On Sunday, Shirley Madill, Executive Director at Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery hosted a small group of us on a tour of the gallery’s photography collection. This opportunity came through Mark Walton and the Foto:RE posse.
The TL;DR: KWAG has an amazing whack of Edward Burtynsky work that just blows my hair back.
For those not following along, I’m helping revive some long-unused CNC machine tools at our awesome local high school, Sir John A. MacDonald in Waterloo, Ontario Canada…
One month ago, I was eating breakfast with my peeps at Fran’s on Shuter Street in Toronto. I looked out across the road to see the most beautifully-dressed wedding party roll up in front of Massey Hall for a photo shoot. Grabbing my camera, I ran outside, letting my eggs get cold so I could get a photo of the bride against this red door with the red neon reflected above. She positively radiated happiness and brightened the whole block.
DW
Sweet, sweet news for the WR photography community today. Canon launched the Canon Innovation Lab at the Communitech Hub this morning. Before the event even got started there were lots of photographers afoot, as you might imagine…
I spoke about IoT security last month at the Internet of Things Waterloo meetup put on by my good friend Ian Pilon (right) seen laughing above with Emile Mclean about my seemingly ridiculous premise. Ok, he was probably stress-laughing because his laptop was not cooperating and the talks were scheduled to start in 10 minutes.
The TL;DR: make a conscious and explicit decision to invest in security or not. Deciding to not invest can be a reasonable and rational business decision. Not making a decision is just poor risk management.
I pitched this talk to Ian after attending the inaugural IoT Waterloo event back in April. There’s so much enthusiasm and gold-rush momentum toward what we now call IoT, and I noticed a very conspicuous lack of discussion around security of these bits of tech that are physically installed in our homes and workplaces now. Hey, I want all that utility too, but I’m slightly freaked out about the wonderland of misuse possibilities it offers to the purveyors, the curious, and the bad guys.
Kevin Madill from Miovision hit me up for my deck from this gig, so here it is with and without notes. Oh, and for those that only know me from the make-o-sphere or my cultural wanderings, I did a bunch of security stuff at BlackBerry in my 12 years there.
A few more pics…
It’s been an interesting three weeks since Part 2 (and before that, Part 1) of this project to reverse engineer and make operational a twenty year old CNC lathe and mill at my favourite local high school.
If you like anything about the video above, we can all thank my son Calder. Upon showing him an early version of the video, me: “Well?” Him: “Needs to be much shorter and you need to point out what you’re talking about.” I like that clarity of feedback.
The TL;DR: I’ve constructed a functional adapter cable to connect a standard PC parallel port to the proprietary 25-pin data port on the TORCAM controller. This should allow the school PC’s running Mach3 to control these tools. It’s time to take this rig back to the classroom and try driving the actual lathe and mill rather than just my test motors.
Of course the real fun was in the challenges so far. All the (re)learning, test rigs, and failures. Speaking of failures…
Cameras, cameras, everywhere at the Communitech Hub on Friday. If there’s anything I love more than cameras, it’s cameras on custom rigs with wires hanging out of them, held together by rubber bands. This handiwork by Kurt Schwarz.
Found this delightfully dirty light a week ago. I liked the leading lines, the perspective, and the three different temperatures of light. Green in the parking lot out back, white in the tunnel, orange at the sidewalk.
On King Street, this is Waterloo.
DW
When in doubt, Ethel’s will help you out. With meatloaf. And beer.
On King Street, this is Waterloo.
DW
