coffee.geek.nz

for the love of humanity, a "long black" is not made by pulling a shot of coffee until the cup is full. That is just an awful bitter cup of yuck.

To make a long black, first mostly fill the cup with hot water, and then pull a shot on top. The water has to go first or the crema won't survive.

IMG_8447, originally uploaded by Br3nda.

a teeny tiny espresso machine, for use in the middle of nowhere if there is no good coffee to be found (such as the south island, auckland, or any airport other than Wellington)
i recieved this gift at LCA - and i hear it was the very excellent idea of the very excellent Donna Kattekrab. Thank you so very much - i blogged about this very nifty gizmo only a couple month ago.

i've wanted one of these for ages -- a portable espresso machine that kinda looks like a bicyle pump.

add hotwater, tamp the coffee in, pump up the pressure, and then pull the shot

they're finally available in New Zealand
handpresso.co.nz

Last weekend the weekly Wellington Friends in Testing group changed location to the National Library to join in the Digital NZ Hacktest.

Here’s the blurb explaining who DigitalNZ are:

DigitalNZ is a collaborative initiative led by the National Library of New Zealand. We work

with a wide range of contributing institutions and organisations. Without these content providers and their content, DigitalNZ would not be possible.

We did the usual test of the latest build of Sugar, and some general playtime testing contributed applications. Some of us tried out the Digital NZ open data API, and thought creating a OLPC app that queries this API would be great, especially if it caches the data locally somehow, or turns into a collaborative activity.

There was coffee, pizza, lollies and beer. Thanks Digital NZ!

Photos by Jo Eaton:

Last weekend I attended the Digital NZ hacktest. A large group of hackers getting together to try out the new Open Data API.

Here's the blurb explaining who they are:

DigitalNZ is a collaborative initiative led by the National Library of New Zealand. We work with a wide range of contributing institutions and organisations. Without these content providers and their content, DigitalNZ would not be possible.

There was coffee, lollies, pizza. And a good group of people making mashups. I had a few ideas for mashups so i reached for good old reliable perl. Before long I had a perl module completed, which I've shared with the world on cpan:
http://search.cpan.org/~shiny/Net-DigitalNZ-0.15/lib/Net/DigitalNZ.pm

For now there is only the search method, but i've started the get-metadata methods and soon some more for images etc. This can be found in my Git Hub repo.

and the mashup? coming soon.

Tabitha Roder is a heroine - she does awesome things in her day job i'm sure, but it her weekend volunteer "job" that is inspirational.

Tabitha is the force behind Wellington's Friends in Testing - This is a group that meets *every* weekend, has breakfast, and then proceeds to test the latest build of Sugar OS on the One Laptop Per Child XO laptops.

She pays for data (over cdma cellular) from her own pocket, she feeds the poorer students coffee and fries while testing, and she send a report back to the project at the end of the day.

The true awesome thing she does is cheerlead and muster the group of students, coderhackers, parents, and others to turn up every weekend - She's done a mighty thing that has a positive effect on far reaching parts of this work.

After 18 years in the same Courtenay Place location, Espressoholic cafe has been given a month's notice by its landlord to close up shop

So, head on down to espressoholic for your last cup of mediocre coffee, at 4am, before it's too late.

The Venue for Software Freedom Day is both the Wellington city Town Hall, _AND_ the Michael Fowler Centre.

Town hall provides the bar camp rooms, barristas serving free Havana coffee and breakout rooms - as well as the Buffet table and bar.

In the Michael Fowler Centre, we've got couches galore, and table+chair for the SuperHappyDevHouse HackFest, and the WellyLUG installfest. All with a harbour view, and blinds so the sun it doesn't burns us.

The tw

Software Freedom Day (SFD) is a worldwide celebration of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) to be held this year on Saturday 20th September, 2008. This year SFD is to be held at the Wellington Convention Centre in Wellington from 12pm - 6pm. There will be free wifi, coffee all day at the venue, and pizza and beer as things wrap up at 6pm.

Two opensource riots nerds are off to microsoft tech ed. It began wonderfully with us arriving 15 minutes late for check in and the airline saying no way can we get on the plane now...

I had to reach for my wallet to buy new tickets - so it's not a free trip no more. Hurrah for free wifi in Wellington airport o ri'd have lost my calm.

Arriving in Bucklame just in time for dinner, we both checked into our swanky 5 star hotel rooms (thanks microsoft).. alas the internet is 70cents per minute. there were tears.

report on the wellington girl geek coffee is up on the google opensource blog
http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2008/05/may-girl-geek-coffee-in-welly.html

report on the wellington girl geek coffee is up on the google opensource blog
http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2008/05/may-girl-geek-coffee-in-welly.html

last time i wanted to hack some sugar (that's the olpc's cute cute name for their environment) it took AGES to compile and pull down all the dependencies.

I don't want to pull down all that data over cafenet, which is both expensive (comparitively only, cafenet is cheap for "normal" activities, like a couple git pulls) and that would hog the limited bandwidth at the cross (they didn't expect 50 users on a Sunday when cafenet wifi-ed that place). So i'm setting it up early and then i can share what i built with other linux-x86-ubuntey users.

For the May girl geek coffee contestants have to decipher a series of geeky clues and find the location of coffee, and a pass phrase to receive some awesome loot that arrived from google.

The First Clue

Loot is first 50 women only - and is a first to solve gets best fit.

had a good hackathon yesterday - just under 20 people which isn't bad
without a bar tab.

Someone was making noises about providing a "coffee tab" next time. I'll need to get on their case :)

The group agreed to make this a monthly thing, == 1st Sunday of each
month, so we'll be hacking together again on 2nd December.

I learned i'm writing java all wrong with hashtable when i should be
using my own classes, and a kind soul wrangled eclipse to work for me.

There was no drinking of the alcohol until the last hour (about 5pm) ---
altogether a very sober and productive hackfest.

There was a family seated nearby giving us strange looks -- the adult ensuring the kids didnt' look at us for fear of something.

Eventually one of family walked over to the bar cashier, pointed at us, and said "Isn't that illegal?"

Not sure what he thought we were doing.

some miguided fools on IRC are getting excited about How Geeks Design Elevators

gigantic, spiraling slide is located in Belgium:

it's so.... won't work.

Your gagets would fall off their belt clips and get damaged.

and bought a ton of CDs from their sale

Mike Doughty - Haughty Melodic
Echo & The Bunnymen - Siberia
A Girl Called Eddy - A Girl Called Eddy
Joanna Newsom - Ys