It’s been a while since I’ve had the opportunity to sit down and write a nicely thought out blog post, but in the complete absence of any rhythm in recent postings I figured I’d write down some thoughts about the last 2 weeks. I’ve been making slow (mostly due to time commitments), but good progress on the USB barcode scanner project I’ve been hacking on for Noisebridge. One of the frustrations in choosing Rust for this project was the lack of API stability in pre-1.

Last Saturday I gave a workshop on Data Security to a small group of Bay Area journalists at Noisebridge. The workshop was a small-group test of the same material that’ll be used at a larger workshop I’m helping to lead at the Committe to Project Journalism’s SF conference later this month. Overall it was a great success and a really awesome experience, with 4 journalists walking away with a fully functional email encryption setup, as well as a good working knowledge on the concepts underpinning it.

I finally, this past weekend, got around to implementing the Iron Blogger group that I’d been hoping to start at Noisebridge before Christmas (better late than never). This post is actually the first of my weekly obligations. Watch this space for more blogging. Things are going well. Life is busy on many fronts. The plans that I had for Linux Fest North West and, more specifically Hackers on a Train are coming along nicely.

Inspired by the twitter account “Shit Noisebridge says” I set about recently to script together that trains a Markov chaina on the complete archive of the noisebridge-discuss@ mailing list to create a rival account “Shit noisebridge probably says”. It’s not yet complete but one useful thing to have fallen out of this project already is a script that makes it easy to download mailman list arcihves in their entirety by passing the name of a list.