So, I’ve been slowly working on the lights in the hackerspace. I’ve rewired them using Weidmuller WDU2.5 terminals on DIN rail, as this is what I use in work. It’s a pretty great system and lets me have clean wiring, easy to read wiring and things will probably be safer. The next steps I’d like to take are to implement the Internet of Shit on our LED lamps above the main workspaces. Because these are lights and need to be used by real people, they cannot be solely internet connected, that would be ridiculous. This means I’ll need to consider per-LED-BANK physical buttons to compliment my software implementation. We’ve got 4 banks of LEDs, so 4 inputs and 4 outputs will be needed. …

So I’ve been curious about running more FreeBSD for a while, it’s kind of an interesting OS. I’ve been dipping my toes in the water by managing to install it on my hackbook (HP Compaq TC1100) with the intention of taking it to 32C3 as my main device. FreeBSD has some lovely architecture features that I really enjoy - the base system is more or less an immutable image between installs, bar a few files… At least it is in my use case. No fancy kernels for me, etc. Any tweaks you do make to the base system you can easily be reminded of by comparing yourself to it. …