Following the resurrection (and connecting to Mastodon) of Bubblino last week our work has been punctuated with gentle whirring and showers of bubbles.
The livestream on our PeerTube install is running pretty smoothly, both from the cloud server side and the Pi4 sending the video. It’s dropped out a couple of times in the week—I think if the PeerTube live was configured as a rolling live it would have just restarted itself, but that also saves the old videos and so chews through disk space and we’ve not paid for much extra on this short-term experiment. There is an option not to publish replays with the restarting option, so I’ve just set that up to try that out too and will keep an eye on the disk usage.
I (Adrian, by the way) have continued with the MCQN website redesign, and have been on something of a deep dive into “fluid design”, guided mostly by the utopia.fyi. I don’t know if it’s my background writing mobile phone web browsers in the late 90s or a more general engineer rather than designer perspective, but I’m finding a real affinity for the idea of defining sets of CSS variables to use to define sizes of elements, the space between them, etc.; and then having those variables change with different screen sizes to provide a responsive design.
Chris reached the point in the Museum in a Box UI rework where the web infrastructure is in place and he needs the new notifications and feedback information to feed into it. That will be things like which object’s audio is being downloaded, and the progress through that download, or when an upgrade is being readied for install.
Some of that information will need to come from parts of the code that don’t currently have any concept of the UI; so the next step is to take a step back and think about all of the progress notifications that we’ll need—some will be on the Box’s web UI, some will be audio messages, and some indications on the front panel LEDs—and then how best to fold that functionality into the software architecture.
Neil has been trying (and succeeding) to get the newsletter out the door for Museum in Box and marvelling at this post from the Museum of East Asian Art demonstrating their Museum in a Box—we all drooled over how good it looked:
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The end of the week brought the tenth anniversay of Liverpool Makefest. Once again we had a stand and were showing off Museum in a Box, My Bike’s Got LED and Lightbeam
It was a busy day with lots of members of the public (plus Davros, creator of the Daleks) stopping by to try things out and have a chat. There were also some other Museums in Boxes present—with Makefest being held in Liverpool Central Library, folk could also check out the new British Library “Unearthed” exhibition.