I for one welcome our new robotic barbecue overlords

By way of mycroftxxx, please welcome the newest US hackerspace, situated in Houston: Tx/Rx, pronounced "TexWrecks". Regular lockpicking, woodworking and Python workshops, as well as plans for a Defcon contingent, to be found therein.

Hey Tx/Rx -- you gonna send anyone to Hacking at Random? They didn't schedule it against Blackhat/Defcon this year, so you can make it to both! Houston represent!

(/me needs digitalusrex's "Fuck Y'all I'm From Texas" icon for this post.)

(no subject)

kragen versus typos. kragen wins.

[LJ Genie] That worked so well before, let's try it again

Dear LJ Genie,

Thanks for all the great advice about accelerometers and uCs! I've now got a line on a local electronics supplier (walking distance, for long values of walking) and will be visiting there soon. Now for a research question -- I don't think I'll be following up on this anytime soon, but it'll help to have my eyes open.

What's a good, affordable, entry-level FPGA for a reasonably competent programmer who can already build arbitrary logic gates from transistors, but doesn't have a lot of other fundamentals down yet? (I do not, for instance, have all that great of a grasp of the intricacies involved in CPU design -- tradeoffs, pitfalls, that kind of thing. Okay, any grasp, really. But I'd like to learn, and have some suitably horrifying ideas about defining something that resembles a fitness function for a processor and doing awful, awful things with Verilog and code generation...)

Alternately, is there a software-based FPGA simulator/emulator that's worth a damn?

Things just got ... different.

Today, the Pirate Party picked up 7.1% of the votes in the Swedish elections for the EU Parliament. This will net them at least one seat.

Yep, that's right. People like me are getting into politics. YHBW.