea from playing around with 2d cellular automata on a hexagonal grid when I was in high school.
I thought the resulting snowflake was really nice. Apparently the Simplicity people thought I was a total weirdo for coding a snowflake in MATLAB, but I remain pleased with the results.
