Howduino is an informal collaboration between MCQN and Liverpool neighbours Glow New Media to run hardware/tinkering/Arduino hackdays/weekends. The first was held in Liverpool last year, and since then we've travelled down to Poole and hung out in Birmingham. We generally partner with a local who finds a venue, a bit of sponsorship to cover expenses (so that we keep them free for attendees) and helps with promotion.

MCQN neighbours Scraperwiki are a startup working out ways to make it easier for people to gather data on the web and forge it into something more useful. To help test their system and give people a taste of what's possible they've been organising a series of hackdays around the country. The Liverpool event (co-sponsored by Liverpool Daily Post & Echo and LJMU OpenLabs) was on Friday 16th July and we went along.

The sensor monitoring work has continued to be a common thread running through the past fortnight, and is entering the last couple of features now. It's felt good to just crank through the work and knock off the tickets in the issue tracking system I use.

Things have been ticking along nicely with the sensor monitoring app over the past fortnight, and that's been taking up most of my time.

The MySQL replication is all up and running, along with a more robust backup strategy which is giving both me and the client more peace of mind. Now that there's a more stable foundation to the app I've been pushing forward with the new functionality.

Another couple of weeks with no big public announcements to make, although I'm not quite sure why I feel there has to be something important to say before I write some weeknotes. I think it's just my excuse for not writing them when there are too many other things of higher priority on the to-do list.

Bubblino has only had one outing of late, we headed over the Pennines for another great O'Reilly Ignite evening - this time the second Ignite Leeds.

Busy, busy.

Lots happening over the past few weeks has meant little time to spend capturing what any of it was and documenting it over here.

Bubblino has been flitting around all sorts of events around Liverpool - from watching news of the General Election, to a weekend celebrating open source and creative commons at OggCamp10, and accompanying me to two Arduino workshops this week.

On Tuesday I spent a day at the lovely Art and Design Academy building here in the centre of Liverpool giving a group of staff from Liverpool John Moores University a hands-on introduction to Arduino.

One of the advantages of having your own Bubblino is that you can easily tell when people are talking about it on Twitter. So it's not surprising that I noticed this tweet recently, from @Samotage:

I'm always interested when people are writing about things that I've made, so I eagerly followed the link.

Has another week passed already? Things have been rather busy this week, and there wasn't even a hint of the coming blur of activity in last week's weeknote. That's because the project that's soaked up every spare second, and quite a few that weren't spare, only found its way to the MCQN inbox last Friday.

It's been a busy week for Bubblino. He's been out of the office all week at the Contemporary Urban Centre (not too far away) for the Contemporary Issues in Arts Management conference. It's an annual event, put on by the students of the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts and covered all sorts of topics from the Digital Economy Bill, through censorship in heavy metal music to opera houses and regeneration.