How I envisage myself with the CoderDojoMobile

I travel a fair bit around Ireland now, CoderDojos are springing up around the country (~20 in Ireland and more worldwide), I goto new Dojos opening, recently opened CoderDojos, meet and talk to people who want to start a Dojo or visit various Dojos every week, plus I often goto meetings or events relating to CoderDojo. Trains are expensive (Cork – Dublin return €79 [Student card expired ]) and buses suck (crazy long and uncomfortable), plus that can be only half the battle for more remote places (It was an array of transport when we set up on Arranmore). I also get given swag to give to Dojos and I’m looking into create kits of resources to give to Dojos for special sessions. Driving in many cases would make me get places faster, get to more places, be cheaper (with car pooling), be easier to transport stuff and generally make life easier. So TL;DR travelling a lot in Ireland, a car would rock!

I want to make the CoderDojoMobile (think BatMobile, but awesomer). I have a couple of ideas for it to make it awesome, obviously the core of it is the actual car itself. Everything else is extra, but why ‘sup up a car’? Make the it look cool and be awesome, make it recognisable, have some memorable hacks and features.

• Body kit - http://www.stxstyling.co.uk/StxStyling/Cars/showit.php?pnum=3876
• Alloys - http://www.performancealloys.com/wheel-details.aspx?ID=64
• Carbon fiber hood – http://www.carpromods.com/product/Vis-Racing-Black-Carbon-Fiber-Hood/Default.aspx?dr=1&make=28&model=4540&year=2006
• White car respray
• Steering wheel – black and red
• Seats covers akin to http://www.modworld.co.uk/universal-mesh-car-seat-cover-set—blackred-7093-p.asp
• CoderDojo decal sides, rear window
• ‘</car>’ rear decal
• QR on code on back linking to car info page
• KITT Knight Rider Style light display on front (As suggested by Eamon Leonard)
• car url and twitter rear decal
• fake grass floor (idea from: @omgtbh) see: http://instagr.am/p/IpXmAdi-tt/
• fake ninja sword inside rear window

Tech – Hardware

• EEE PC Seahell – Onboard Computer – http://usa.asus.com/Eee/Eee_PC/Eee_PC_1015PE_Seashell/ (gut it and reinstall into console)
• Touch screen for EEE PC – http://www.fidohub.com/product.php?prod_id=54&sort3=
• 3G dongle
• gps dongle (realtime trip info, track car incase of theft)
• sound system
• Arudino to hook gauge usage
• Assorted electrical parts to wire everything up
• iPhone holder

Tech – Software

• Ubuntu for onboard computer (control sound, see info, get notifications, push realtime info to site, etc)
• GitHub repo – keep car info, progress, set up and hacks here; Flag issues in, well, issues
• Use Avego for ride sharing
• Website with usage data, ride share info, contributes page, check ins and more

Additional info

• Post upcoming trips and ride share opportunities through twitter
• twitter/github sign in for people who ride share
• Get someone who knows car electronics and such to triple check everything
• Mobile hotspot (CoderDojo Galtee mountains?!?)
• Do cool projects like visual wifi networks on routes I drive (based on idea by @MarcosEQ)

So these are just a few ideas I have. I realise the cost and work that is required, to pull this off, its gonna cost around €10,000, I’ll hustle and try get that down and try get help for fittings, spraying etc. Also that some of the things in here are nice and may be deemed extravagant for their nature of not being a core requirement, plus that and my income is currently not enough to make this a tangible idea and I don’t look like a idiot for going out, spending money and making up a nice car, but these are my thoughts and ramblings and this is something I’m going to look into further. I am open and considering any person/company wanting to help making this a reality, having their info up on the site and having a decal of their logo on the car side, if their brand is associated with connecting people and reaching, given the distance and places I’ll be racking up, it’d be a perfect match. Anyway this was what was in my head tonight and hey look, I made a blog post!

Update: Thinking of nailing down all the metrics (cost, build time, etc), doing some sweet ass visualisations, a video and throwing it up on Kickstarter, with pledges:

1.  €10+ getting their name on the site
2. €100+ getting their name or logo written on the interior of the car (door panel?) + no.1
3. €500+ getting their logo on the rear bumper + no.1 & no.2 (10 of these spots?)
4. €1000+ getting their logo on the side of the car (foot sized) + above (5 of these spots)
5. €2500+ getting their logo on side of car (large) + above (3 of these spots)

So I’m currently a couple thousand feet up in the air on a Virgin America flight to San Francisco from Boston and Google are doing this cool thing where they loan you a Chrome Book for the flight, apart of this, you get free wifi on the Chrome Book, whilst on any other device you need to pay like $12.95. I figured out by faking the User Agent to be that of the Chrome Book, you can get free wifi.

TL;DR : Set your browser User Agent to this:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; CrOS i686 1193.117.0) AppleWebKit/535.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/16.0.912.66 Safari/535.7

On Safari do it like so, make sure the Develop menu bar item is enabled (Do this in the Advance tab in Safari Preferences), then click on the Develop menu, then into User Agent, click other and copy and paste in the above browser agent string.

This tricks whatever is handling the wifi into thinking your computer is a Chrome Book and gives you free wifi as apart of the programme they’re running with Google!

Enjoy my friends!

Print. Cut. Fold. Glue. Admire. Repeat.

Basically recently got addicted to papercraft, do it most nights after supervised study. tough to make, pretty to look at, awesome to photograph and CHEAP! Favourite one I’ve so far is the cartoony style ‘Link’ from Legend of Zelda:Windwalker.





And here is my collection of what I’ve done so far….

Heres a link to my papercraft album on flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jameswhelton/sets/72157625223884156/

Yeah Im that prick…

Got my hands on these, scans a patient (88 and fought in WW2) of my dads gave to him, uploaded the PDF for all to enjoy! My German sucks, but I’m pretty sure what they’re saying is sinister!

Note this full quality scan is 53MB! If you want to view a lesser quality version, click here

got some footy today, threw it together.

Wassup?!??!…. Im saying Wassup to a website…. god I’m going insane….

I made my first Icon. I followed this tutorial, did it in photoshop and changed around one or two things, it ended up looking kinda like HAL, but its cool like that!

Any who, here is the finished product!

Im done for. Im doomed. Its all over.

I’ve gotten soft.

See back in the day, 7 months ago really, I used to learn and practice my frontflips and other things on grass and concrete. Because of this I was on my way to achieving ‘Urban Ninja’ status. Having no fear of scaling things, or frontfliping off/onto stuff. It was pretty epic. Then my friend dropped me on my neck while I was learning backflips. Since then I’ve been unable to do learn stuff on ground, now just going to a gym and training on soft crash mats. This is bad. Why?
You may say “well you’re learning in an safe environment”, true, but at the cost of being versatile in where I can do these ariel tricks. It also majorly stunted my progress. Where’s I would learn side flips and try them every day out back, I now wait a week and only get about 5% better each time. I also have the time to attend the gym with the equipment I need, what with supervised study.
So really I am stuck, being a ponch and learning stuff so slowly.

What’s the solution?

Hurt myself on ground to toughen up. Basically I’ve found by just diving and throwing myself on hard floor and grass, I am getting more used impact!

Before long I’ll be ripping out those butterfly twists and return to my former trek to being an Urban Ninja.

Saw this outside my school…