Red Square MPLS: Office Condos now available for Sale!

Geeks,
My firm (LOCUS Architecture) is currently developing Red Square, a commercial building on Central Ave in the Northeast Arts District – you may have heard the radio spots for it on MPR’s The Current. It will offer 40k+  square feet of environmentally conscious commercial and retail space on 4 floors. You can find more info on Redsquare’s website. The plans for the building have been extremely well received in the planning phase and we are now looking to fill it with tenants. Feel free to pass on the link if you know of people who may be looking to own commercial space.

Linux LCD Picture Frame

I have an old laptop. It’s a PIII 733Mhz Dell Inspiron 5000, which you may recall weighs about as much as a small Yugo. This laptop is old enough that I don’t use it, but good enough for some use. So I’ve decided to attempt the creation of a Linux based LCD picture frame. I’m not the first to attempt this and this guy has some good guidance.

So far, I’ve managed successful disassembly, and the bits and pieces still boot. The system is currently running Fedora Core 5 off an IBM Travelstar HD.

Considerations for the future are:

1. Should I boot off some solid state media instead, and if so, where should pics be stored?

2. Can I run this PIII without a fan if it’s a sufficiently open case?

3. Do I want to try to remount the trackpad and keyboard, or just go with auto-networking and remote management?

4. Software details: auto-login, scripts to start the pictures, poll the usb port and add pics, FTP access to pics directory

5. Mounting and framing.

I’ll keep the geeks up to date on the project, especially when I need some help.

Check out the NightHawk

It looks like our friends at Now have finally heard the customer base and are trying to finally release a new version of Now Up To Date and Contact labeled NightHawk. For those of us using it, there seems to be hope that all of the ballast of the old code base will be shed in order to boost performance and reliability. I would certainly appreciate it. The big question remaining is whether or not Now can beat other vendors to the punch. I am most excited to see how Apple will stack up with their suite of products, as I anticipate major updates to Mail, iCal, and AddressBook in light of the iPhone this year. Your thoughts?

Geek Gather v2.01

Ladies and Gentlemen, Geeks and Geekettes, Sharks and Jets:

Happy New Year!

The time has come for another installment of that dodeci-annual hit, Geek Gather!

Where: Chatterbox Pub
When: January 9, 2006, 6:30pm or when you can get there
Theme: In the spirit of Tuesday, let’s make it a twofer: Gadgets you got for Solstice/Xmas/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa and predictions for the New Year.